Egypt floods Gaza lifeline tunnels
Al-Akhbar | February 13, 2013
Egyptian forces have flooded smuggling tunnels under the border with the Palestinian-ruled Gaza Strip in a campaign to shut them down, Egyptian and Palestinian officials said.
The network of tunnels is a vital lifeline for Gaza, bringing in an estimated 30 percent of all goods that reach the enclave and circumventing a deadly blockade imposed by Israel for more than seven years.
Reuters reporters saw one tunnel being used to bring in cement and gravel suddenly fill with water on Sunday, sending workers rushing for safety. Locals said two other tunnels were likewise flooded, with Egyptians deliberately pumping in water.
“The Egyptians have opened the water to drown the tunnels,” said Abu Ghassan, who supervises the work of 30 men at one tunnel some 200 meters (yards) from the border fence.
An Egyptian security official in the Sinai told Reuters the campaign started five days ago.
“We are using water to close the tunnels by raising water from one of the wells,” he said, declining to be named.
While Gaza’s rulers have been reluctant to criticize Mursi in public, ordinary Gazans are slightly more vocal.
“Egyptian measures against tunnels have worsened since the election of Mursi. Our Hamas brothers thought he would open up Gaza. I guess they were wrong,” said a tunnel owner, who identified himself only as Ayed, fearing reprisal.
“Perhaps 150 or 200 tunnels have been shut since the Sinai attack. This is the Mursi era,” he added.
Dozens of tunnels had been destroyed since last August following the killing of 16 Egyptian soldiers in a militant attack near the Gaza fence.
Cairo said some of the gunmen had crossed into Egypt via the tunnels – a charge denied by Palestinians – and ordered an immediate crackdown.
The move surprised and angered Gaza’s rulers, the Islamist group Hamas, which had hoped for much better ties with Cairo following the election last year of Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi, an Islamist who is ideologically close to Hamas.
A Hamas official confirmed Egypt was again targeting the tunnels. He gave no further details and declined to speculate on the timing of the move, which started while Palestinian faction leaders met in Cairo to try to overcome deep divisions.
The tunnelers fear the water being pumped underground might collapse the passage ways, with possible disastrous consequences.
“Water can cause cracks in the wall and may cause the collapse of the tunnel. It may kill people,” said Ahmed Al-Shaer, a tunnel worker whose cousin died a year ago when a tunnel caved in on him.
Six Palestinians died in January in tunnel implosions, raising the death toll amongst workers to 233 since 2007, according to Gazan human rights groups, including an estimated 20 who died in various Israeli air attacks on the border lands.
Israel imposed its vicious blockade on the coastal strip in 2007. Food imports to Gaza were cut by nearly 75 percent, from 400 trucks per day to 106 by the start of the blockade.
At one stage an estimated 2,500-3,000 tunnels snaked their way under the desert fence but the network has shrunk markedly since 2010, when Israel eased some of the limits they imposed on imports into the coastal enclave.
All goods still have to be screened before entering Gaza and Israel says some restrictions must remain on items that could be used to make or to store weapons.
This ensures the tunnels are still active, particularly to bring in building materials. Hamas also prefers using the tunnels to smuggle in fuel, thereby avoiding custom dues that are payable on oil crossing via Israel.
(Reuters, Al-Akhbar)
Press TV announces new frequency for US, Canada viewers
Press TV – February 9, 2013
Press TV has announced a new frequency for viewers in the United States and Canada after the Iranian channel was removed from the Galaxy 19 satellite platform.
The satellite platform provided broadcast services to the viewers of the 24-hour English-language Iranian news channel, and the film channel iFilm in the United States and Canada.
In order to watch Press TV in the US and Canada, viewers can use the following frequency on Galaxy 19:
Frequency 12028 MHz
Polarization H (horizontal polarization)
Symbol rate 21991Msym
FEC 3/4
Press TV, iFilm taken off air in US, Canada
Press TV – February 8, 2013
In another flagrant violation of freedom of speech, Iranian channels Press TV and iFilm have been removed from the Galaxy 19 satellite platform.
The satellite platform provided broadcast services to the viewers of the 24-hour English-language Iranian news channel, Press TV, and the film channel, iFilm, in the United States and Canada.
This is not the first time that Iranian media have been targeted. In January, the Spanish government ordered Madrid’s regional government to stop the broadcast of the Iranian Spanish language channel Hispan TV as of January 21.
