Singapore Condemns Iran - Wow!

On April 1st 2024, an Israeli missile struck the Iranian Embassy in Damascus, destroying the Consulate building and killing 16 people, including Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi and 7 other members of Iran’s  Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).  The government of Singapore was silent comment on this act of mass assassination together with its brazen violation of a 3rd country’s sovereignty.  But on April 14th 2024, less than 24 hours after Iran conducted retaliatory air strikes on 2 Israeli military facilities which caused no fatalities and only one minor injury, Singapore’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) posted a statement on its website condemning Iran.  It should be noted that Iran had just granted visa-free entry to Singaporeans on January 31st.  Iran has very few countries it considers “friendly” enough for a visa waiver.  Not only did we not grant Iran the courtesy of reciprocal visa-free entry for its citizens, but we chose to repay the Iranian gesture of welcome with a condemnation. 

The Times of Israel wrote: “Western nations condemn Iran attack on Israel, issue statements of solidarity.”  It was not surprising that these countries condemned Iran’s retaliation, but not Israel’s assassination strike.  One of the effects of Gaza is that the words “Western nations”, “hypocrisy” and “double standards” tend to find themselves in the same sentence.  Is this such a good time for Singapore to advertise its attachment to “the West”? 

As an awkward aftertouch, the leader of the Western World didn’t show much conviction in the condemnations.  After almost all the Iranian drones and missiles had been successfully shot down by Israeli, US, UK, French and Jordanian air defenses, US President Biden publicly told his Israeli counterpart Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to “take the win” and back off.  He also stated that the US would not join the Israelis if they chose to launch a counter-response against Iran.  

Taboo Violation and Upping the Ante 

In contrast to “the West”, the Rest of the World (ROW) understood that Iran had acted with its usual restraint. They knew that since 2010 Israel had been assassinating Iranian scientists on Iranian soil and Iranian military commanders in Syria and Iraq, as well as launching cyberattacks on Iran’s civilian nuclear facilities which had led to both “soft” destructions of centrifuges and “hard” explosions.  On January 3rd  2020, Israel’s provocations reached a climax when its spy agency Mossad provided precise intelligence for Donald Trump’s assassination of Sardar Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad.  Soleimani was the commander of the élite Quds Force branch of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a steadfast defender of his country dating from the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, a national hero beyond ideology, revered alike by the faithful of the Wilāyat al-Faqīh and by Monarchists who despise the Iranian régime. 

In January 2024, about 100 people were killed by suicide bomb as they attended a memorial ceremony for Soleimani in his hometown of Kerman on the 4th anniversary of his assassination.  Although ISIS claimed responsibility for the massacre, Iran blamed the US and Israel.   

Throughout these 14 years of Israel’s murders and nuclear sabotage, Iran had never delivered any kind of response.  On April 1st, Israel upped the ante once again by not just killing the person widely seen as Soleimani’s successor, but targeting him in an Iranian diplomatic mission in a foreign country, hence violating a taboo of international relations that Iran could not ignore.  With characteristic cunning and impunity, the Israelis had provoked an inevitable Iranian response for which Iran could then be condemned. Israel gets away with it because the West is primed to believe that Israel only acts in “self-defense”, while Iran’s acts are inherently “malign” and “destabilizing”. 

The problem for Israel is that the West is losing control of the narrative. In Gaza, we see the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) openly violate international humanitarian law (the international law of war) and international human rights law (the law of both peacetime and war).  Gaza is also where Israel’s penchant for violating taboos is on full display, eviscerating its claim to the moral high ground.  A taboo is “a social group's ban, prohibition, or avoidance of something based on the group's sense that it is excessively repulsive.”  Luring ambulance medics to a 6-year old girl trapped in a car and then ripping all of them to shreds with automatic  gunfire; sniping an elderly woman in the leg as she walks home, shooting at anyone attempting to reach her, letting her lie on the ground for hours and finally running her over with a tank; sniping an elderly lady in a Catholic church and then shooting her daughter dead as she tries to move her mother’s body to safety; blowing up hospitals, churches, mosques, bakeries, schools, orphnages and refugee tents; abducting doctors with their families and dumping their executed bodies in a shopping mall; broadcasting recordings of women’s and children’s voices to lure civilians into the open and kill them; tracking a Hamas official and waiting for him to sit with his family for dinner before blowing them all to pieces from the air; executing children in front of their parents; mowing down crowds of starving people waiting for aid; assassinating doctors while they attend to patients; letting a dog maul a wheelchair-bound patient to death; stripping medical staff and patients naked, then zip-tying their hands behind their back and executing them, leaving some of the corpses with IV lines and catheters still attached, while others are found beheaded or with organs and skin removed; using bulldozers to dig up graves and desecrate corpses before dumping them by the hundreds into mass graves and covering them with whatever rubble and rubbish is lying around – such acts are “excessively repulsive” and inconceivable to most humans.   

