A member of a terrorist organization, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who is also Iran’s foreign minister is at New York to lecture the United Nations on humanitarian issues, denounce America and Britain over war mongering claims, and condemn Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza.   

Like America, which lists the IRGC as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, several countries sanction this military organization of the Islamic Republic. While Britain recently imposed sanctions on top IRGC leaders, it has nevertheless yet to fully list it as a terrorist organization.

Yet “we’ve been very clear about the IRGC and its destabilizing influence, and that’s why we maintain sanctions across the board when it comes to IRGC members and of course the IRGC organization as a whole,” London’s secretary of state for Mideast and UN affairs, Tariq Ahmad, tells the Sun. 

Lord Ahmad and fellow top American and European diplomats were forced to share a UN platform Tuesday with Tehran’s foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, who is a card-carrying IRGC member. 

Despite America’s designation of the IRGC as a terrorist organization, the Department of State authorized an entry visa for Mr. Amir-Abdollahian to attend Tuesday’s ministerial-level Security Council meeting on “the situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian question.”

Israel “does not observe any red lines in the genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank,” the Iranian IRGC officer told the council. The solution to the region’s problems, he added, “cannot be achieved by resorting to the use of force and the killing of civilians.”

The council meeting, a monthly affair that had been held for decades, is now gaining new life as the Gaza war rages. Most speakers are using the occasion to accuse Israel of depriving Gaza civilians of necessities, and to criticize its refusal to end its pursuit of Hamas, the organization that launched the war with its October 7 atrocities. 

“The person who is responsible for this situation will be sitting here soon,” Israel’s UN ambassador, Gilad Erdan, said at the beginning of the council meeting, referring to Mr. Amir-Abdollahian.

Listing Iran’s militancy around the region, Mr. Erdan also launched a rare track on Russia, whose foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, attended the meeting. “As we all know, Iranian drones are being used by Russia to kill civilians in Ukraine,” Mr. Erdan said. “Iran’s terror will reach all of you. We all know this. Even Russia collaborates with Iran.”

Mr. Lavrov, for his part, presented a Russian road map for peace, which he insisted must begin with the non-starter of an immediate cease-fire. 

Mr. Amir-Abdolahian’s UN appearance was his first since the start of the war, launched by the IRGC-financed, -armed, and -trained terrorist group, Hamas. As Mr. Erdan noted, beyond Israel and Ukraine, the IRGC and its proxies have instigated wars against Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, Lebanon, Sudan, and Morocco.

The Iranian foreign minister was having none of it. “The United States and the United Kingdom have made a strategic mistake with the military attack on Yemen,” he said, speaking a day after the two countries launched the most potent attack so far on the Houthis. Iran and the IRGC-backed Yemeni group are blocking shipping at the Red Sea, where 15 percent of the world’s commerce travels. 

While Mr. Amir-Abdollahian is staying at the Millenium Hotel, across the street from the UN’s headquarters, his country, the Islamic Republic, is executing dissidents at home. A protester, Mohammad Ghabdalou, was hanged Tuesday morning for the crime of protesting the regime’s killing in 2022 of a young Kurdish-Iranian woman, Mahsa Amini, at the hands of Iran’s morality police. 

Waves of anti-regime demonstrations have swept the country after the death of Amini, who had been arrested by the morality police for wearing a mandatory head covering improperly. Since then, the IRGC has been instrumental in arresting, killing, maiming, and hanging protesters. The heavy-handed oppression is at times successful, yet anger at the regime and its organs simmers among Iranians.  

In 2022, President Biden, who was hoping to revive the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, was considering a removal of the IRGC from the terrorist list. Yet, under heavy political pressure, he ultimately decided to keep it on. 

“Representatives and members of a designated FTO, if they are aliens, are inadmissible to and, in certain circumstances, removable from the United States,” according to American law. Yet, citing the host-nation agreement between America and the UN, the Department of State argued it could not bar Mr. Amir-Abdollahian from attending the UN meeting. 

In 2018, though, America refused a visa for Mr. Amir-Abdollahian’s predecessor, Javad Zarif, when he asked to attend a UN event. At that time the state department cited a 2014 measure, signed into law by President Obama, that bars entry to UN visitors engaged in “terrorist activity.”