London Daily

Focus on the big picture.
Thursday, Oct 09, 2025

0:00
0:00

Election desperate populism: UK's Sunak proposes 'Rushdie sanctions' on Iran

UK Conservative Party leadership candidate Rishi Sunak on Sunday called for a tightening of sanctions against Iran in response to the recent attack on novelist Salman Rushdie by… an American, in America.

The Indian-born British-American writer Salman Rushdie was stabbed on Friday in New York State as he was preparing to give a lecture.

A possible cause for the assault could have been his 1988 novel ‘The Satanic Verses’, which was condemned by Muslims for its allegedly blasphemous references to Islam and its holy book, the Koran. In 1989, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death, and while Iran officially retracted this edict, an Iranian private religious foundation placed a $3.3 million bounty on the writer’s head in 2012.

According to Sunak, the “brutal stabbing” of Rushdie should serve as “a wake-up call for the West” that should prompt Britain to designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), an influential branch of the Iranian Armed Forces, a terrorist organization. The IRGC is already deemed as such by the US and a number of other countries.

Sunak, the former UK chancellor of the Exchequer, noted that Tehran’s response to the incident further supported the case for blacklisting the Islamic organization. He also said that all attempts to salvage the landmark 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), might fail.

“We urgently need a new, strengthened deal and much tougher sanctions, and if we can’t get results then we have to start asking whether the JCPOA is at a dead end,” he stressed, referring to the accord that put limits on Iran's nuclear program.

Rishi Sunak’s comments came after Iranian media quoted Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei as saying that the “arrow” shot by his predecessor “will one day hit the target.”

Some of the seemingly more hardline outlets even wrote about the attack in positive terms.

The newspaper Kayhan, for instance, touted the assailant as a “brave and dutiful” person, while another Iranian publication, the Khorasan daily, reacted to the incident with a piece entitled “Satan on the way to hell,” an apparent reference to Rushdie.

The suspect Iranian media was referring to is Hadi Matar, a 24-year-old New Jersey resident. Following the attack, he was charged with second-degree murder. According to preliminary findings, Matar was “sympathetic to Shia extremism and Iran.”

Rushdie was repeatedly stabbed at a public event in New York State on Friday. Following the attack, the author was placed on a ventilator but by Sunday, according to author Aatish Taseer, he has been taken off it and is now able to speak. However, he reportedly sustained nerve damage to his arm, damage to his liver and could even lose an eye.

Although there is an absolute consensus in the entire world that the attempt to assassinate Salman Rushdie is a serious criminal act, motivated by an extreme Islamic ideology, it was done in the United States, by an American, that is, in a country where murders of innocents by various types of lunatics is routine and not unusual.

So Rishi Sunak's Pavlovian response to sanction Iran, which is already under sanctions anyway, because of a criminal act committed by a crazy American, in USA, sounds like the desperate populism of a dubious politician fighting to become the next non-elected-by-the-public leader of Britain, a forced leader that never elected by the public, do no not enjoy the public's trust, and politician who has a very problematic record of lies to parliament and the public, violations of the law and his personal household £ 29 million tax evasion, while imposing more and more taxes on the entire overtaxed British population.

The attempt to assassinate Salman Rushdie is despicable, obscene, and such acts must not be allowed to happen. The attempts to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons are also essential and it seems that unfortunately they are not effective enough.

But the attempt to take advantage of this serious crime to divert public attention from the economic recession, the massive inflation and the spike in the cost of living, which are disasters for which Rishi Sunek is personally responsible as the Minister of Finance who deteriorated the British economy to its current state, is an insult to the intelligence of the British people.



It is important not to let failed politicians continue to mislead the public: the rise in cost of living and the energy crisis are not the fault of cruel Putin and the terrible acts that Russia is committing against the citizens of Ukraine, but solely because of the failed response of Sunak and his partners to the war in Ukraine: they shot themselves in the foot when they cut their country from the Russian energy pipeline and food supply, while by doing that they in fact made Russia much richer as a result of the sanctions. This, instead of helping Ukraine in ways that would prevent the war from happening by not pushing them to place western weapons against Moscow on their Ukrainian-Russian borders, or alternatively to end it through negotiations instead of adding fuel to the fire and sending to Ukraine more and more useless weapons cost  billions of dollars at the expense of the British poor taxpayers who are no longer able to pay bills and buy food.

Rishi Sunak is a former banker specializing in money laundering. He does not understand the economy of a country, neither leadership nor military and political strategy. 

Here is something obvious he do not understand: Committing economic suicide did not punish Russia (Their incomes have almost doubled and their energy and food prices have been greatly reduced ) but the British people who Sunak and his partners led to the current British economic suicide.