The move came a month after the Spanish satellite company, Hispasat, terminated the terrestrial broadcast of Hispan TV.
Hispasat is partly owned by Eutelsat, whose French-Israeli CEO is blamed for the recent wave of attacks on Iranian media in Europe.
Back then, the move was immediately welcomed by the American Jewish Committee (AJC), which called it an important development in worldwide efforts to contain Iran’s media influence.
AJC Executive Director David Harris has acknowledged that the committee had for months been engaged in discussions with the Spaniards over taking Iranian channels off the air. … Full article
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Israeli lies on Iranian nuclear program exposed
By Yusuf Fernandez | Press TV | February 5, 2013
In recent days, reports about an alleged Israeli-US bombing attack that would have allegedly destroyed a large portion of the Fordo nuclear enrichment plant in Qom were circulating in Western media. However, its falsehood was soon revealed by several sources.
The story first appeared on February 25th when an Iranian defector going by the pseudonym Reza Kahlili published an evidence-free article in the US site wnd.com, in which he claimed that the Fordo plant had been the target of a sabotage operation. The article claimed that a blast deep within Fordo had “destroyed much of the installation and trapped about 240 personnel deep underground”.
However, the first doubts came due to the personality of the author himself, as Kahlili, a defector, is widely considered as a liar because of his previous claims. He wrote some months ago that Iran actually had nuclear weapons.
Kahlili’s sole source was Hamid Reza Zakeri, another Iranian defector, who is also notorious for his lies against Iran. A US official has been quoted by some US media as saying that Zakeri was “a fabricator or monumental proportions”.
This is not the first time that defectors are used in order to launch false accusations against a country. In the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003, New York Times reporter Judith Miller (and some others) published several stories about Saddam Hussein´s non-existent weapons of mass destruction programs and these reports were used by the Bush administration as a pretext to launch the war. Later, all these allegations turned out to be false and the newspaper was forced to admit that Miller had based her reports on Iraqi defectors. In that sense, the case for the war on Iraq was built on a set of fabricated documents and deliberately manipulated intelligence that US media outlets uncritically reproduced.
Israel spreads the story
Shortly after the Fordo story appeared, Israeli sites and officials tried to make it pass as true. The website of the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot repeated the claim and it was later echoed by the Times of London, which added that the story had been confirmed by Israeli intelligence officials. “We are still in the preliminary stages of understanding what happened and how significant it is,” one Israeli official told the London Times. “Israel believes the Iranians have not evacuated the (Fordo´s) surrounding area. It is unclear whether that is because no harmful substances have been released, or because Tehran is trying to avoid sparking panic among residents.”
For his part, Israeli acting Defense Minister, Avi Dichter, reacted to the story by saying that indeed any explosion in Iran was “good news”.
Of course, Israeli officials always knew that the story was false but it is clear that they wanted to feed the notion that they -with US help- were conducting a successful secret war against Iran in order to reinforce their own extremist stance. However, as these stories are revealed as lies, the effect is counterproductive to them because they expose themselves, once again, as liars before the international community, especially on the Iran nuclear issue.
However, two senior Iranian officials dismissed reports of the explosion. Deputy head of the Iranian Atomic Energy Agency Seyyed Shamseddin Barbroudi said there had been no explosion at the Fordo facility, according to the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA). The chairman of the Iranian parliament’s Committee for Foreign Policy and National Security, Alaeddin Boroujerdi, said they were “baseless lies” meant to impact talks on Iran´s nuclear program, reported IRNA.
The Iranians´ statements were then confirmed by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which claimed that there were no signs of any explosion whatever in Fordo. The IAEA has live cameras at the site and its inspectors regularly visit it, and, therefore, they would have known if it had been “in ruins with hundreds trapped within”. “We understand that Iran has denied that there has been an incident at Fordo. This is consistent with our observations,” IAEA spokeswoman Gill Tudor said.
The White House also rejected the report as unreliable. “We have no information to confirm the allegations in the report and we do not believe the report is credible,” spokesman Jay Carney said in a briefing with reporters. “We do not believe those are credible reports.”
The false diagram
The Fordo false explosion was not the only Israeli fabrication on the Iranian nuclear issue. On November 27th 2012, the Associated Press agency published a report claiming that it had discovered the existence of alleged evidence of “Iranian work on a nuclear bomb”. “Iranian scientists have run computer simulations for a nuclear weapon that would produce more than triple the explosive force of the World War II bomb that destroyed Hiroshima”, the agency said.