IDF soldiers break taboos because they can.  The Israeli government encourages its soldiers and citizens to do so for more strategic reasons.  The constant repetition and escalation of Israeli atrocities, the endless innovation in ever more unimaginable repulsive acts together with their bland reception in “the West”, are all part of a mass grooming exercise to reinforce the dogma that the Israelis are a special people enjoying a unique impunity which may never be questioned. 

Israel’s April Fool’s Day attack on Iran’s embassy in Damascus was not just an act of mass murder or aggression against Syrian sovereignty.  It was also a deliberate violation of a centuries-old taboo of international relations enshrined in the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations to which Israel itself is party.  Diplomatic missions are sacrosanct in peace and in war.  There have been attacks on embassies in the past, but they were carried out by rioters, students, militant groups or “by accident”, never by another state’s armed forces.  Even during the 2nd World War and the Korean War, diplomatic missions were never violated.  And Israel was not even at war with Iran.   

As with its atrocities in Gaza, Israel's taboo-shattering attack in Damascus had multiple purposes: 1) humiliate and dehumanize its victims; 2) provoke a response for which the victim could be blamed; 3) re-inforce Israel's absolute and unconditional impunity. While the ROW remained skeptical, Singapore's response reveals flawless manipulation by the Jewish State.

The Western Nations of Asia 

“The West” is not a geographical or ethnic term, but an ideological one.  There are 3 and a half “Western nations” of “non-Western” origin – Japan, South Korea, Singapore and the quasi-nation of Taiwan, all of which predictably excused Israel and condemned Iran’s retaliatory strikes.  Taiwan did not give a reason for its condemnation; South Korea took offense at the “large scale” of the Iranian response, and Japan and Singapore both denounced Iran’s response as a “dangerous escalation”.   

In essence, all these countries’ governments found Iran’s response “disproportionate” to the original Israeli attack. What does this mean?  Usually we are made to think that human life is more precious than things and money. But it seems this valuation only applies to certain kinds of humans. 16 Iranian lives are not worth as much as the Western resources used to shoot down Iran's drones. This is the West's double standards on full display.

Iran’s Retaliation Analyzed 

In contrast to the Western narrative of a "dangerous" though bungled Iranian military escalation, there were in reality 5 strategic goals Iran’s attack – defense, deterrence, intelligence gathering, de-escalation and retribution.   

Defense - Iran’s strikes on Israel were limited to two air bases.  It is likely that one of them had been used to conduct the missile strike on the Iranian Embassy.  Both air bases were still functional and capable of launching future strikes.  Iran’s attack on these bases was therefore consistent with Chapter VII of Article 51 of the UN Charter, which grants to all states “the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations”.

Deterrence –  Deterrence “is the act of discouraging an act by instilling fear of its consequences”.  Iran gave the US 72 hours’ advance warning of its attack, the warning filtered down to the mainstream media and soon the whole world knew it was imminent.  On the day of the pre-announced attack, the Iranians launched a swarm of aging Shahed-136 drones which took on average 5 hours to reach Israel, giving plenty of time for US, British and French air-to-air and Aegis defense systems to down them all.  Next, Iran delivered a salvo of lesser quality cruise missiles which were neutralized by Israel’s vast array of THAAD, Iron Dome, Shadow 3,  David’s Sling and Patriot surface-to-air defense systems.  Finally, the Iranians  launched a mix of ballistic missiles of varying sophistication, of which ten hit their targets after evading all of Israel’s anti-ballistic missile defense systems, including a state-of-the-art AN/TPY-2 X-Band radar system which can track missiles from their launching point in Iran.   

