Thank you very much for inviting me today. It's a pleasure to be with you.
In particular, I want to say how honoured I am to be sharing this platform with Mr. Hamed Esmaeilion. I consider him to be a role model for the Iranian diaspora community. I consider him to be a moral compass for the Iranian diaspora community and all of North America. I really hope that the families of the flight PS752 victims get the justice they deserve.
I also want to recommend to all of you, Kylie Moore-Gilbert's remarkable book, The Uncaged Sky. I've read a dozen of these prison memoirs, and hers was really the most vivid example of the atrocities that are suffered on a daily basis in Iranian prisons. I also am honoured to share the stage with her.
I will be brief in saying that we now have a 43-year case study of the Iranian regime, and although Iran is inaccessible to independent analysis and journalism, perhaps no government in the world has had a more consistent and enduring ideology over the last four decades.
Essentially, there have been three components to Iran's grand strategy: Number one, Iran has sought to defeat what they would call the U.S.-led world order, to defeat a liberal democratic world order and try to replace it with an illiberal undemocratic world order. Number two, Iran has sought to replace Israel with Palestine. Number three, Iran has sought to remake the Middle East in its image.
Now, what Iran has done quite effectively, more effectively than any other country in the Middle East, has been to fill regional power vacuums. I think it's now well established that Iran has outsized influence in four countries in the Arab world: Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq. They have managed to do so by using regional proxies to fill those power vacuums. As the previous panel attested to, I think the Government of Iran has one of the world's worst human rights records, and they have essentially exported that human rights record to their regional proxies.
There are five or six things that Iran's regional proxies have in common. Here we're talking about Lebanese Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, the Al-Hashd Al-Shaabi, the Shia militias in Iraq, as well as many more ancillary groups.
One of the things that Iran and its militias have in common are an intolerance towards women. The second thing is an intolerance towards religious minorities and an anti-Semitism, which all the proxies share. Third is the persecution of LGBT communities. The fourth is hostility, repression of independent thinkers; we've had several assassinations over the years in Lebanon and Iraq. The fifth is accumulation of wealth through illicit means. As a previous panellist pointed out, increasingly a lot of that illicit wealth is showing up in Canada. It is something that I think you need to be mindful of, in the same way that illicit Russian wealth showed up in Europe. We saw the consequences for that. Increasingly, a lot of illicit Iranian wealth is showing up in Canada. Finally, which is also very troublesome, is Iran's use of child soldiers. The Iranian proxies use child soldiers, in particular in Yemen, with the Houthis.
The final thing I will close on is that I want to emphasize something which I know that Kylie could go into much further detail on. It is the case of former Canadian resident, Niloufar Bayani, whom Kylie has written about very eloquently in her book. She is a graduate of McGill University. She has now been a hostage in Iran for four years.
Oftentimes we can speak about human rights in the macro and forget about the individual stories. I was very moved by her story in Kylie's book, and I think she has really been forgotten about. As a former Canadian resident, a graduate of McGill, in addition to the families of the victims of the Ukraine airlines flight, I hope that her fate becomes a priority for the Canadian Parliament.
Thank you.