Government Policy on Iran Debate
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Ian Paisley
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Government Policy on Iran
Ian Paisley Excerpts(4 years ago)
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Ian Paisley (North Antrim) (DUP)
It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Miller.
The hon. Member for Henley (John Howell) outlined the issues to do with the nuclear threat, and I will not touch on that, to give hon. Members time on other issues. He was right to say that Iran is one of the world’s most malevolent pariah states. It is a destabilising influence across the middle east, and it now stretches its extremist statecraft across Europe.
Iran backs terrorism. In 2018, Members from this House were caught up in an event in Paris; some people in this room attended it. One of Iran’s front people tried to murder people at that protest by way of a bomb. Many Members were moments from death. The person who was accredited with carrying out that bombing was an Iranian diplomat who is now using his diplomatic immunity to avoid prosecution.
Iran sponsors direct links between Hezbollah and the Real IRA. Its radicalism drives via the Muslim Brotherhood to radicalise people in this country. The UK has a choice to make to now—to urgently take action against the Muslim Brotherhood. It is a surrogate for Iran and for extremist ideology in this country.
We have quite rightly proscribed Hezbollah, which was funded by Iran. I believe that Iran uses other surrogates—al-Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, Daesh and the Real IRA—and I call on the UK Government to signal that they are now going to tackle the terrorism and extremism sponsored by the Muslim Brotherhood seriously by signalling that they intend to proscribe that organisation as urgently as possible. The Muslim Brotherhood is a cesspit for extremist ideology and for training young people in this country to hate this country. We should be taking actions to pull them away from that.
Today, I have left in the House of Commons Library a very important report by Cornerstone into the Fakhrizadeh assassination, which links some of the activities in the Gulf with Qatar and Iran, and with the Muslim Brotherhood. Some of the reading in that report is very worrying indeed. For example, it indicates that the USA—our partner—no longer shares information that has military intelligence associated with it with Doha, because of its concerns over the proximity that Qatar has to Iran. I know there is going to be a debate in the House on Qatar tomorrow, but these things do not stand alone, and I urge Her Majesty’s Government to use their power, authority and influence to influence Qatar to influence Iran to pull itself away from some of these things. At the moment, we in the UK buy something like 31% of all our gas from Qatar, which is astounding, and yet that country is playing a role in Iran, which is influencing extremists in this country also. We really have to stand up for the Arab quartet—Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates—and help those countries stand up against the extremism sponsored by Iran.