Newsletter

Related Articles

0:00
0:00
Close
France: Less Than a Month After His Appointment, the New French Prime Minister Resigns
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán stated that Hungary will not adopt the euro because the European Union is falling apart.
Sarah Mullally Becomes First Woman Appointed Archbishop of Canterbury
Mayor in western Germany in intensive care after stabbing
Australian government pays Deloitte nearly half a million dollars for a report built on fabricated quotes, fake citations, and AI-generated nonsense.
US Prosecutors Gained Legal Approval to Hack Telegram Servers
Macron Faces Intensifying Pressure to Resign or Trigger New Elections Amid France’s Political Turmoil
Standard Chartered Names Roberto Hoornweg as Sole Head of Corporate & Investment Banking
UK Asylum Housing Firm Faces Backlash Over £187 Million Profits and Poor Living Conditions
UK Police Crack Major Gang in Smuggling of up to 40,000 Stolen Phones to China
BYD’s UK Sales Soar Nearly Nine-Fold, Making Britain Its Biggest Market Outside China
Trump Proposes Farm Bailout from Tariff Revenues Amid Backlash from Other Industries
FIFA Accuses Malaysia of Forging Citizenship Documents, Suspends Seven Footballers
Latvia to Bar Tourist and Occasional Buses to Russia and Belarus Until 2026
A Dollar Coin Featuring Trump’s Portrait Expected to Be Issued Next Year
Australia Orders X to Block Murder Videos, Citing Online Safety and Public Exposure
Three Scientists Awarded Nobel Prize in Medicine for Discovery of Immune Self-Tolerance Mechanism
OpenAI and AMD Forge Landmark AI-Chip Alliance with Equity Option
Munich Airport Reopens After Second Drone Shutdown
France Names New Government Amid Political Crisis
Trump Stands Firm in Shutdown Showdown and Declares War on Drug Cartels — Turning Crisis into Opportunity
Surge of U.S. Billionaires Transforms London’s Peninsula Apartments into Ultra-Luxury Stronghold
Pro Europe and Anti-War Babiš Poised to Return to Power After Czech Parliamentary Vote
Jeff Bezos Calls AI Surge a ‘Good’ Bubble, Urges Focus on Lasting Innovation
Japan’s Ruling Party Chooses Sanae Takaichi, Clearing Path to First Female Prime Minister
Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Sentenced to Fifty Months in Prison Following Prostitution Conviction
Taylor Swift’s ‘Showgirl’ Launch Extends Billion-Dollar Empire
Trump Administration Launches “TrumpRx” Plan to Enable Direct Drug Sales at Deep Discounts
Trump Announces Intention to Impose 100 Percent Tariff on Foreign-Made Films
Altman Says GPT-5 Already Outpaces Him, Warns AI Could Automate 40% of Work
Singapore and Hong Kong Vie to Dominate Asia’s Rising Gold Trade
Trump Organization Teams with Saudi Developer on $1 Billion Trump Plaza in Jeddah
Manhattan Sees Surge in Office-to-Housing Conversions, Highest Since 2008
Switzerland and U.S. Issue Joint Assurance Against Currency Manipulation
Electronic Arts to Be Taken Private in Historic $55 Billion Buyout
Thomas Jacob Sanford Named as Suspect in Deadly Michigan Church Shooting and Arson
Russian Research Vessel 'Yantar' Tracked Mapping Europe’s Subsea Cables, Raising Security Alarms
New York Man Arrested After On-Air Confession to 2017 Parents’ Murders
U.S. Defense Chief Orders Sudden Summit of Hundreds of Generals and Admirals
Global Cruise Industry Posts Dramatic Comeback with 34.6 Million Passengers in 2024
Trump Claims FBI Planted 274 Agents at Capitol Riot, Citing Unverified Reports
India: Internet Suspended in Bareilly Amid Communal Clashes Between Muslims and Hindus
Supreme Court Extends Freeze on Nearly $5 Billion in U.S. Foreign Aid at Trump’s Request
Archaeologists Recover Statues and Temples from 2,000-Year-Old Sunken City off Alexandria
China Deploys 2,000 Workers to Spain to Build Major EV Battery Factory, Raising European Dependence
Speed Takes Over: How Drive-Through Coffee Chains Are Rewriting U.S. Coffee Culture
U.S. Demands Brussels Scrutinize Digital Rules to Prevent Bias Against American Tech
Ringo Starr Champions Enduring Beatles Legacy While Debuting Las Vegas Art Show
Private Equity’s Fundraising Surge Triggers Concern of European Market Shake-Out
Colombian President Petro Vows to Mobilize Volunteers for Gaza and Joins List of Fighters
×