Darius Guppy, full-dress apologist for Iran's thuggish regime

News trickles out of Iran concerning the fate of a girl named Taraneh, who was disappeared by government security forces in the wake of last month’s post-election protests. Like the murdered woman Neda Agha-Soltan, Taraneh was not actually participating in the demonstrations, but had just stopped to watch on her way to work. However, she was slung into a van with all the others arrested. When the party reached the secret detention centre, Taraneh’s interrogation took much longer than that of all the others. She was also prevented from ringing her family to tell them what had happened, as the others were allowed to do.

Family and friends found out from a local hospital that a girl answering Taraneh’s description had been brought in recently showing symptoms of brutal, multiple rape, but had been taken away soon afterwards. A few days later, following a tip-off, they found her burnt body by a roadside. (Hat tip: iransolidarity.org.uk)

We know that employees of the Islamic Republic of Iran rape women to death – they even did it to a Canadian citizen, Zahra Kazemi, a few years back. All this regime’s representatives, and all its supporters, should be held to account for that dreadful fact.

Which brings us on to a name from the past.

Readers no longer in their first youth will remember Darius Guppy. Eton and Oxford, friend of Boris Johnson, sent to prison for jewellery fraud? You’ve got him.

Guppy has now turned up again as a full-dress apologist for the Iranian regime. In the Independent, a paper which is, shall we say, not choosy, he has written an article telling the (equally undiscriminating) readership how superior the Islamic Republic is to wet, decadent Britain, where, shockingly, women may express opposition to the Government without being raped to death.

Regarding the elections, Guppy claims it is ridiculous to “suggest that two undeniably devout men, Ayatollah Khamenei and Mr Ahmadi-Nejad, should have engaged in such an un-Islamic conspiracy as cheating their own people”. Yeah, right.

And then a plunge into the waters of pure nutterdom: “The planet has been brought to its knees by bourgeois greed. Scientists increasingly consider us to be in the midst of a ‘mass extinction event’, similar to that which gripped the world when a giant meteorite slammed into the Gulf of Mexico and extinguished the dinosaurs.” Get your story straight, Darry. Either we’re being destroyed by bourgeois greed (I wouldn’t entirely disagree). Or we’ll be destroyed by an asteroid strike which cannot possibly have anything to do with human economic activity. Make up your mind.

But the Islamic Republic of Iran, of course, points the way forward. “God willing, she can then become what Huntingdon [sic] refers to as a ‘core state’ around which other nations that cherish freedom can coalesce.” I thought that was happening already: Chavez, Castro, Kim Jong-Il, all those cherishers of freedom are already on side. For heaven’s sake, a “nation” is not the same thing as a government.

When Guppy and people who think like him praise “nations who cherish freedom”, they’re actually lending moral support to “governments whose agents cherish the freedom to rape women to death”. Well, if Guppy’s now Iranian I suggest he stays where he is.