“LET ME BE CLEAR” IRAN’S PROTESTS NOT A PRIORITY LIKE HONDURAS
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=511397
WITH US OR AGAINST US….
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=511397
Freedom: Young Iranians had a surprise Wednesday for mullah rulers celebrating the anniversary of the 1979 attack on the U.S. Embassy in Tehran: angry protests. Why aren’t we giving them more support?
The big hate-America bacchanal was to commemorate the glorious crime against the U.S. 30 years ago, when “student” hoods stormed our sovereign embassy, preened before TV cameras, danced around with rifles and paraded dozens of blindfolded U.S. diplomats, military men and CIA officers as hostages.
Then-President Jimmy Carter, whose sanctimonious refusal to get tough helped lengthen the ordeal to 444 days, enabled these terrorists to consolidate their “revolution,” leaving the rotten regime still in power today.
Out went Western dress, competitive education, high culture and the rule of law; in came chadors, Islamofascist indoctrination, arbitrary arrests and whip-wielding revolutionary “vigilance” police.
But something unexpected happened on Wednesday: Iran’s democrats, many of them real students, gathered in streets of Tehran to ruin their rulers’ party. They shouted “Death to dictators!” instead of “Death to America!”
The Los Angeles Times reported impassioned protests not just in Tehran, but across smaller cities like Rasht, Ahvaz, Mashhad and Tabriz, against this same gang of mullah tyrants who first took Americans hostage.
By “same,” we mean literally the same — there’s a photograph that some intelligence analysts believe to be Iran’s ruling president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a 1979 hostage-taker.
Iran’s regime showed the young Iranians no mercy at these new protests, the biggest since the June 12 uprising against the fraudulent election. Troops went after students with truncheons and fists, beating up many, as YouTube videos show. The Times reported that clashes are expected to continue through the night.
Sure the protests were smaller than on June 12, as some media noted.
But that fails to grasp that for Iranians, significant courage was needed to come out this time: These protests occur after the regime has shot past protesters in the streets, like young Neda Agha-Soltan who was killed last June, and has recently arrested and condemned six other protesters to death.
For Iran’s democrats to come out now, and to make use of the anniversary of the mullahs’ biggest hate-America act, is a strong signal that what they seek is American-style democracy and that they want better American support.
President Obama hasn’t given them anything like that, offering only mealy-mouthed encouragement for all sides, in the sort of statements that would have made Jimmy Carter proud.
“I have made it clear that the United States of America wants to move beyond this past, and seeks a relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran based upon mutual interests and mutual respect,” said Obama in a statement.
This failure to step up by our nation’s leader, even rhetorically, explains why young Iranians now chant a slogan eerily redolent of the George Bush era: “Obama! Obama! Either you’re with them or with us!” according to the Los Angeles Times.
It signals that there’s a bad imbalance in the Obama approach to the mullahs. Presumably he’s holding back in a bid to advance the now-faltering nuclear talks, and to avoid being perceived as meddling in Iran’s affairs.
It’s also useless — especially when a regime refuses to change, as the mullahs do. People now being shot in the streets won’t complain about U.S. meddling. Neither should Obama.
If the president doesn’t want to turn this anniversary into a second rout for the U.S., he needs to take a stronger stand for Iran’s democracy.
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