Liberals pressured into calling Iran’s terrorists terrorists

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The question that arises from the decision by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government announced on Wednesday to finally declare Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist group is why did it take so long?

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To be clear, it’s the right decision.

But it’s one that has been repeatedly called for by MPs and senators from all parties going back to 2018 — when the House of Commons approved a non-binding Conservative motion to declare the IRGC a terrorist entity.

That campaign continued right up to last month, when MPs from all parties again voted 327-0 in favour on the same issue.

As Conservative foreign affairs critic Michael Chong noted, since 2018, “the IRGC has been able to grow stronger … They have been allowed to fundraise, recruit and operate in Canada while terrorizing countless Iranian-Canadians who fled to Canada to escape the IRGC … Reports indicate there are now 700 agents of the Iranian regime in Canada and that the Iranian regime has hired members of the Hell’s Angels in B.C. to assassinate persons in North America.”

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Four years ago, the IRGC blew a Ukrainian civilian airliner out of the sky with two surface-to-air missiles, shortly after it took off from Tehran airport, killing all 176 people on board, including 55 Canadians and 30 permanent residents of Canada.

Formed in the aftermath of Iran’s Islamic revolution in 1979, the IRGC, the so-called defender of the Islamic republic from internal and external threats, has armed, funded and trained Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command and the Taliban, all designated by Canada as terrorist organizations.

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In 2012, the Conservative government of Stephen Harper designated the IRGC’s Quds Force — its clandestine branch responsible for exporting the Iranian revolution abroad through terrorism — as a terrorist organization.

The IRGC also violently suppresses anti-government demonstrations in Iran, presiding over a vicious campaign to discredit their demands for basic human rights as “a conspiracy of the enemy.”

This in an Islamic dictatorship that imprisons, tortures and murders women for such “crimes” as dancing in the streets and removing their head coverings in public, illegal under Iranian law.

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Two years ago, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland described the IRGC as “terrorists” and the IRGC as “a terrorist organization” while the Trudeau government continued to resist repeated calls by MPs in all parties and from Canadian citizens of Iranian origin to officially designate it as a terrorist organization.

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Given all of this, the fact that the Trudeau government waited until more than three years after it designated the Proud Boys and two other white-supremacist groups as terrorist entities in Canada before finally doing so for the IRGC is utterly bizarre.

That’s not to say that Canada declaring the Proud Boys a terrorist organization wasn’t justified.

It is to say that a federal government that doesn’t understand the IRGC is a far greater threat to global peace and security because it is literally a part of the terrorist-exporting Iranian government is alarming.

Up until now, the Trudeau government argued that designating all of the IRGC as a terrorist organization could result in the unfair criminal prosecution of Iranians now living in Canada who were in low-level positions and forced to join the IRGC.

In fact, it is Canadian citizens of Iranian origin fighting for the rights of their families and friends in Iran, who have been among the strongest campaigners for designating the IRGC as a terrorist group.

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