This evidence, according to AP, was a “graph” which the agency said was “leaked” to it by “officials from a country critical of Iran’s atomic program” to “bolster their arguments that Iran’s nuclear program must be halted before it produces a weapon”. Moreover, “an intelligence summary was provided with the drawing” claiming that “Iran is working not on isolated experiments, but rather on a single program aimed at mastering all aspects of nuclear arms development.”
Why did AP hide which country had delivered the diagram? It said that officials of that country wanted anonumity, so the agency gave it anonymity. However, everybody was certain it was Israel.
The author of the AP report, George Jahn is also notorious because every time there is a possibility of a diplomatic solution to the crisis over Iran´s nuclear program, he reports an “exclusive” anti-Iranian revelation, always provided to him by “an official of a country tracking Iran’s nuclear program,” or “an official of a country that has been severely critical of Iran´s nuclear program.”
Nevertheless, experts soon discovered that the diagram was fake and amateurish. According to the British newspaper The Guardian, it simply showed that “the bulk of the nuclear fission yield is produced in a short 0.1 microsecond pulse”, which is a common knowledge for any physics student. Later, it was equally discovered that it is widely available all over the Internet and in university textbooks. Even worse, the diagram contained huge errors, which were unlikely to have been made by research scientists who work in a state-run national program.
Scott Kemp, an assistant professor of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), told IPS he suspects the graph leaked to AP was “adapted from the open literature”. He said he believed its authors “were told they ought to look into the literature and found that paper, copied (the graph) and made their own plot from it.”
After the hoax became exposed, Western diplomats privately accused Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, of being behind the leaks, which would be part of an effort to implicate a murdered Iranian in an alleged weapons program. The diplomats also said Mossad is becoming increasingly active in Austria, the home of the IAEA and the place where George Jahn works, in order to drive support for a war on Iran.
Therefore, what AP presented as a kind of highly specialized and very complex document was only a very common graph, which can be easily found on the internet. The agency helped create and spread a dangerous hoax and its credibility was severely damaged by this serious incident that demonstrated that it let itself be manipulated by officials “of an anonymous state” in order to incriminate Iran. The agency did not tell the public who gave it the false and misleading information with the evident goal of misleading the public into believing that Iran had a weapons programme.
Recently and after having scored a heavy defeat in the latest parliamentary elections, where he and his his right-wing partner Avigdor Lieberman lost 25% of their seats in the Knesset, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried to hide his current political weakness by shifting the public´s attention to Iran. In his “victory speech”, he insisted that his first challenge would be “preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons”.
Of course, this rhetoric does not deceive anyone, as even the US and the IAEA reports recognize that Iran continues to use civilian enriched uranium only for civilian purposes. US officials have recently said that the assessment included in the 2010 National Intelligence Estimate, which claims that there is no evidence whatever of an Iranian nuclear weapons program, remains the consensus view of the US´s 16 intelligence agencies.
The international community is actually fed up with Israel’s false allegations and fabrications against Iran. Netanyahu and his Zionist supporters in the US probably know that the American and Western public cannot be manipulated into supporting an attack on Iran, as all the polls show.
Another for-Israel war in the Middle East would not benefit anyone but the far right in Israel, the pro-Israeli lobby in the US and its neocon agents. It would not only devastate the Middle East and kill hundreds of thousands, if not more, but it would also produce a decades-long conflict between the Muslim world and the West that would also destroy the West´s economy. Due to all this, the international community and the peoples of the world must confront these Zionist plots threatening the existence and hopes of humanity.
Related article
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Iraq, Iran, Red Lines and Headlines
By Nima Shirazi | Wide Asleep in America | February 6, 2013
Could this repeated history be any more obvious?
This was August 5, 2002:
And this was November 8, 2011:
This was September 9, 2002:
And this was October 9, 2012:
This was also September 9, 2002:
This was September 17, 2002:
And this was May 9, 2006:
This was September 22, 2002:
And this was November 6, 2011:
This was September 10, 2002:
And this was November 9, 2011:
This was September 17, 2004:
And this was January 27, 2009:
This was October 6, 2004:
And this was January 25, 2010:
This was April 25, 2005:
And this was October 8, 2012:
This was September 6, 2007:
And this was February 4, 2013:
*****
Bulgarian Opposition Blasts Burgas Bombing Charge
By Yahya Dbouk | Al-Akhbar | February 6, 2013
The US and Israel are using the accusations leveled against Hezbollah in the 2012 Burgas bus bombing to pressure the EU into including the resistance group on its terrorist list. But the Bulgarian opposition is crying foul.
