No one knows the hand behind the Delhi bomb attack. With Israel pitching for war against Iran, why is the media jumping to prejudiced conclusions?
Akash Bisht (Journalist, Delhi)
While Indian intelligence agencies are struggling to unearth all significant leads about the perpetrators of the bomb blast targeting Israeli diplomats in Delhi, sections of the Indian media has as usual gone overboard. Blatantly laying the blame on Iran and Shiite militant group Hezbollah (based in Lebanon), without an iota of evidence or investigation detail, some in the media conjured up fantastic theories, including that the Indian intelligence were aware that ‘Iran was planning an attack’. Pray, so why didn’t they stop this murderous attack? Political observers detect the marked presence of a strong Israeli lobby manipulating news, currently pitching it against Iran in a renewed and high powered propaganda and psychological war.
Needless to say, India shares “civilisational links” and friendly relations with Iran and has not joined the sanctions lobby against the country, or the shrill war cry by Israel and hardliners in the US. It has simultaneously insisted that Iran should follow the nuclear protocol as per international rules. (This too is ironical, post Pokhran II and Pakistan’s Chagai nuclear blasts! What is the measure of responsibility and self control when it comes to being a nuclear power?) There has been of late immense pressure on India to stop all ties with Iran, including a strong letter by the powerful Jewish-American lobby to the Indian ambassador in the US.
Expectedly, the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, within hours of the Delhi bombing, accused Iran of masterminding the attack and referred to the Islamic nation as “the largest exporter of terror in the world”. This is part of a pattern. Rightwing forces in Israel and the US, and the hardline regime in Tel Aviv, has been consistently preaching in recent times to go for direct action against Iran, including pushing the tacit proposal to militarily destroy Iran’s potential nuclear installations. Disturbingly, the media chose to un-objectively follow the Israeli version and ignored the harsh realities of the historic conflict between the Zionist regime and the Islamic nation, literally, on the verge of a war. The occupation of Palestine by Israeli with the help of western forces, and the ritualistic sacrifices, atrocities and tragedies in Palestine, at the hands of the Israeli armed forces, has not helped matters, even while the epicentre of conflict in the Middle-East continues to simmer without a tangible, just and humane solution.
Five nuclear scientists in Iran have been attacked by similar magnetic bombs, only one survived. Ironically, sections of the same Indian media chose to remain indifferent to these killings
The events that unfolded after yesterday’s bomb blasts in Bangkok, the capital of Thailand, were uncannily similar to those in India. The news that started to trickle in after the blasts in Thailand was in many ways similar in tone and tenor to what followed the Delhi blast. Once again, the media, without any circumstantial evidence, pinned the blame on Iran and mentioned it as a part of the so-called “Iranian global terror drive”. Israel, predictably, jumped to this conclusion, even while the sequence of events in the Bangkok blasts remains clouded.
The Indian government on Wednesday has categorically stated that there is no evidence of involvement of any individual entity, organisation and country in the attack.
Interestingly, Israeli newspaper Debkafile, that had initially termed the Delhi bomb blast as a ‘Hezbollah attack’, later reported that there was ‘no connection’ between the Thai blasts and instances in New Delhi and the Georgian capital of Tbilisi. “At first, Israeli terrorist investigators assumed Hezbollah carried out the bomb attacks on diplomats in Georgia and India to mark the fourth anniversary of the death of the Lebanese Shiite group’s commander-in-chief Imad Moughniyeh. They shifted ground when it was discovered that a motorcyclist had attached a magnetic bomb to Talya Koren’s car not far from the Israeli embassy, and noted that the attack mirrored the method used in the assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists in Tehran,” reads a report in Debkafile.
‘Netanyahu apparently feels, however, that he can manipulate Rightwing Israeli influence on American politics to make it impossible for Obama to stay out of an Israeli war on Iran’
Five nuclear scientists in Iran have been attacked by similar magnetic bombs, only one survived. Ironically, sections of the same Indian media chose to remain indifferent to these killings.
