Who is afraid of the mirror? - Iranian Embassy in Accra writes
Who Is Afraid of the Mirror?
By Embassy of the Islamic Republic of Iran — Accra, Ghana
A recent article published in this outlet [How Iran became the world’s bogeyman] by the Zionist regime's delegate has recycled familiar accusations against Iran: nuclear threat, proxy networks, regional destabilisation. These are charges that have been circulating in the Western media echo chamber for years. We have no interest in issuing a defence, nor do we pay any regard to the source of the article. But the people of Ghana and Africa deserve to see the other side of the coin.
Let us begin with the nuclear issue — because it is both the loudest accusation and the most hollow. Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Its facilities have been and remain under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Iran's Supreme Leader has issued an explicit fatwa declaring nuclear weapons religiously forbidden. Iran signed the most comprehensive nuclear agreement in diplomatic history — the JCPOA — and implemented it fully, as confirmed repeatedly by the IAEA itself.
That agreement was destroyed not by Iran, but by the unilateral withdrawal of the United States in 2018. So the question stands: how can the only regime in the Middle East that actually possesses nuclear weapons — an estimated 80 to 400 warheads — that has never signed the NPT, and that has never allowed a single international inspector into its Dimona facility, presume to raise alarm about the "nuclear threat" of others? This is not diplomacy. It is theatre — discredited, exhausted, and playing to an empty house.
Now, the accusation of "proxy networks." Iran has supported resistance movements — this is a fact we do not deny. But history cannot be read from the middle. Hezbollah was born from an 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon. Palestinian resistance is not a rootless phenomenon. Just last week marked the 78th anniversary of the Nakba — the day in 1948 when Zionist forces expelled at least 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, destroyed over 530 villages, and seized 78 percent of historic Palestine. Ansarallah in Yemen is a popular movement rooted in decades of political and economic discrimination against northern Yemen.
It has endured over a decade of war and blockade, evolved into a force that has rewritten the region's strategic equations, represents a significant portion of Yemen's population, and maintains a functioning governance structure. And if unconventional conduct is to be discussed, it is the other side's record that is far thicker: the assassination of hundreds of scientists on the soil of other nations, thousands of bombings of civilian areas across multiple countries, hundreds of covert assassination operations around the world, the bombing of the Iranian embassy in Damascus, the savage genocide of the defenceless people of Gaza, and the assassination of the Leader of the Islamic Revolution of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei, along with many of his companions.
The third accusation — and perhaps the most painfully ironic — is the claim of "wiping off the map." At this very moment, an actual erasure is underway. Since October 2023, more than 80,000 Palestinians — the overwhelming majority of them children and women — have been killed. Seventy percent of Gaza's homes have been destroyed. Hospitals, schools, universities, mosques and churches have been bombed.
The International Criminal Court has confirmed charges of genocide and issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu. The United Nations has spoken of an "unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe." These are the findings of international institutions — not the words of Iran. Those who have produced these numbers answer to no one. Iran has insisted, and continues to insist, on the right of the Palestinian people to determine their own destiny. We do not seek the destruction of any people. We seek the end of apartheid. Those who cannot grasp the difference between the two either cannot or will not understand.
Iran has not attacked another country in over two centuries. This is a historical fact, not rhetoric. By contrast, the Zionist regime invaded Lebanon in 1978, 1982 and 2006, bombed Gaza in 2008, 2012, 2014, 2021 and 2023, struck Syria repeatedly and without declaration, and has maintained an unbroken occupation of the West Bank since 1967. This same regime — whose leader was battling three criminal corruption cases and which in 2023 experienced the deepest constitutional crisis in its history — buried every internal question under the rubble of Gaza once war began, and now speaks from the position of "concerned guardian of regional stability."
A cabinet in which one minister called for a nuclear strike on Gaza, another demanded the ethnic cleansing of all Palestinians, and a third called the starvation of civilians a "legitimate tool" — this cabinet holds no moral standing to pass judgement on anyone.
The very accusations levelled against Iran today — "fundamentalist," "threat to stability," "dangerous" — are precisely the language that the apartheid regime of South Africa used against the ANC and Nelson Mandela. The same language colonial powers used against every liberation movement. The pattern is familiar: the occupier labels resistance "terrorism" and asks the world to restrain the occupied.
The question is asked, almost laughably, what the international community should do about Iran. We correct the question: what should the international community do about a regime with eight decades of illegal occupation behind it, condemned for practising apartheid by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and whose genocide charges have been upheld at the world's highest judicial body?
The people of Ghana need no one's guidance to tell an occupier from a freedom fighter.