Israeli and US pressure on Bulgarian authorities to formally accuse Hezbollah as the organization behind the 18 June 2012 bus bombing in the city of Burgas – in which six people, including five Israelis, were killed – has not been entirely successful.
They have succeeded in pressuring the Bulgarian investigators probing the bombing to link the attack to Hezbollah. This has been done in such a way as to strike a compromise between the hardline stances of Israel and the US, and the cautious position of European countries, who do not see it in their interest to up the ante against Hezbollah at this juncture.
Bulgarian Minister of Interior Tsvetan Tsvetanov announced Tuesday, 5 February 2013, that two people believed to have been connected to Hezbollah were involved in the Burgas bombing.
Speaking after a special meeting of the country’s Consultative Council on National Security to discuss the investigation’s findings, Tsvetanov said the pair were part of a group of three who carried out the attack. The two had traveled on Australian and Canadian passports, and lived in Lebanon since 2006 and 2010, respectively.
The minister went on to say that “there is data showing the financing and connection between Hezbollah and the two suspects,” and that investigators had “a well-founded assumption that they belonged to the military wing of Hezbollah.”
The wording of his remarks was significant. It could foil longstanding Israeli and US efforts to pressure the EU to designate Hezbollah in its entirety as a terrorist organization, as opposed to merely its “military wing.”
Tsvetanov also said that the Lebanese authorities had been asked for assistance in the probe.
From Lebanon to Bulgaria, the Opposition Reacts
The announcement was quickly challenged by Sergei Stanishev, leader of Bulgaria’s parliamentary opposition and the head of the Bulgarian Socialist Party, who charged that finger-pointing against Hezbollah was unfounded and politically motivated.
“It is obvious that Bulgaria’s government has chosen a political approach and is only repeating the interpretation alleged by Israel on the very next day following the attack, when the investigation had not even started,” he said, as quoted by the Sofia News Agency.
“The investigation is currently underway, and there is no way one can be talking about decisive evidence regarding the direct perpetrators, much less regarding the organization that is behind this tragic event,” Stanishev added.
The Agency quoted sources at the Bulgarian foreign ministry as saying that security had been stepped up at the country’s embassy in Beirut as a precaution against possible attacks.
The Bulgarian opposition’s skepticism over the Hezbollah accusation has made no impression on the Lebanese opposition. Members of the March 14 coalition seized on the news, and some predicted it would lead to the downfall of Prime Minister Najib Mikati’s government, of which Hezbollah is a member.
Senior sources in the Future Movement told Al-Akhbar that it had already been agreed that Mikati would step down once a new election law is in place, “but now we have been unexpectedly given the Bulgarian accusation.”
The sources said Future Movement MPs discussed the issue at a meeting Tuesday, but decided not to discuss the Bulgarian charge against Hezbollah in the media for the time being.
Nevertheless, a prominent Future Movement MP remarked to Al-Akhbar: “How can a partnership be established in this country on the basis of terrorism?” He added that in demanding that the government quit, “we are not speaking from a position of hostility or score-settling,” but “out of concern for the country and its interests.”
Sources close to the prime minister denied that the government had any intention of stepping down in the wake of the Bulgarian minister’s announcement. The source attributed the suggestion to “the wishful thinking of the March 14 camp.”
In his public reaction to the announcement, Mikati reiterated Lebanon’s readiness to cooperate with the Bulgarian authorities “to shed light on the circumstances” of the incident, while stressing its condemnation of all such attacks in any European or Arab country.
Lebanese official sources said Beirut had been informed earlier that four members of Hezbollah would be accused of complicity in the bombing. It also knew in advance that the Bulgarians would draw a distinction between Hezbollah’s military wing and Hezbollah itself in order to avoid its placement on the EU terrorist list.
Yet no Lebanese officials were informed of the suspects’ identities, the sources said. The only request for assistance received from Bulgarian investigators by Lebanese judicial authorities was a request to search for an individual’s fingerprints in Lebanese records.
While Hezbollah remained silent, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was quick to seize on the news to demand that the EU designate Hezbollah a terrorist organization and not distinguish between its military and political wings.
In a statement released by his office, Netanyahu thanked the Bulgarian government for its “thorough and professional investigation” and elaborated on how Iran and Hezbollah were “orchestrating a worldwide campaign of terror,” as well as supporting “the murderous Assad regime in Syria.”
