Transcript This is Abby Martin with your Empire Update, wrapping up the last week of US imperialism. Our first story is about a brazen terrorist attack that murdered a civilian. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, one of the most important nuclear scientists in Iran was assassinated on November 27th by unknown gunm

Transcript

This is Abby Martin with your Empire Update, wrapping up the last week of US imperialism.

Our first story is about a brazen terrorist attack that murdered a civilian. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, one of the most important nuclear scientists in Iran was assassinated on November 27th by unknown gunmen.

Here’s what we know so far: First, only two countries are likely culprits, who have also done so in the past: the United States and Israel.

From 2010 to 2012, back during the Obama administration, four nuclear scientists were killed in Iran. Though Israel never took credit for the executions, reports were conclusive that Israel, working with the MEK, was behind the killings.

The MEK is a secretive cult of Iranian exiles headquartered in Paris that is known for carrying out terrorist attacks in Iran. They were even listed as a terrorist organization by the US, while at the same time US politicians were cashing lavish paychecks from them to do their bidding.

Central figures like John Bolton and former DNC chairman Howard Dean were given tens of thousands of dollars from this group. I even confronted Dean about this on my old show Breaking the Set.

Israel rarely acts unilaterally. We know that they would likely NOT have done this back then, or now, without collaborating with the US. Likewise, if this was a US plot, they would most likely collaborate with Israeli intelligence. So either way, the US was probably involved.

We also know Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was specifically on the radar to be targeted by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who threatened him by name in a televised speech back in April 2018.

Or, could this have just been Trump? We know that last week Trump asked his Generals to provide him with a variety of military strikes on Iran, making clear he wanted to leave office with some kind of attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Was this some kind of compromise? In response to Trump’s desire to potentially start a war, was he offered a low-risk option to carry out his second high-level assasination, pleasing the anti-Iran hawks in the US and Israel, but with no risk of repercussions?

We’ll probably never know what really happened, but it’s very safe to assume that Washington had a hand in the attack.

Either way, if Biden doesn’t immediately condemn this, it’s going to be much harder for him to engage in the diplomacy with Iran he says he wants, and understandably so.

Whether it was the US, or Israel, or both, we need to see this for what it is: an act of state terrorism, funded by our tax dollars. Even if the US was in an active war with Iran, assassinating a non-combatant for being a scientist would still be considered a war crime under international law.

And imagine the response if Iranians assassinated a nuclear scientist in the US! Not only that, imagine the response from the corporate media; the hand-wringing, the condemnation from every pundit, every politician.

It would be condemned by the entire media and political establishment as the worst kind of terrorism. And they would be out for blood because of it. But when it happens to Iran, there doesn’t seem to be any concern.

This act of aggression against Iran’s non existent nuclear weapons program is particu...