Commentary
By Dr. Hamed Esmaeilion

A recent opinion piece by Martin Regg Cohn, despite his patronizing tone towards Iranians and especially Iranian-Canadians, makes some interesting observations about Ibrahim Raeisi, the president elect of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

As soon as he ventures beyond the obvious observations, Mr. Cohn’s piece falters tragically.

As the president and speaker of the Association of the Families of Flight PS752 Victims and as a grieving husband and father who follows every thread of this crime almost every second of my waking hours, I speak from firsthand experience and knowledge, and with facts and substantiated claims.

Mr. Cohn states that Rouhani forced the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC) to accept responsibility for the downing of the commercial airliner, conveniently withholding from his reader the fact that the Iranian government and their apologists lied, denied, and distorted for three days.

The Rouhani government and the IRGC had no other choice but to accept responsibility for shooting down the Ukrainian flight. The affected countries, especially Canada, revealed clear evidence supported by firsthand observations made by Ukrainian investigators on the crash site. Signs of shrapnel on the fuselage, photographs and video, thanks to social media and responsible actions of citizens who filmed the downing, left no shred of doubt on how flight PS752 met its doom. That is when the IRGC submitted to undeniable to facts. It was not because of Rouhani’s pressure for honesty.

Audio recordings published by CBC last year also revealed that Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) and the supreme leader decided to keep the civilian airspace open, while the country was in a heightened state of alert for attack. Another convenient omission by Cohn.

The SNSC is in fact chaired by Hassan Rouhani, the then president of Iran. Other members of the SNSC include senior officials of the IRGC, two representatives of the supreme leader, several cabinet ministers of Rouhani’s government, including his foreign minister Javad Zarif, Interior minister Rahmani Fazli, and the Information Minister Mahmoud Alavi.

The facts of this crime are undeniable.

The black boxes were withheld for seven months.

The Islamic Republic disseminated false information and actively sought to mislead the world. Ms. Agnes Callamard, the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions stat-ed in her report that was published last February; “The inconsistencies in the official explanations seem designed to create a maximum of confusion and a minimum of clarity. They seem contrived to mislead and bewilder…”

The Islamic Republic Transportation Ministry formed a special commission in collusion with the then head of the judiciary Ibrahim Raeisi to intimidate, humiliate, and force the families to accept financial compensation and include the victims’ names in the list of “wartime martyrs”.

Over the past eighteen months, many of the victims’ families have been intimidated, persecuted and some even tortured by the information ministry in Rouhani’s cabinet.

The Islamic Republic’s security and intelligence forces, government and the IRGC are part of an integrated regime. Any separation between the IRGC and the government that relies on and is directly influenced by them is a fallacy, if not a convenient oversight to justify appeasement of a brutal regime.

Calling for an embassy is a reward not a punishment. A reward for which Cohn seems content to overlook the details about the covert activities that Iranian embassies facilitate around the world, such as the terrorist activities of Iranian diplomats in Austria.

I spent two agonizing weeks in Iran and, thanks to the help and support of a special envoy from Canada’s foreign ministry, I brought the remains of my wife and daughter back to Canada without the existence of an embassy.

I, like many other Iranians who have suffered in the hands of the Islamic Republic regime, would like to see accountability, transparency and justice. We would like to see the IRGC be officially listed as a terrorist organization, just like its foreign branch the Quds Force. We demand that the Canadian government use targeted, Magnitsky sanctions against the leaders of that regime and the commanders who have a hand in murder and mayhem. Dictators and fascists deserve punishment, not reward and appeasement.

Dr. Hamed Esmaeilion, a dentist in Toronto, lost his wife and nine-year old daughter who were on the ill-fated Ukrainian flight PS752 that was shot down by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, three minutes after take-off from the Tehran International airport on the morning of January 8, 2020.