Lawmakers and Jewish advocacy groups welcomed the European Union’s designation of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization at the Jan. 29 Foreign Affairs Council, urging all nations to follow suit.
In a Jan. 28 letter to E.U. foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, dozens of members of Congress urged the E.U. to “join the United States, Canada and Australia in designating the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization.”
“The IRGC has not only committed terrorist acts throughout the Middle East but has also carried out attacks throughout the EU and against EU citizens—all while continuing to brutalize its own citizens at home in Iran, with a brutal crackdown this month leading to the murder of an estimated 12,000 Iranian protesters,” the letter stated.
Reza Pahlavi, son of Iran’s last shah, lauded the decision as an “important step.”
It “sends a message to the criminal regime that it has no global legitimacy. We now need further concrete action to protect the Iranian people and to support a legitimate transitional government leading Iran to democracy,” he stated.
B’nai B’rith International President Robert Spitzer and CEO Daniel S. Mariaschin called the designation “long-anticipated” and said it aligns European policy with the reality of the IRGC’s global threat.
“Today’s decision by EU member states is a critical, if belated recognition of decades of malign activity,” B’nai Brith stated. “For too long, the IRGC has operated with impunity—repressing its own people, plotting terror in Europe and around the world, targeting Jewish and Israeli institutions, arming Russia’s war in Ukraine and financing terror proxies such as Hamas and Hezbollah.”
Ted Deutch, CEO of the American Jewish Committee, stated that the “designation is not symbolic.”
“It is a decisive, long-overdue political act that sends a clear, unmistakable message that Europe, now united with governments around the world, will not tolerate terror,” he wrote.
Deutch added that the IRGC is “not a conventional domestic security force” but “the long arm of a regime that thrives on terror, repression, and destabilization,” and urged E.U. members to implement the designation immediately.
