It was in Autumn 2017 that Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, perhaps not the wisest choice of Foreign Secretary, told a Parliamentary committee that Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, sentenced to a five year jail term by the Iranian authorities, had been “
simply teaching people journalism”. As the
Guardian put it, with no small
amount of restraint, these words represented “
comments that appear to have complicated her legal case”.
Indeed, three days after Bozo’s blunder, “
Zaghari-Ratcliffe was summoned before an unscheduled court hearing, where the foreign secretary’s comments were cited as proof that she was engaged in ‘propaganda against the regime’ … [her] employer, Thomson Reuters Foundation, released a statement making clear that she was not working in Iran, but was on holiday in the country to show her daughter, Gabriella, to her grandparents”.
The Foreign Office was clearly unconvinced by the Iranians making the connection between Bozo’s bluster and their excuses for further charges, “
but Johnson failed to withdraw his earlier comments”. Being Bozo means never having to row back. Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s husband Richard Ratcliffe told “
We demand a clear statement from the foreign secretary to correct his mistake - in parliament and in Tehran at the earliest opportunity”.
Fast forward to 2022, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe is still detained in Iran, while Bozo has become our alleged Prime Minister, but has done not unadjacent to Sweet Fanny Adams about her plight. Richard Ratcliffe has gone on hunger strike, lobbied, pleaded with both the Iranian and British authorities, all to little avail. But maybe, just maybe, the behaviour of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and his gangsterist régime in Moscow has swung the case.
How so? Well, Bozo has gone to Saudi Arabia to prostrate himself in the murderous despots’ general direction to try and get them to increase oil output for the benefit of the West. While he is there, the Ratcliffes’ MP Tulip Siddique revealed “
I am very pleased to say that Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe has been given her British passport back”. Woah!
There was more. “
She is still at her family home in Tehran. I also understand that there is a British negotiating team in Tehran right now”. Meanwhile, the
Guardian’s diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour has quote Tweeted Iranian journalist Sara Massoumi and added “
[Very] respected Iranian reporter here saying UK has paid its £400m debt to Iran and UK Iranian dual nationals Nazanin Zaghari Ratcliffe and Anoosheh Ashoori will be released”.
To which an increasing number of commentators have expressed a mixture of good wishes, relief, and hope that Nazanin will be returned to the UK. So why the move to pay that debt, and why now? And what has Vlad The Invader got to do with it? As so often when it comes to Middle East politics, it’s about what Iran produces, and the West wants.
Which means Oil. Or Gas. Or Oil And Gas. Bozo, given he’s making nice to the Saudis, isn’t going to admit that, so he will, for once, keep schtum and definitely will not visit Tehran. But he wouldn’t have just settled a £400 million debt after all this time unless there was something in it for Himself Personally Now. Maybe he is also fronting for the Biden administration as a means of getting a trade deal with the USA.
We told the world for so many years that we wouldn’t do business with the Iranians. But desperate politicians need to do deals desperately.
Pity Bozo is six years too late, mind.
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8 comments:
And still mugs will vote in the same policies from the same old liars, thieves, warmongers, careerists and narcissists in a corrupt Parliament.
It's difficult to have sympathy for a country that has been committing slow motion suicide for over forty years.
In these circumstances it's always the innocent and most vulnerable who are targeted. This is a nation infected with the cultural cancer of moral cowardice. Which seems to satisfy it.
Sadly, that poor hapless woman is victim of it all, as was long-ago Greville Wynne. And there isn't the slightest sign the insanity will end any time soon.
Part of me wonders whether, while in Saudi Arabia, Bloody Stupid Johnson will say something pointlessly derogatory about Iran while toadying up to loathsome despot Mohammed bin Salman and condemn Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe to another three years in chokey. It would be entirely typical of the useless bucket of wank.
So we stop buying oil/gas from one murderous tyrant because he is bombing a sovereign nation and go begging for oil/gas from another murderous tyrant who is bombing a sovereign nation!
What fucked up morals we have!
Anonymous said at 13:10 -
'Sadly, that poor hapless woman is victim of it all, as was long-ago Greville Wynne.'
But Greville Wynne WAS a spy, working for MI6 as a conduit for classified info back to London from his Russian contact Oleg Penkovsky, using his many (legitimate) business trips to Moscow as cover. Wynnes's cover story of being an innocent businessman was blown many years ago, in no small way by Wynne himself, after his release in a spy exchange. Penkovsky was either shot or committed suicide, it is unclear, so Wynne got off rather lightly spending only 2 years in the Lubyanka before being expelled.
To 21:13.
Absolutely spot on. Thus proving my general point that everyone is a victim in a war (hot or Cold) even when they think they're not, even when they think they've "won", or, like the hapless Wynne, even when they think they're just "helping out" the "good guys". In Wynne's case it turned out - as it always does - that such "good guys" are every bit as treacherous and lunatic as their "opposites". For evidence of which, see the craziness of James Angleton and the fate of "defector" Nosenko.
Therein lies the problem: Who knows the truth in Angleton's Wilderness Of Mirrors? His successors on both sides of the Atlantic? The inventors of nonexistent Weapons Of Mass Destruction?
Tulip Sidiq tweeted this morning that Nazanin Z-R was at Tehran airport and on her way home. Natch Bloody Stupid Johnson will trumpet this as a great personal triumph of his l33t d1pl0m@t1c 5k1llz. I for one look forward to Richard Ratcliffe's broadside when Johnson opens his runaway piehole on the matter.
Iran is a mortal enemy of Saudia Arabia, so I think there is probably no connection between Johnson's visit to Saudia and the release of Nazanin.
To 13:55.
But since Bozo/Cameron/May/Bliar/Brown/Major etc. sold weapons of mass destruction to both Iran AND Saudi Arabia maybe there is a link after all........
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