Because of Iran’s advance warning, there were no personnel or aircraft exposed at the airbases.  Iran staggered its combined drone and missile attack, with no intention of overwhelming its enemy’s defenses.  It didn’t use its most advanced weapons.  And yet with all this absence of cutting-edge technology, Iran still managed to penetrate the most robust anti-ballistic missile defenses in the world.  While inflicting minimal damage and zero loss of life, Iran implied the potential for catastrophic destruction if it were to use its most advanced weapons and did not give advance warnings or stagger its attacks.  It must be said that Iran did not succeed in its deterrence mission, because 3 months later Israel assassinated Hamas’ political leader Ismail Haniyeh on Iranian soil while he was resting in a state guest house prior to his planned attendance at the inauguration ceremony of Iran's new president.  In Muslim culture, a guest is more honored than one's own, so this act was calculated to up the ante once again. 

Intelligence Gathering - Iran’s slow and staggered intrusion into Israel allowed it to learn about the defense capabilities of Israel and its allies.  It revealed which parties would rush to defend Israel, and how and from where they would do so. Theoretically, Israel’s awareness that Iran possesses this intelligence should in turn enhance Iran’s deterrence capability. 

De-escalation – Iran’s biggest achievement was Joe Biden’s refusal to get involved in an Israeli counterstrike.  Binyamin Netanyahu had been trying to get the US to attack Iran for the past 3 decades.  He almost succeeded with Donald Trump, who would have gone to war over Iran’s taking down of a US spy drone over Iranian territory, had he not been dissuaded by his generals.  INetanyahu’s need for the US to attack Iran was now more pressing than ever, to take the world’s focus off the daily slaughter and maiming of Palestinian mothers, grandmothers, children and infants, to distract the Israeli population from the failure of Israel’s military operation in Gaza, and above all to convince the world that Israel must be on the right side if the United States is going to war for it. But Iran's calculated move caused Biden to de-escalate.

Retribution -  Retribution is an instinctive right, ingrained in social custom and a mainstay of drama from ancient Greece to modern cinema.  The right to retribution is also enshrined in law.  In the West, the state takes control of the retribution process by converting it into institutionalized punishment.  In Iran the right of retribution is returned to the wronged individual.  A mother whose son has been murdered has the right to pardon the murderer who would otherwise be executed. 

Iran has not yet taken an Israeli life for an Israeli murder of one of its own.  By contrast, it is IDF doctrine to obliterate densely populated city blocks as a means to “pressure governments”, to kill any amount of civilians on the premise that a single enemy fighter is hiding among them, and to murder the sisters, sons and grandchildren of a Hamas political leader when he isn’t even with them.  This is the same Israel which presents itself as the heroic vanguard in a war between “civilization and barbarism” to an applauding audience of both Houses of the US Congress.

What the Public was Told and Why  

UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron summed up the Western narrative during a Sky News interview: 

“There was a massive degree of difference between what Israel did in Damascus and 301 weapons being launched by the state of Iran against the state of Israel, for the first time a state-on-state attack, 101 ballistic missiles, 36 cruise missiles, 185 drones, that is a degree of difference,  I think a reckless and dangerous thing for Iran to have done, and I think the whole world can see, who have wondered what is the true nature of Iran – it’s there in black and white.” 

Cameron focuses on a single element of Iran’s attack – the quantity of weapons used – and ignores everything else, including the fact that Iran’s targets were military bases while Israel’s was a diplomatic mission, that Iran gave advance warning of its attack and flew its drones for 5 hours so they could be picked off at leisure by Israel and its allies, whereas Israel conducted a stealth attack designed to maximize death and destruction, and the fact that Iran’s attack was de facto de-escalatory while Israel’s was designed to provoke retaliation.  Cameron’s exclusive focus on Iran’s 301 weapons versus the 1 missile Israel used in its embassy assassination allowed him to accuse Iran of being “reckless and dangerous”.  Technically of course, Israel’s missile attack was not “dangerous”, because danger implies potential harm, and Israel’s act was not potential, but actually lethal.  This is how the eloquent minister uses quibbles to absolve Israel.   

“The medium is the message” is a phrase coined in the ‘60s.  It is the whole package of Sky News, the Etonian accent, that honed aura of apparent reasonableness and knowing whereof he speaks, that is meant to make Cameron’s speech the definitive word on Iran’s retaliation.  But again, Gaza has changed all that.  

