DEFENCE Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif has strongly condemned the Israeli aggression towards Iran and criticized the Western world’s double standards, saying performance of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was tainted with hypocrisy and a selective approach.
In an interview with IRNA, he noted that a regime that is not even a member of the NPT and there is no monitoring and inspection of its nuclear arsenals, can do anything and has the authorization to carry out any aggression and attack on Palestine, Gaza, Yemen and Iran. All these countries are targets of deliberate and reckless actions of the Jewish state, which is not held accountable by the IAEA.
The remarks of the Minister assume added significance in the backdrop of the questions being asked by the global nuclear watchdog to Iran about the fate of the enriched Uranium after bombing of the enrichment plant by the United States. The agency maintained criminal silence when Israel and the US were preparing to attack Iranian nuclear sites but now it is pressuring Iran to disclose the whereabouts of the material. Similarly, Israel and the United States used their all military might including bunker buster bombs with the stated objective of destroying Iranian nuclear programme and assets despite the fact the programme was well under IAEA safeguards and IAEA saw no evidence to suggest Tehran was close to making a bomb. What a shame that countries like France and the United Kingdom, which considered themselves as leaders of the civilized world, extended both military and economic assistance to Israel to carry out aggression against Iran on the pretext of its nuclear programme. Their jaundiced approach was quite visible as they supported a country, which is undeclared nuclear power. France is the country that backtracked from an IAEA-guaranteed agreement with Pakistan for provision of a reprocessing plant after India carried out nuclear explosions in 1974 despite the fact the project was at a fairly advanced stage of implementation and its revocation inflicted heavy financial loss on Pakistan. All this shows the entire focus of nuclear non-proliferation is the Islamic world whereas non-Muslim allies of the West are free to pursue the nuclear path. It is all the more worrisome that the Jewish State continues to hurl threats on Iran boasting it will see to it Tehran is not able to revive its nuclear programme. In other words, the nuclear programme has become a necessity for Iran in the face of existential threats from Israel.
