Canada can fight Tehran’s murderous theocrats and their terrorist proxies

Twenty-four years ago, on July 18, 1994, a suicide bomber drove a vehicle full of explosives into the Jewish community centre of Buenos Aires, Argentina, killing 85 people and injuring hundreds more.

To this day, it remains the country’s deadliest bombing in history.

Though Western intelligence services have long believed Iran to be responsible for the attack, it has never been held fully accountable for its role in the bombing of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA).

In 2006, Argentine prosecutors formally accused the Iranian government of directing the attacks through its terrorist proxy, Hezbollah. One of the prosecutors, Alberto Nisman, was found dead in January 2015, the scene having been made to look like a suicide.

This type of insidious behaviour serves as a powerful reminder of why Canada should not normalize relations with the Islamist regime reigning in Tehran.

Since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, the regime has been at the forefront of international terrorism, with Israel and the Jewish community as its main targets. Through the Quds force, the military arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Iran has cultivated and supported numerous terrorist groups abroad. Iran is a crucial ally to the murderous Assad regime in Syria, and supplies groups like Hamas and Hezbollah with weapons, funding, and training.

It would be a grave mistake to think that the regime has changed: it continues to sponsor and direct terrorist activity against Jewish communities around the world. In 2012, the New Delhi police alleged that members of the IRGC were behind a bomb attack on an Israeli diplomat. As recently as January of this year, German authorities searched the homes of multiple suspected Iranian spies and members of the Quds Brigade who were said to have been spying on Israelis and Jewish institutions. Earlier this month, an Iranian diplomat in Austria was arrested and stripped of his diplomatic immunity on suspicions of involvement in a terror plot targeting Iranian dissents.

As the voice of grassroots Canadian Jewry and a champion of human rights, B’nai Brith Canada continues to work at the forefront of the fight against the normalization of Iran.

In 2002, B’nai Brith turned to the courts in an effort to force Canada to designate Hezbollah’s political wing as a terrorist entity, in addition to its military arm. We have pressed officials to condemn and ban the alQuds Day hatefest, an annual outpouring of anti-Semitism created by the Islamic Regime, which takes place in major Canadian cities.

On June 13, Conservative MP Garnett Genuis presented a motion in the House of Commons that included a call for Canada to list the IRGC as a terrorist organization. After the motion passed by an overwhelming margin, Liberal MP Michael Levitt duly reported that Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale had initiated the terrorist designation process.

To end the Islamic regime’s stranglehold on its people, we must deprive it of what it craves: options. To ensure the safety of the Jewish community, and international security, the Islamic Republic must be isolated at every turn. Actions such as these are vital steps.

TO END THE ISLAMIC REGIME’S STRANGLEHOLD ... WE MUST DEPRIVE IT OF WHAT IT CRAVES.