The “Iranian Proxies” Myth  

In 2005, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei uttered the words: "Palestine belongs to Palestinians, and the fate of Palestine should also be determined by the Palestinian people".  In 2012, he expressed confidence that "the superfluous and fake Zionist (regime) will disappear from the landscape.”  Iran does not accept the legitimacy of the Jewish state.  And neither do 27 other UN member nations, including our neighbors, Malaysia and Indonesia.  None of these governments wishes a long life for the current régime in Tel Aviv, but they have also never harbored intentions to topple it militarily.  The Israeli claim that Iran is out to “destroy” Israel has no basis in any act or statement from Iran. 

Owing to the inconvenient fact that Iran never attacked Israel before April 13th, it has been necessary to construct a cognitive edifice in which Iran has been continuously “threatening” Israel and the region through its so-called “proxies”.  It is claimed that the “Houthis” of Yemen, the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Units, Hamas and Hezbollah are all “Iran’s terrorist proxies”. These groups are always described as “Iran-backed”, and this is enough to brand them as “terrorist” and “antisemitic”.

Israeli propaganda is accepted as fact not because we all find the Jewish State particularly trustworthy.  It is because the Zionist ideology is so firmly embedded in the institutional West, and especially in the Ivy League universities of America with their postgraduate “Schools” where our leaders are professionally incubated.  Lee Hsien Loong and Lawrence Wong may come from disparate social backgrounds, but they are united as alumni of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.   

 Israel’s control of Western institutions is so robust that a Google search of “Iranian Proxies” will return not Israeli articles and studies, but those from the American University, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, the Council on Foreign Relations,  the Atlantic Council, the Wilson Center etc.  These august and allegedly “independent” and “non-partisan” American institutions of political scholarship all have either direct ties to Israel, or to the US military, the CIA, the oil and arms industries and the US Congress which are all deeply in bed with Israel.

“Research fellows” from the above institutions are fixtures on Channel News Asia (CNA), the news network upon which English-educated Singaporeans depend for their understanding of geopolitical events, and these pundits are responsible for telling Singaporeans that Hezbollah is a “terrorist proxy” of Iran. Israeli leaders, however, know better.  Former Israeli PM Ehud Barak said in 2006: “When we entered Lebanon… there was no Hezbollah.  We were accepted with perfumed rice and flowers by the Shi’a in the south.  It was our presence there that created Hezbollah.”  Another Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, said in 1987 that it was Israel that “let the genie out of the bottle”.  What is meant by Israel's "presence" in Lebanon?  Israel has invadedthe country 6 times – in 1978, 1982, 1993, 1996, 2006 and now in October 2024.  In the wake of the Lebanese government’s perennial failure to defend its country, Hezbollah was formed as a political party in 1982, and its armed militia came into being in 1985 to liberate the country through military means.  In 2006, Hezbollah succeeded in expelling the IDF from all Lebanese territories except for a sliver of land known as the Shebaa Farms.  There is no doubt that they will do so again this time. 

Like Hamas, Hezbollah is a national resistance movement with zero ties to international terrorism.  On the contrary, Hezbollah has continually defended the southern border of Lebanon from incursions by Al Qaeda and ISIS, and the organization is esteemed by many of the country’s Maronite Christians who view it as protecting them from both “Islamist” and Jewish State terror.  Since October 7th, Hezbollah assumed the additional mission of launching measured attacks on IDF facilities in northern Israel to hamper the genocide in Gaza. 

Hezbollah is a Shi'ite organization, and the southern part of Lebanon through which Israel invades is predominantly Shi’a. Hezbollah has few financial resources, and receives no support from the Lebanese state.  Iran is a Shi’a state with oil and gas reserves, and it is said to allocate about US$700 million in annual aid to Hezbollah, an organization with which it enjoys spiritual and cultural kinship, but which is engaged in the defense of it people in Lebanon, not to strike "terror" in Israel.

Hezbollah is Iran’s ally, not its proxy.  Iran does not need “proxies” to “destroy Israel”, because while both Iran and Hezbollah would be very happy if Israel disappeared, neither of them are suicidal or stupid enough to think they can remove Israel by force.  Both the Iranian government and Hezbollah are concerned primarily with their people’s livelihoods which are struggling under the weight of direct and secondary sanctions, and the last thing they seek is an escalation with Israel leading to the massive retaliation from the US which is Israel's goal.

