Who's Ollie Byrne?’ Roudabeh Shafie wanted to know.

I was sharing a platform in Dublin with Roudabeh, discussing the possibility of a western attack on her country, Iran. Ollie cropped up in relation to the UN nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT).
It¹s said that Iran is in breach of the NPT. America is leading calls for action to force the country back into line.
At the meeting, I quoted commentator David Morrison on a recent exchange between US diplomat Robert Joseph and Egyptian journalist Khaleed Dawoud. Joseph had briefed journalists on the need for action against Iran. Dawoud asked whether Israel, too, should be called to account for its nuclear programme.
Joseph replied: ‘In terms of Israel, I mean, this is really about Iran. This is about Iran...violating its commitments under the Non-proliferation Treaty.’
Dawoud pressed on:  ‘Are you saying, sir, Israel is not in violation of its obligations under the NPT?’
Joseph: ‘Israel is not a member of NPT, so it’s not violating.’
It was this which brought Ollie to mind.
I invited the meeting to consider whether Derry City should inform Fifa that it had withdrawn from the provisions of the off-side rule and that all Derry goals would henceforth be legitimate irrespective of the position of the scorer. How would Ollie react?
Possibly, I suggested, he would announce that so also would it be at Tolka Park.  
How would he then react, I wondered, if Fifa responded by expelling Shelbourne from football. (It was at this point Roudabeh piped up, ‘Who¹s Ollie Byrne?’)
Ollie, I speculated, would demand, ‘What about Derry?’ And Sepp Blatter might retort: ‘In terms of Derry, I mean, this is about Shelbourne violating its commitments under the offside rule.’
That could be the tipping point for the Tolka supremo. He¹d possibly explode, splattering gobbets of Shel-flesh across a thousand-metre radius. Even people who¹d previously thought him excitable might agree he had reason.
Just as the Iranians have reason.
Diplomat Joseph¹s residual argument was that Iran is bound by the NPT because it signed up to it, whereas Israel isn¹t because it didn¹t. But Iran could resign from the NPT, by giving the UN three months notice.
Israel has used its freedom from the provisions of the NPT to acquire 200 nuclear warheads and the missiles to deliver them to any city in the Middle East. Iran could award itself the same freedom by e-mailing the UN and waiting three months.  The reason it has not was set out last August in an Iranian message to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA):
‘We meet when the world is remembering the atomic bombings of the civilians in Hiroshima(August 6) and Nagasaki (August 9) 60 years ago. The savagery of the attack, the human suffering it caused, the scale of the civilian loss of life turning individuals, old and young, into ashes in a split second, and maiming indefinitely those who survived, should never be removed from our memory.  It is the most absurd manifestation of irony that the single state which caused this single nuclear catastrophe in a twin attack on our earth now has assumed the role of the prime preacher in the nuclear field while ever expanding its nuclear weapons capability...
‘The Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has issued the Fatwa that the production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons are forbidden under Islam and that the Islamic Republic of Iran shall never acquire these weapons.’
Is it not strange that you havn¹t heard this statement in any of the extensive features our media have carried on the Iranian ‘crisis’?
The crisis arises not from any action by Iran but from the determination of the Western powers to shape the Middle East according to their own interests.

On the day I was in Dublin explaining Ollie to Roudabeh, John Kerry was in Derry explaining why he lost the US election.
Speaking to an audience of fat Catholics at Magee College, Kerry described Iran as ‘the world¹s leading State sponsor of terrorism.’  
‘A nuclear-armed Iran clearly poses an unacceptable threat to global security,’ he went on. ‘America must lead an unrelenting collective effort that matches the urgency of the threat.’
The same sentiment, if less stridently expressed, as from Bush-camp neo-con Joseph.  As in the presidential campaign, Kerry pledges to wage any war that Bush fancies fighting, but less convincingly.
They don¹t have a US-style democracy in Iran. Take this, in response to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad¹s denial that the Holocaust ever happened: ‘We should speak out even if a single Jew is killed, even if the historical reality of the Holocaust has been misused and there is enormous pressure on the Palestinian people...The persecution of the Jews, just like Nazism, is a Western phenomenon... We follow a religion which holds that the death of an innocent person is the death of all of humanity.’
That¹s from a speech by Mohammad Khatami, President of Iran until ousted by Ahmadinejad last year. A rather more vigorous critique of his successor¹s stance than Derry heard from Kerry.  
Or consider an editorial in the mainstream Teheran newspaper Sharg: ‘The Holocaust has, as wished for by the president, become a topic of our foreign policy.  The Jewish question was never a problem for Islam or Iran, and is a Christian-European problem....Don¹t we have enough with the nuclear question, human rights, free elections and political in-fighting: do we need to add another problem to that?’
Referring to Ahmadinejad¹s call for the obliteration of Israel, Sharg suggested Iran would be better ‘thinking of the creation of a Palestinian State rather than the destruction of Israel.’
No mainstream US newspaper has savaged Bush¹s foreign policy in such terms.  
Roudabeh reckoned Ahmadinejad¹s ranting reflected the fact he¹d been elected on promises to root out corruption and tackle poverty, but was failing dismally on both fronts, and needed to divert attention from his failures.
Insofar as any of this has been reported in the West, it¹s drowned out by the stereo sound of Bush and his main US ‘opponents’ bawling loudly from the same lie-sheet.

The success of the war propaganda is evident in the fact that so many have come to believe that Iran is in breach of the NPT or of some other agreement. But it is not. Here¹s what the breach amounts to:
In November 2004, Iran agreed with the E3 (Germany, Britain and France) to suspend nuclear fuel enrichment. The voluntary nature of the move was set out in a joint declaration: ‘The E3/EU recognise that this suspension is a voluntary confidence-building measure and not a legal obligation.’
After more than a year of E3-Iran meetings had served only to encourage US attacks on European ‘softness’ and increasingly explicit threats to Iran, the Iranians ended the suspension.
That¹s it. There¹s nothing else. And yet, the US has been able to bring virtually the entire non-Muslim world into acceptance that Iran presents a threat to peace which must be curbed.
Three years ago, Bush and Blair lied to the world to lure us to war. Millions resolved they wouldn¹t let it happen again.
But it is happening. Only hysteria against Islam can explain this.