World Leaders

It is being widely pointed out in Iran that Ahmadinejad's view that Chávez will rise again with Jesus makes him a Muslim heretic. Maybe it does. But it makes him an orthodox Catholic. As for the man himself, he had his divorces (I do not know if his first marriage was ever annulled), but he died fortified with the Rites of Holy Church, and his Funeral Mass was conducted accordingly.

The inclusion of a local Evangelical pastor at a stage of no sacramental consequence only echoes that of Catholic Archbishops, and other proud Dissenters from the Established Church, at comparable British occasions these days. As for the inclusion of Jesse Jackson, he was totally pro-life once. In his heart of hearts he must still be. Or else, in a long line of questions to him on this issue over more recent decades, why did he participate so prominently in this ceremony?

For the Comandante leaves a country in which the great demon of "socialised medicine" makes possible a law on abortion even more pro-life than that in Britain was during the first generation of the National Health Service. While there is no Cuban-style persecution of the otherwise inclined, marriage in Venezuela is, and will continue to be, defined as only ever the union of one man and one woman.

It is no wonder that the signatories to Jeremy Corbyn's Early Day Motion 1154 already include Jim Dobbin, Chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Pro-Life Group and stalwart defender of the traditional definition of marriage, views that he shares with many other signatories to EDM 1334, which calls on the wider media, and not least the BBC, to stop discriminating against the Morning Star, which has of course been fulsome in its praise of this pro-life hero and, whatever his personal disappointments, this upholder of traditional family life, both by the harnessing of the full power of the State against the ravages of the unfettered market, as taught by the Catholic Church.

His honour guard included at least two of our own Queen's serving Prime Ministers, as well as at least one President of another Commonwealth country and at least one Prime Minister of another again. Not for nothing did it also include the President of a country with reserved parliamentary representation for Assyrians, Armenians, Zoroastrians and Jews. That's right. Jews. Compare and contrast the constitutional protection and status of Assyrians in Iran with the plight of Assyrians in "liberated" Iraq, or the constitutional protection and status of Armenians in Iran with the plight of Armenians in NATO, and putatively EU, Turkey, which is now prominent in the Islamist invasion and destruction of pluralist, largely Christian Syria.

Compare and contrast the ancient indigenous Christians of Iran, not only with those of Iraq, but also with those of the Holy Land, where the Israeli Government includes people who want to denaturalise them (along with the ultra-Orthodox Jews, a fair description of those who have a guaranteed parliamentary seat in Iran), and where it is incandescent at the possibility of World Heritage Site status for the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.

But then, it is also incandescent at the possibility of World Heritage Site status for the Tomb of Rachel and for the Tombs of the Patriarchs. Well, of course. Compare and contrast the condition of the Shrine of Habakkuk, of the Shrine of Daniel, and of the Tomb of Esther and Mordechai, with that of the Shrine of Ezra the Scribe, who invented both synagogues and the square Hebrew script, but which has been turned into a mosque since 2003, with the Shrine of Ezekiel, featuring some of the oldest Hebrew inscriptions in the world, next on the hit list. Iran has had an arrangement in place for several years whereby the Vatican would mediate in any dispute with the United States should that matter ever really come to a head.

And not for nothing did that honour guard include Alexander Lukashenko. The cause of solidarity with Belarus is of the utmost importance, as is appreciated by the Holy See, which was hardly noted for its friendly relations with the Soviet Union, and is therefore hardly likely to favour "the last outpost of the USSR" or whatever absurd thing we are expected to believe that Belarus now constitutes.

Lukashenko's Belarus is one of four countries ever to have effected total nuclear disarmament, giving the lie to the claim that it would be impossible. South Africa tellingly did it at the same time as she gave up apartheid, while Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine were negotiated to it by Jim Baker, as much the successor of Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford and Reagan in his anti-nuclear activism as he was in his denunciation of the pursuit of Greater Israel. If a country which has disposed of an entire nuclear arsenal is, under the same President, unfooled by the ridiculous claims of an Iranian nuclear threat, then the rest of the world ought to listen most attentively.

But we are not doing any such thing. Well, of course we aren't. Belarus is so critical of her Soviet past that she has given up her nuclear weapons, while at the same time so critical of the decadence of the Postmodern West and its bloodthirsty globalisation that she is explicitly recognised as an ally by the Holy See. The cake is iced by pointing out that an Iranian Bomb is as fanciful as an Iraqi Bomb was, and would in any case matter not one jot against hundreds of Israeli Bombs. The cherry on top was an off-colour remark last March which breached the ultimate taboo of the Postmodern West by questioning, however little, the absolute supremacy of the homosexual lobby. Not its legitimacy. Its supremacy. So economic sanctions are in order, with military sanctions not taken off the table.

There is none of this, though, for Uzbekistan, where, for Radio Four, John Sweeney last year found far worse torture than in Belarus. Nor for Kazhakstan, Turkmenistan or Azerbaijan. Still less for Olympically corrupt, shamelessly election-rigging Georgia. Unlike those really fighting against Islamist terrorist secession from Unfavoured Nations such as Russia and China, they are our allies in "The War On Terror". They are our invaluable assistants in Afghanistan, great success that that is. They are the paymasters of Tony Blair, Progress, and the public relations company for both, Bell Pottinger. So they can do no wrong. Can they?