The Israeli prime minister’s words were parroted almost verbatim by US President Barack Obama’s counterterrorism advisor John Brennan, who urged EU states to ”take proactive action to uncover Hezbollah’s infrastructure and disrupt the group’s financing schemes and operational networks.”
The EU itself seemed less eager than the US and Israel to put Hezbollah on its terrorism list. EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton merely took note of the results of the Bulgarian probe and stressed the need to “reflect on the consequences.” She said that “the EU and member states will discuss the appropriate response based on all elements identified by the investigators.”
Israeli media had reported in advance of the Bulgarian announcement that Israel’s contribution to the probe had enabled investigators to link the Burgas bombing to Hezbollah. Israeli reports over the past two months had anticipated that Hezbollah and Iran – Hezbollah as an organization and the Iranian state – would be accused of funding and implementing the attack.
Israel must not meddle in AMIA affair: Argentina’s FM
Press TV – February 6, 2013
Argentinean Foreign Minister Hector Timerman says the Israeli regime has no right to interfere in the proceedings of the AMIA issue underway between Argentina and Iran.
Israel recently called for an explanation about an agreement between Iran and Argentina to set up a fact-finding committee to investigate the 1994 deadly bombing at a Jewish center in Buenos Aires.
“Israel has no right to demand explanations; we’re a sovereign state,” Timerman told Israel’s ambassador to Buenos Aires Dorit Shavit.
“Israel doesn’t speak in the name of the Jewish people and doesn’t represent it,” Timerman added.
Those who live in Argentina are Argentinean citizens and Israel’s involvement in the issue will only give ammunition to anti-Semites, the Argentinean foreign minister stated.
On January 27, 2013, Iran and Argentina signed a memorandum of understanding for the two countries to shed light on the 1994 bombing on the AMIA building in Buenos Aires, which killed 85 people and wounded 300 others.
The Israeli foreign ministry issued a statement on January 28, 2013, saying they were “astonished and disappointed” at the deal.
Israel summoned Argentina’s envoy Atilio Norberto Molteni the following day in protest against the deal. The Tel Aviv regime also asked Shavit to demand a meeting with Timerman to “seek clarifications.”
Under intense political pressure imposed by the United States and Israel, Argentina formally accused Iran of having carried out the 1994 bombing attack on the AMIA. The Islamic Republic has vehemently and consistently denied any involvement in the bombing.
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The politics of aggressive war
By John Robles | Voice of Russia | February 1, 2013
When is it acceptable for a country to engage in an act of aggressive war? Can it be justified to engage in an act that has been recognized by the world community and laid down in international law as a crime against humanity? Not just my humanity but all humanity?
These are questions the world community should have been asking itself every day for approximately the past two decades, but it has not. For it was approximately that long ago that one of the world’s superpowers began engaging in acts of aggression wherever it saw fit in order to show its strength and military might and terrorize the world into bending to its will.
Suppose for a minute you and I are that power. We are righteous, rich and powerful and control much of the planet through our economic manipulations and massive media and political know-how. We also have bombs and weapons all over the planet ready to wipe out any adversary and the adversaries of our friends. We are righteous, our God is the proper god and our people are beautiful, fairly well educated and created in our God’s image.
We have more of a right to exist on earth and consume the world’s resources than any of the other nations, because we are the chosen, the beautiful and the strong. They are weak, poor, envious of our power, and worth almost nothing compared to us. What is more, their god is the wrong god and they are not as beautiful and tall and proud as we are. The world is ours, we own it and everyone else has to bow down before us. We take what we want, from where we want, when we want.
Above all else is our moral superiority; we have been victimized in the past and the world must side with us and allow us to seek revenge on our enemies who want to destroy us because we are powerful, beautiful, free and our God is better and more righteous than their god. Our word must be good enough for everyone. If we say someone wants to destroy us, that is the way it is. We do not need to provide proof or receive permission from anyone to destroy whoever we decide is our enemy.
We know that one of us is worth thousands of them because we are the chosen and live in God’s land, a land given to us by our God. A land we cleansed of the savages and animals that had claimed it was theirs. We also know we are worth more than them because we were persecuted for our God and our God has chosen us over other, false, gods.
Since we are the chosen, if we have the idea that you are not worthy of life and are a useless eater, we can kill you, we can bomb you and we can take your lands. After all you are less worthy than us, we are the beautiful and strong and we were created in our God’s image.
