Brexit leader and Reform UK leader Nigel Farage said the Iranian embassy in London had been “just a whisker away” from calling for the establishment of a paramilitary in Britain and that this shouldn’t be tolerated.
Speaking in response to the knife attack rampage that may have seen three people injured, including two in prominent Jewish neighbourhood Golders Green on Wednesday, Nigel Farage cited the recent call by the Iranian embassy in London for people in Britain to be prepared to martyr themselves for Tehran.
Of the attack that had already taken place, the Reform UK leader said “what happened here yesterday [was] shocking, appalling awful, but in many ways I’m afraid unsurprising. We know the growth of hatred, antisemitism, a two-tier approach to speech, behaviour, has allowed and encouraged much of this.”
While it is always forthcoming with strongly worded statements after attacks the government has failed to take action on these problems for years, Mr Farage said, calling for strong and immediate action. Beyond his calls for the IRGC and Muslim Brotherhood to be banned, he also said the Iranian ambassador should be kicked out of the country for the behaviour of his embassy.
Farage said: “I find it extraordinary that the Iranian embassy can put out, just a few days ago, a call that is just a whisker away from advocating for setting up of a paramilitary organisation within this country. And what has happened thus far? The ambassador has been summoned for a cup of tea. Frankly if we mean it, we should expel the ambassador and say we will never have embassies in our country encouraging this kind of behaviour.”
Telegram messages sent in Farsi by Iranian consulate officials, obtained by the Daily Mail, had allegedly asked “proud Iranian compatriots residing in Britain” to sign up for the embassy’s “Jan Fada” programme, which the paper translated as a “sacrificing life” scheme.
The messages reportedly called on migrant followers with a “desire for the people’s defence of the land of Iran” to demonstrate a “display of solidarity, loyalty, and national zeal.”
“Let us all, to a man, give our bodies to be slain; For it is better than giving our country to the enemy,” the official Iranian account is said to have added.
A spokesman for the embassy attempted to deny that the messages were intended to stoke violence, saying that the Jan Fada campaign, which was launched last month, does not “promote any form of hostility”.
However, despite Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s constant insistence that the conflict in Iran is not Britain’s war, there have been heightened concerns of potential retaliatory strikes against UK targets given its alliance with the United States.
Beyond Wednesday’s knife attack — and while the rising tide of antisemitic rhetoric and violence in Britain has been clearly linked to the October 7th attack against Israel, no direct link has yet been proven in this case — there have already been multiple suspected terror attacks linked with Iran since the conflict in the Middle East broke out in February. These have included arson attacks against multiple Jewish targets in London allegedly at the hands of a Tehran-tied terror group called Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia (HAYI).
Although Prime Minister Starmer has pledged to officially list Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organisation, he has yet to introduce legislation to do so. The government has said that it plans on rolling the ban in with a broader law empowering the government to further target state-sponsored terror groups, which has become a speciality of the Islamist regime in Tehran.
The government’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, Jonathan Hall KC, said that the new legislation will give the government powers to prosecute people involved in attacks as a part of broader terror networks, even if the individual attackers were unaware that they were being sponsored by foreign state actors such as Iran.
The result would allow the government to charge members of groups like HAYI for acting on behalf of a foreign power, which could see them jailed for up to 14 years in prison.
Commenting on the apparent threats from the Iranian embassy, the former director of security at the British-based Iran International dissident news station, Roger Macmillan, said earlier this week: “It is horrific the fact that this is on UK soil.”
“This is an attempt at radicalisation online of people who could be persuaded by the regime to commit acts in support of the Islamic Republic in the UK. This is a significant threat to security and of our whole way of life. It is a way of finding out who is supportive of the regime. They are not going to go back to Iran, it is for here in the UK.”
Top lawyer Hall spoke out on Wednesday evening after the Golders Green stabbings, stating the pace of violence against Jews in Britain had reached the state of a national emergency. As reported:
Jonathan Hall KC spoke out on the surge in attacks on Jewish communities in recent months. He said: “we’re now in a period of national security emergency. I think 2017 was a massive uptick where everyone around the country felt very unsafe because of what happened in Manchester and London. Now you’ve got repeated attacks against Brits in London, you know, day after day. So I think that we now qualify as an emergency.”
The senior lawyer said that after the 2005 London bombings the government moved decisively to crush the “cause” of terrorism, “Islamist preachers”, and extremist groups, and the government should “go after” the causes of this new spate of attacks today. He identified this as “very, very vicious antisemitism on the streets, probably in homes, probably in certain mosques”.
In separate remarks to Times Radio, Hall said there is an “ambient antisemitism that exists in some parts of the Muslim community” and political leaders weren’t calling that out. He said that while it “pains” him to say so, it appeared the country had got to the point where the frequent anti-Israel, pro-Palestine marches that have been taking place should be banned. He said: “It pains me to say this, but I think we may have reached a point where we need to have a moratorium on the sorts of marches that have been happening.
“It’s clearly impossible at the moment for any of these pro-Palestine marches not to incubate within them some sort of anti-Semitic or demonising language.”
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