A senior Iranian diplomat said Western double standards on nuclear weapons, sending inspectors to Iran while ignoring Israel’s undeclared arsenal, make the Iran case a test of the entire Non-Proliferation Treaty.
The head of the Foreign Ministry’s Institute for Political and International Studies said that by any serious measure, Israel has no qualification whatsoever to possess weapons of mass destruction, yet it is exactly the regime whose nuclear arms Western governments refuse even to name.
Recalling President Masoud Pezeshkian’s remarks at the UN General Assembly, he said the president summed up the contradiction in one short sentence: “The atomic bomb is in Israel, but the inspectors are in Iran.” He called the sentence an indictment of the entire flawed international system.
He said the double standard is evident in sending inspectors to a country that has the legal right to enrich uranium while maintaining absolute silence over an arsenal built entirely outside any legal framework; in Washington’s and European capitals’ all-out support for a regime that never joined the Non-Proliferation Treaty; and in punishing and pressuring a government that has never left the treaty.
The deputy foreign minister said that when Iran defends itself, it is defending its national sovereignty and its people, but beyond that it is defending the fundamental principles of international law and the UN Charter. He said Iran’s defense is against states that consider themselves above the law, against Israel and its illegal nuclear arsenal, and against distorted narratives that seek to invert objective realities.
He said the Iran case today is the test of the credibility and the very pillar of survival of the Non-Proliferation Treaty worldwide.
MNA