Several Iranian scientists have mysteriously died and disappeared in the past and the two countries, US and Israel, obsessed with Iran’s nuclear programme, have been blamed for these covert murders. In January 2010, a remote-controlled bomb attached to a motorcycle killed a neutron physicist Masoud Ali Mohammadi. In November 2010, two separate bombs killed nuclear scientists Majid Shahriar and Fereidoun Abbasi. In July 2011, Darioush Rezaei, a neutron transport expert and member of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran was shot dead by unknown assailants. “According to Iranian media, a 32-year-old university professor, Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan, died when an assailant riding on a motorcycle attached a magnetic bomb to his car, which then detonated and killed him,” reports Salon.
“There are cursory references to the four Iranian nuclear scientists who were killed in the last two years. Instead, the bomb blast is being touted as revenge for the death of Hezbollah’s military chief Imad Mughniyeh in a car explosion. What is so important about the fourth death anniversary? Do also note that he was killed in Syria, so Israel has a virtual buffet meal at its disposal to point fingers at,” writes Farzana Versey in Counterpunch.
Drop drop drop
The uncanny similarity of the attacks on Iranian scientists and the Israeli diplomat in Delhi has certainly changed diplomatic equations and raised uncanny questions on the entire bombing episode. Is it linked to the high pitched propaganda against Iran? It is widely perceived that Israel is looking for instant reasons to attack Iran and for that it needs legitimacy and support of other countries especially after the Barack Obama administration thwarted hardliner Netanyahu’s reported plans of precision strikes. The relationship between the US president and Netanyahu has not been exactly warm in the recent past. The peace talks have also been lost somewhere in the crossroads, and a rigid Netanyahu has a lot to do with it.
Shiite Iran has had no strategic relations with Al Qaeda or Taliban. These jehadi forces have been nurtured by Wahabi Islamic fundamentalists, based prominently in Saudi Arabia, an ally of the US
“Netanyahu apparently feels, however, that he can manipulate Rightwing Israeli influence on American politics to make it impossible for Obama to stay out of an Israeli war on Iran. He has defied the Obama administration by refusing to assure Washington that he would consult them before making any decision on war with Iran,” reports Al Jazeera.
Earlier this month, Israel’s Defence Minister, Ehud Barak, in an annual Herzliya security conference in Israel, said that the window for an effective strike against Iran was shutting rapidly as the Islamic nation is moving uranium-enriching centrifuges to an underground facility near the holy city of Qom. This, he believed, would give Iran a “zone of immunity” wherein they would manufacture nuclear weapons without any disturbance.
Amidst all this, it is indeed too premature on the part of sections of the Indian and western media to squarely put the blame on Iran and Hezbollah and ignore the bloody historic realities of the strained relations between the two countries. How can they ignore the injustices suffered by the Palestinian people for so many years? Hezbollah has always been defined as a resistance group fighting for the liberation of Palestine and backed by Iran. It is also a fact that despite Israel’s superior military power, it got a kind of drubbing at the hands of Hezbollah during the last military conflict in 2006.
Similarly, Shiite Iran has had no strategic relations with either the Al Qaeda or the Taliban in the Af-Pak region. The truth is these jehadi forces have been nurtured and backed by powerful and prosperous Wahabi Islamic fundamentalists, based prominently in Saudi Arabia, which is an ally of the US. Not surprisingly, Saudi Arabia and other extremist Sunni lobbies are tacitly and overtly backing Israel and the US against Iran, including reportedly pleading for a military strike.
The use of magnet bombs, widely believed to be organised by Israel’s notorious secret service, Mossad, in its covert assassinations, is yet another aspect that sections of the Indian media failed to acknowledge. Clearly, they should have dug deeper, waited for investigation details and chosen to be more discreet and circumspect, before squarely blaming Iran and Hezbollah for the attacks. This is precisely because no evidence has yet appeared implicating Iran or Hezbollah in the Delhi attack on an Israeli diplomat.
“Blindly accepting the Israeli version of domestic links with groups will obviously lead to the blanket indictment of jehadi organisations, many of them imagined entities of the Rightwing parties. Is it not possible that some Hindutva terror groups now openly asserting themselves and held culpable for such activities could be used for Israel’s covert operations? Israel does not have suicide missions, but it understands the masochism paradigm only too well,” writes Versey.
(This article was first published in Hardnews)
