No sooner had Iran agreed to the new tougher inspections regime of its nuclear facilities by International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors under the rules set out by the additional protocol to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), than U.S. President George Bush initiated another diplomatic offensive against Iran using democracy as a pretext. Wiser statesmen had warned prior to Iran’s compliance that there would be no end to U.S. excuses, even if Iran did agree to sign the additional protocol to the NPT, but the political pressure brought to bear on Iran had reached such intensity behind the scenes that it would be hard to imagine if much else could have been done to avoid the furor.

Democratic values preached by a U.S. president who was not democratically elected to office himself is hard enough to swallow in a country like Iran, where close to eighty percent of those eligible to vote regularly take part in elections, but the insistence of the U.S. Zionist lobby on human rights issues within Iran really takes the cake. This is the same lobby which supports and funds Israel and the Zionist ideology in the Middle East, despite the thousands of human rights abuses committed by Israel against the Palestinians annually, which are substantiated, recorded, and reported by NGO’s to the United Nations, but to no avail, since the U.S. vetoes any and all resolutions tabled against Israel at the UN.

Many Western intellectuals complain bitterly in private of not being able to speak out against Israel’s excesses for fear of being branded anti-Semitic and the consequent retribution which would be exacted on them by various pro-Israel pressure groups funded by the Zionist lobby to keep the facts far away from the general public’s view. It is no secret that the pro-Zionist pressure groups have penetrated almost every level of Western governments’ infrastructure, from civil administration, media, and education through to trade, industry, and banking. At their whim they can do a lot of damage to anyone’s reputation and prospects with complete immunity.

So democracy is in itself a relative term in the Western world. Choice and competition, allegedly two of the main pillars of democracy, have been warped to suit the requirements of certain minorities. One can speak out about Israel in the pseudo-democratic atmosphere of the West, but one must also be prepared to pay dearly should his or her outcry run contrary to Zionist interests and, God forbid, if it is portrayed as anti-Semitic! In short, a sort of Jewish extremist mob rule goes on unnoticed, while the Western general public remains hypnotized by the glitter of their mass media.

The result of a recent poll in the European Union, however, must have rung alarm bells for the Zionists. Israel was voted enemy number one to world peace and stability by close to sixty percent of the participants. The ferocity of the Zionist lobby’s reply bemused many Europeans who were immediately -- and rather predictably -- branded anti- Semitic by Jewish pressure groups whilst some Israeli ministers went as far as to warn them about returning to “darker sections of their past”.

It must be noted that despite their maturity, Western democracies are evidently far from perfect. In fact the Western public’s democratic values often fall victim to other concerns in the “grand scheme” of things, a fact graphically demonstrated by Silvio Berlusconi’s comment that EU policy is not necessarily based on the European public’s wishes. The tragedy is that it happens far more regularly than their mass media allow them to realize, most remaining ignorant of the injustices committed -- wrapped in fancy little sound bites such as “new world order” -- against them and the rest of the world. Should the Islamic world not consider officially calling the U.S. anti-Islamic? Close to a million Iraqi children are estimated to have perished as a direct result of U.S. sanctions; how is that never called genocide? Israeli forces have forcefully removed four million Palestinians from their homes in occupied Palestine in the last fifty years; why is that never called ethnic cleansing? The Taleban regime was originally backed by the U.S., based on an agreement for oil exploration in northern Afghanistan; is that not promotion of terrorism? And finally, how can a president non-elect like Bush get away with calling himself the “leader of the free world”?