The thesis that Iran’s strategic objective is to “destroy” Israel lies at the heart of the readiness to “condemn” Iran’s April 13th retaliatory strike.  The question is whether Singapore’s leaders really believe this fiction, or are they instead complicit in Israel’s information warfare.  The 3rd possibility is that they are simply guided by an instinct to go along with “the West” and not worry too much about the details.  None of these possibilities is comforting. 

The Bond Between the West and Israel 

All American politicians must support Israel if they wish their career to last. Some, like Barack Obama, seem to find the Jewish State's behavior problematic.  But Obama could only push back obliquely at Israel by spearheading the Iran Nuclear Deal.  He still approved a massive military budget for Israel and he never spoke out against the Jewish State. We wil never know what he really thinks about Israel.

Then there are the career politicians who revere Israel.  They are predominantly White, sometimes Evangelical Christian. Even if such a person had the intellectual capacity to realize that the narrative of Iran’s military threat to Israel was false, he or she would still be among those Senators and House Representatives who granted Netanyahu a solemn address to the Joint Houses of Congress and rewarded him with thunderous applause as he told one debunked lie about Hamas after another, while claiming absurdly that Israel “sanctifies life”. 

Ridicule has poured in from all quarters of the globe for the 58 standing ovations and 79 total rounds of applause given to Netanyahu by the legislature of the nation that stands tall as the beacon of freedom, human rights and democracy, right when the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) was seeking to arrest him for his role in “war crimes and crimes against humanity”, when his government was violating multiple court orders issued by the ICJ to prevent the crime of genocide, and when the ICJ had just determined that Israel's "presence" in all of Palestine was illegal.   

The truth is that these Senators and House Representatives do not have the liberty not to applaud Netanyahu. Whatever horrors Israel perpetrates, no American politician can stop supporting Israel, and yet none views himself as a criminal, and hence merely to preserve their own sanity these people must constantly blinker their eyes and convince themselves that Israeli narratives are truthful.  For such people, Israel can do no wrong, and no price is too high for defending the Jewish State, or else their whole cognitive edifice would collapse. 

The traditional American ruling class supports Israel unconditionally because there is a blood bond between them, not their own blood, but the blood of others spilt so that they could have their nations.  Settler-colonialism is the act of displacing the existing inhabitants of a territory by killing and expelling them, followed by “settling” in the cleared territories and justifying one’s acts by supremacist claims to a Manifest Destiny or to a Land promised by God.  The ethnic cleansing of Gaza is but the logical extension of Israel’s uniquely ruthless brand of settler-colonialism. 

In the history of the world, there have been only 5 settler-colonial nations – the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Israel.  In the learning institutions of Canada, Australia and New Zealand, it has become fashionable to begin webinars with a “land acknowledgement” such as: 

“We broadcast today from the traditional, ancestral, current and unceded lands of” such and such a displaced indigenous tribe.  The word “unceded” is particularly cogent.  It means: “you took our lands by force”. 

To US Republicans, land acknowledgements are reviled as “woke” drivel, but left-leaning American institutions use them, and a land acknowledgement was even used as the preamble to the Democratic Party’s 2024 Platform though without the use of the word "unceded".  To the US and Israel alike, it is anathema to point out that the entirety of America and Israel is "unceded". territory.   

The threat Iran poses to Israel is not physical but cognitive, because Iran never tires of reminding the world that the Israeli nation is founded upon violence and theft. 

Israel responds to Iran’s cognitive challenge by enlisting the West to treat Iran as a rogue state, and prompting the US to dangle the threat of annihilation over Iran.  

The US obliges Israel because of the similarity of the two countries' origins. Europe follows in the footsteps of the US and Israel for several reasons.  There is the patron/client relationship between the US and Europe. Europe is also the place from which most Americans came and Europeans are proud of what their offspring have become. Finally Europe is seemingly never done with atoning for the sins of the Holocaust - Germany for committing them and the rest of Europe for not doing anything to prevent them. Europe is also the home of centuries of antisemitism and expulsions of Jews for which Israel is the lasting compensation.  We can hence understand why the ROW is much slower in supporting Israel and condemning Iran.

What then explains Singapore's behavior?

Against a normal state, Iran’s April 14th retaliation would have served the purposes of deterrence and de-escalation.  But Israel is not a normal state.  It is one that glorifies death and destruction.  It will keep upping the ante until Iran loses its restraint.  When that day happens and if it leads to regional or even world catastrophe, Singapore’s consistent enabling of Israel’s impunity will have contributed to this outcome.