Hypocrisy exists in everyone. Our fathers tells us not to smoke though they have yet to quit, teachers tell us to turn in work on time though they themselves are behind occasionally, and even our neighbors complain about loud music though they have parties that last until early morning. This human characteristic is not only embodied by individuals, but also by our government.
Though the Cold War ended decades ago, nuclear weaponry still plays a big role in international politics.
Nations across the world agree that the U.S. government should have no say in matters of nuclear power. Being the only country to ever use a nuclear warhead against another nation, it is shocking that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and United Nations trust us. But Washington’s word still bears more influence than any other.
One victim of this policy is the Islamic Republic of Iran. Though Iran’s government is justly criticized for denying the Holocaust, executing two boys for being gay, and attacking peaceful protesters, all allegations of Iran developing nuclear weapons are baseless.
In initial accounts, former IAEA Director General and Nobel Peace Prize-winner Mohamed ElBaradei claimed that he found nothing in Iran’s nuclear facilities that would suggest an attempt to create nuclear weapons, but only nuclear-enrichment facilities for power. After escalations between the Islamic Republic and the United States occurred, the IAEA and UN were pressured to ask more of Iran.
Unfortunately for the U.S. government, Iran has not complied.
The nuclear issue is obviously just a ploy by our own government to make sure that only west-friendly nations control nuclear power. After all, Iran is one of the only countries being scrutinized for their nuclear program at the moment. There are other countries with confirmed nuclear weaponry that have not even been questioned yet.
Israel, for example, is the only undeclared nuclear state in the world. According to the Nuclear Threat Institute, Israel is the sixth country in the world to have developed nuclear weapons. Though they maintain a policy of “Nuclear Ambiguity,” Israel is believed to have between 75 and 400 nuclear warheads. In the recent UN Nuclear Summit, many Middle Eastern nations brought up the fact that Israel has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
This might not sound shocking to most people (after all, Israel is a democracy that has always had strong ties with the U.S.), Middle Easterners definitely find it biased. Israel has been allowed to maintain this nuclear weapons program without any sanctions for decades yet Iran is not even allowed to develop basic nuclear power without being questioned.
And let’s keep this all in context: the issue here is war and acts of violence. Though the media would have you believe otherwise, Iran has posed little threat to anyone since your great, great-grandparents were alive (the Iran-Iraq war was started by Iraq’s invasion). It has not attacked any of its neighbors for centuries, a fact that Israel cannot boast for itself.
The truth of the matter is that there are two renegade nations in the Middle East, each one corrupt in its own way. Iran has made racist, threatening comments towards Israel and the U.S. and has oppressed its own people on numerous occasions. In contrast, Israel oppresses 1.5 million Palestinian Arabs everyday through occupation (in the West Bank, a Palestinian territory) and blockade (the Gaza Strip, another territory). To be truly fair in this situation, nuclear weaponry should be banned on both sides.
The lesson here (and I say this as a pacifist, not an Iranian-American), is that America and Israel need to question themselves before they question Iran and other nuclear states. The fact that the U.S. can make such audacious claims about nations like Iran without any opposition from the U.N. or IAEA proves nothing more than those agencies’ cowardice.
We have a much skewed, biased view of the world in America and we are not showing any progress. If we do not begin questioning these untrustworthy notions from Washington, it could lead to our own demise by nuclear genocide.
