Mick Hartley

Matthew Syed invokes Karl Popper – Enemies like Iran will exploit liberal naivety until we’re destroyed.

Karl Popper was a Jew, one of the brightest boys in his class, whose family hoped they would be safe from the pogroms, having converted from Judaism. They turned out to be wrong, and many of his beloved relatives would perish in the Holocaust.

Karl, for his part, escaped and later pondered on the cataclysms of his formative years. Not just the horrors of Nazism and Bolshevism (he was a keen student of the gulag) but also fascism in general. He realised that the liberal traditions of tolerance and freedom, while valuable, had an Achilles’ heel: they can be turned against you. In his book The Open Society and Its Enemies, he articulated the most pertinent diagnosis of his age and perhaps ours, too: “Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant [such as Nazis] … then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”

I suggest we see this pattern afresh today. The legal immigration systems of western democracies have been described as “welcoming” and “liberal”, but in the name of freedom and tolerance we have opened our doors to those who hate these values and wish to destroy them. The names of Abu Qatada, Omar Bakri Muhammad and Abu Hamza are perhaps familiar; worse, because more widespread, are the dangers of Muslim bloc voting and creeping sharia. It is nether racist nor divisive to state that this is a form of self-annihilating madness dressed up as enlightenment. Yes, it’s true only a minority of western Muslims are Islamists; but it is also true that we have utterly failed to confront those who are. We have effectively been made to pay taxes to fifth-columnists who wish for our demise.…

Come to Tehran. A regime that has zero tolerance. That hates freedom. That murders dissidents. And that has for years used the shield of international law, that great shibboleth of ultraliberal governments, to cultivate genocidal proxies, terrorise civilian populations and develop nuclear capabilities while always lying about its intentions, confident its enemies would not retaliate, fearful of breaching narrow interpretations of “self-defence” in   the UN charter that have become gospel in the high circles of the western legal establishment.

For years Obama dithered; Biden dithered; the West dithered. They used sticking plasters like the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, Obama’s nuclear deal, while Tehran bided its time, masterminded October 7, disrupted global trade by means of the Houthis and came within weeks of full uranium enrichment last year. Even now, according to Lord Hermer, we only have the right to attack Iran’s bases when it has already fired on us. Errr, try that in a nuclear shooting match when you have been incinerated already.

So Trump is right? Well yes, but Syed is not a fan. Fair enough: nor am I. Iran needed to be confronted, though, and no one else – apart of course from the Israelis – was willing to make the move. So Iran is reeling, but yes, there are huge doubts about Trump and his plans. If he just does a Venezuela and puts in a “more amenable” leader – a Khamenei lite – then we’re back where we started, and it will all have been in vain. Basically, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps needs to be completely destroyed, or they’ll just rise up and take control again.