So if we have “intelligence” that your country is arming our enemies we can, at our discretion and when we please, enter any country’s territory, including yours, and murder the people and destroy their facilities. Sure we can. After all we are the righteous and you are a bad guy in the eyes of me and my friends. And what is more we control the international courts and all of the international bodies that you could use to complain against us.
What is more, if we decide we don’t like your ruler we will replace him, assassinate him or publicly execute him before your eyes.
But you will never complain or do anything against us because what is more we control you, and if we decide you are a threat we will come to you and destroy you. Or cripple you, or torture you, or take you to a secret prison and make you disappear forever. We can even kill you without leaving our own bunker on the other side of the world.
Do you doubt our power? We have satellites, the Internet, cameras and even tracking devices set up in your cell phone. We know where you are every minute. We record your every move, we know what you watch and what you buy at the shop and we know where your children are and we can kill them if you get out of line. For you are nothing. You are the mud people and we are your masters.
Did you imagine you and I were that powerful? Did you feel the righteousness and superiority? Do you understand who we are dealing with? If you feel a little uneasy, queasy or even nauseous that is okay. It means you are still human and there is still hope; if you feel rage and feel you are being mocked it is time you took off your blinders and imagined you were the “lesser” people and your lands were being taken and your women and children were being murdered before your eyes and there was nothing you could do about it.
Wake up!
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UK: Israeli raid on Syria is justified
Press TV – February 1, 2013
British Foreign Secretary William Hague claims the Israeli regime’s violation of Syria’s airspace in the air raid on a Syrian army research center is a “reaction” to the Syrian crisis rather than a breach of the country’s sovereignty.
“I’m not going to give any condemnation of Israel, rushing to any criticism,” Hague told the BBC.
In a clear attempt to whitewash the Israeli aggression, Hague further claimed that Israel has rightfully reacted to the situation in Syria.
“We have a whole massive situation in Syria to deal with … So I think we should keep our eyes on the main event, on the main crisis,” he said.
“If it affects neighboring countries they would react in various ways, we have to get to the root causes of it and the root cause of the Syria crisis is not Israel,” he added.
This comes as Britain had initially avoided reacting to the airstrike on the research center in northwest of the Syrian capital of Damascus that killed two people and injured several others in full violation of the international law.
The raid has been condemned by Iran, China and Russia with Russians calling it an “unjustified assault” and a “blatant violation of the UN Charter.”
This is while analysts believe the attack has been exactly opposite to what Hague has tried to pretend it is, that is an Israeli act of provocation to drag Syria into de facto war that would give the west an excuse for direct military intervention in the Middle Eastern country.
Following the strike, the Syrian army accused Tel Aviv of being behind the unrest in the country.
Syria has formally complained to the United Nations over the Israeli fighter jets’ attack.
Meanwhile, Britain has been playing a major role in fanning the flames of unrest in Syria by providing support for terrorists who are killing innocent civilians in the country.
Hague reiterated that stance in his interview with the BBC, saying London will “keep increasing the support, the practical support we give to the [Syrian] opposition.”
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Iran UN ambassador calls for destruction of all nuclear weapons
Iran’s ambassador to the UN Gholamali Khoshroo
Press TV – March 29, 2017
Iran’s ambassador to the UN Gholamali Khoshroo has called for the total eradication of nuclear weapons.
Khoshroo reiterated Iran’s call during a UN conference aimed at creating a nuclear weapons ban treaty in New York on Tuesday.
“Iran, as a victim of chemical weapons, strongly feels the danger posed by the existence of weapons of mass destruction and is determined to engage actively in international diplomatic efforts to save humanity from the menace of nuclear weapons,” he said.
Khoshroo stressed that Iran is committed to its Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) obligations, which include negotiations based on effective nuclear disarmament measures.
He added that several countries continue to ignore international calls and treaties for nuclear disarmament and even continue to increase their nuclear stockpiles. “They do not have political determination to abandon doctrines of nuclear deterrence and nuclear terror,” he went on to say.
Iran’s UN ambassador noted that boycotting the talks by many countries, including the US, shows that the world’s nuclear powers are by no means committed to the eradication of nuclear arms. Britain and France were also among the some 40 countries that did not join the talks.
“We note that prohibition of nuclear weapons must be accompanied by the elimination of such weapons. There can be no doubt that without complete abolition of nuclear weapons, there will be no absolute guarantee against the danger of nuclear war and the use of such weapons,” Khoshroo added.
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