Guardian
On the morning of 11 January Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, the deputy head
of Iran's uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, was in his car on his
way to work when he was blown up by a magnetic bomb attached to his car door. He was 32 and married with a young son. He wasn't armed, or anywhere near a battlefield.
Since 2010, three other Iranian nuclear scientists have been killed in similar circumstances, including Darioush Rezaeinejad,
a 35-year-old electronics expert shot dead outside his daughter's
nursery in Tehran last July. But instead of outrage or condemnation, we
have been treated to expressions of undisguised glee.
"On
occasion, scientists working on the nuclear programme in Iran turn up
dead," bragged the Republican nomination candidate Rick Santorum in
October. "I think that's a wonderful thing, candidly." On the day of
Roshan's death, Israel's military spokesman, Brigadier General Yoav
Mordechai, announced on Facebook: "I don't know who settled the score with the Iranian scientist, but I certainly am not shedding a tear" – a sentiment echoed by the historian Michael Burleigh in the Daily Telegraph: "I shall not shed any tears whenever one of these scientists encounters the unforgiving men on motorbikes."
These
"men on motorbikes" have been described as "assassins". But
assassination is just a more polite word for murder. Indeed, our
politicians and their securocrats cloak the premeditated, lawless
killing of scientists in Tehran, of civilians in Waziristan, of
politicians in Gaza, in an array of euphemisms: not just assassinations
but terminations, targeted killings, drone strikes.
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