Sisters and Bothers, Comrades and Friends,
We gather here today on Al-Quds Day, a day of global solidarity inaugurated by the leader of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini. He looked at the expansionist, racist Zionist regime and called it what it is: a cancerous tumor that must be stopped. He understood that the fight for justice is one fight, whether in Palestine or anywhere else.
The Iranian Islamic Revolution itself was a huge blow to the empire. In 1979, the people of Iran did the unthinkable. They rose up against a brutal Shah, a dictator who had been put back on his throne by a MI6-CIA coup against the democratically elected leader, Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh, who had the audacity to nationalize Iranian oil. He dared to take his country’s wealth out of the hands of British and American imperialists. For that crime, he was overthrown. For that crime, the Shah was imposed on us for 25 years of torture and tyranny.
The Iranian Revolution was a declaration of independence from the empire but it also enshrined in its constitution a historic duty: to stand with the oppressed, and specifically with the people of Palestine. For these two crimes—the crime of independence from the empire and the crime of solidarity with Palestine—the US and its allies, prodded by Israel, have waged a 47-year war against Iran.
They have waged economic warfare with crippling sanctions, a war crime designed to starve our people into submission. They organized coups. They encouraged and armed Saddam Hussein in his 8-year war of aggression, giving him chemical weapons to kill Iranian civilians and soldiers. None of it worked.
And now, after 29 months of a live-streamed genocide in Gaza, after Israeli ministers openly declare their “Greater Israel” project with the backing of the US ambassador, they have launched their naked, unprovoked aggression against Iran.
Twice in less than nine months, they have used the cover of negotiations to attack. In June last year, they bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities that were under IAEA inspection. And just two weeks ago, hours after the Omani mediator announced a breakthrough and that peace was within reach, they bombed again. They launched a cowardly “decapitation” strike, assassinating Iran’s head of state, his family, and his 14-month-old granddaughter. And in a grotesque display of their savagery, they double-tapped an elementary school in Minab, slaughtering 170 girls.
They do this while whispering an end-of-times fantasy in the ears of their soldiers, telling them this war will bring the return of Jesus. This is the madness driving the most powerful armies on earth.
Make no mistake. An unprovoked war of aggression is what the American prosecutors at Nuremberg called the supreme international crime. It contains the evil of all other war crimes. And the Labour government by refusing to condemn the aggression of its masters, by refusing to call on them to halt their aggression and above all by provide access to the US to its military bass is now complicit in this supreme crime.
And here is a bitter truth. The founders of the Zionist project, many of them themselves fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe and the Nazi genocide, internalized the evil of their oppressors. Instead of learning the lesson of “never again,” they chose to act out that evil against the Palestinians, copying the toolkit of ethnic cleansing and genocide.
But here is another truth, and it is a powerful one. Some of the most courageous voices against this evil come from the children of Holocaust survivors themselves. The sons and daughters of those who endured the Nazi horrors have become leading intellectuals and activists of our time, standing in unwavering opposition to the Zionist project. They understand that the lesson of the Holocaust is not to inflict suffering on another people, but to say: never again for anyone. They stand with Palestine, and they stand with justice. They testify that Judaism is not Zionism, and that Zionism betrays the very memory of the victims of the Nazi genocide. It is great honor for me to personally know one of these great Jewish intellectuals, Professor Haim Bresheeth, who is speaking here today too.
The atrocities we see today—from the river to the sea, from Gaza to the West Bank, from Lebanon to Iran—is the representation of all that is evil in humanity: hegemonic domination, land grabbing, the theft of water, oil, and gas. We see it in the naked arrogance of leaders like Donald Trump.
But hubris has a flip side. The arrogance of Donald Trump is also the mask for a weak, terrified child within—a man with a death wish who will drag the US empire down with him. Trump thought he could win a quick victory with a gangster’s trick—attack under the cover of negotiations, decapitate the leadership, and terrorize the nation. But in that act of murdering Iranian leaders and slaughtering Iranian children, he awakened something. His aggression has united Iran as never before since the days of the revolution. Under the missiles, our people chant Allahu Akbar as they demonstrate in the streets, defiant and unfazed.
In Palestine, for a hundred years, we have seen a people endure unimaginable sacrifice for dignity and justice. In Iran, for 47 years, we have seen the same resolve. These movements draw on something deep. In our Islamic and Shia faith, we have a model of sacrifice embodied by Imam Hussein, who stood against tyranny knowing the cost.
This movement cannot be defeated, because in it lives everything that is noble in humanity—the refusal to bow, the demand for justice, the love of what is right.
We demand: No UK military base access for this aggression. No British complicity in this crime.
Long live Palestine. Long live Resistance! Long live Iran. Free Palestine. Stop the bombing of Iran.
