Can Iran ban all Israeli tech?

By Engr. Edgar Mana-ay

 

In the last week of June after al-Quds day, Iran’s Parliament unanimously passed a legislation banning any cooperation with Israel–specifically the use of Israel’s computer hardware and software as a crime against God.

Iran Supreme Ayatollah leader Ali Khamenei and his Parliament has resorted to criminalizing Israeli tech, that any activities using Israel software platform in Iran and using its hardware and software products is forbidden. Under the legislation that was passed, any cooperation with the “Zionist regime” is henceforth to be considered “equal to enmity towards God and corruption on earth.” By the way, al-Quds day is an annual event held on the last Friday of Ramadan initiated by Iran in 1979 to express support for the Palestinians and oppose Zionism and Israel.

Zionism is a nationalist movement of the Jewish people for the re-establishment of and support for a Jewish state in the territory defined as the historic land of Israel.

But can Iran really implement the Ayatollah’s order? For a start, if the solemnly enacted legislation of the Majlis (a Persian term meaning council or parliament in Iran) is to be regarded as anything other than braggadocio or hot air, then Iran must now shut down all its computers. They all feature Intel chips (just like my Lenovo laptop I am banging on right now which has a sticker “Intel Pentium inside”) and/or technologies designed and/or developed in Israel. Given the widespread and centrality of Israeli innovation and technology to so many aspects of modern life, the new anti-Israeli legislation IF implemented as required by the Iranian Parliament will set Iran back at least 50 years and certainly will spell the demise of the brutal, rapacious, and cynical Ayatollah regime.

By the way, Ayatollah is a title given to the highest religious leaders of the Shiite sect (the other Muslim sect are the Sunnis headed by Saudi Arabia; both Shiites and Sunnis harbor mortal hatred at each other). Iran is a unitary Islamic Republic with one legislative house, but its Executive, Parliament and Judiciary are all administered by the clergy whose head is an Ayatollah. In other words, it is the religious leaders that control the government of Iran unlike here in the Philippines where we have a separation between the Church and the State.

Israeli-developed chips and technologies are simply the mainstays of computer designs for almost all of the computers used by the Iranians. Intel set up shop in Israel in 1970 and Intel Haifa then developed the 8088 processor which was used in the IBM PC, the first popular Microsoft-based computers for home use. Intel Israel has developed increasingly advanced processors through decades ever since, for PCs, tablets, and laptops. The whole laptop revolution was kicked off by the Pentium M (Banias) processors, developed in Israel in 2003. Apple, which has been using Intel chips since 2009, also maintains a major R&D center in Israel. Routers produced by CISCO system are a core component of the Internet’s backbone – transferring info between computer networks at dizzying speed. A Cisco Israel is central to the US multinational’s ongoing router development. So, WILL IRAN ALSO STOP USING THE INTERNET?

If Iran bans all the use of tech that has Israeli footprints or handprints, Iran’s vital oil exports are going to take a massive hit. The international oil refineries that handle its black gold rely on Israeli-developed monitoring systems, Israeli cyber defense systems, and other protective technology developed in Israel. Shipping is going to be a problem, since FREIGHTOS – the Expedia of global freight shipping – is, well, Israeli. The Iranian will now obviously have to hang up their smartphones. Going back to Motorola, which was doing R&D in Israel, even before Intel, cell phones are riddled with Israeli tech. Since overthrowing the Shah of Iran many years ago, the Ayatollah’s rule is always characterized by braggadocio, hot air, and boastful talks, and not accepting reality which is that they can never drive out the Israelites from the promised land that God had given them and that peaceful co-existence should have been the name of the game. It is the people of Iran that suffer from this hateful and vengeful governance of the religious clerics.

Mossad, the spy agency of Israel, was responsible for bringing Nazi butcher Adolf Eichmann (who once boasted that he had personally ordered the murder of 6 million Jews), from Argentina (where he fled after World War II) to Israel for the Nuremberg trial where he was convicted and hanged. Mossad did this by kidnapping Eichmann on a busy Argentine street, drugged him, and brought him through Argentine custom in a wheelchair, told the officials he was a wealthy invalid Jew who wishes to die in the Promise Land.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Mossad, has hunted down and brought to Israel NOT enemies of the state, but some 80 million surgical masks, 180 million pair of gloves, 1,300 ventilators, with another 4,700 expected to arrive by October in preparation for a potential second COVID-19 infection wave and hundreds of millions of medical drugs to help ailing persons.

The spy agency also brought around 2 million coronavirus test kits. At the turnover of this function back to the Ministry of Health, Mossad Spy Chief Mossi Cohen said that while he and his agents “don’t have the medical expertise, they were able to bring the spirit of the Mossad” into the daily operations undertaken to curb the coronavirus threat. In times of a pandemic crisis, why did Israel use the Mossad?

Mossad has more than 7,000 operatives and agents spread all throughout the world, hence it has the connections, be it medical suppliers or other nation’s spy agents and high officials sympathetic to Israel. Described as the “Deep State,” Mossad is exempted from the constitutional laws of the State of Israel, hence there are NO LAWS that define its purpose, objectives, roles, missions, powers, or budget. Mossad agents tracked down and assassinated the Arab guerrilla leaders responsible for the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. It has also been linked with several assassinations of Palestinian leaders in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. We cannot have such flexibility in the Philippines. In times of crisis such as the COVID-19, our government agencies are mired up and tied up with numerous bureaucratic hassles including COA restrictions which incapacitates them to respond with quickness and dispatch to a pandemic crisis.