Iran is in turmoil with courageous Iranians risking their lives to experience freedom, after living for 30 years under Islamic law. Demonstrators are holding signs in English, pleading for support from America. They want us to stand with them in their quest for freedom. But, President Obama, like the weak American President Carter who resided in the White House when they lost their freedoms, is disappointing them as he votes “present” yet again.
But, forget Obama’s weak response for a moment, and take a ride back in time to the Carter years. Get a refresher course in history from the Canada Free Press, via Sultan Knish:
Meet the true father of the Islamic Revolution: Jimmy Carter
“Jimmy Carter has devolved from being America’s worst president to being America’s worst ex-president.
Earlier this week, Carter met with the Hamas government that gained control of Gaza two years ago, after the Palestinian Authority’s forces were routed not only by popular vote bust also by bloody factional struggle.
Jimmy declared that Hamas (the Islamic Resistance Movement) should be recognized as the proper governing authority in Gaza and should not be viewed as a terror organization.
Few, however, are screaming, despite the fact that Hamas is one of the world’s leading Islamic jihadi groups.
Hamas is an organization that remains responsible for scores of suicide attacks against Israeli civilians (including the 2002 Passover suicide bombing); that supports the World Islamic Statement (the declaration of war against the United States as issued by Osama bin Laden in 1998; that disseminates hate literature to Muslim children throughout the Middle East; and that prays for Allah to transform Jews into ‘apes, pigs, mice, and lizards.’
Jimmy thinks they are great guys and wept over the fact that they remain on the terror list of Israel, the European Union, and the United States and that the Israelis have responded to their guerilla attacks by launching mortars that have left much of the country in shambles.
But Carter was not content with simply making a spectacle of himself in Gaza. He went on to Lebanon to meet with Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, the spiritual leader of Hezbollah. Fadlallah is responsible for the October 1983 bombing of the barracks of the U.S. Marines in Beirut - - an attack which result in the deaths of 241 American soldiers.
Jimmy shook Fadlallah’s hand and expressed delight to their meeting.
While Carter was visiting his favorite terrorists, all hell was breaking loose on the streets of Teheran. This seemed a fitting background to his meeting Middle East shenanigans, since Jimmy is really the father of the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the rule of the nutcase mullahs.
Let’s remember Jimmy’s record in the White House.
As soon as Carter assumed the oath of office, the White House became peopled with characters out of Li’l Abner’s Dogpatch, including the family matriarch ‘Miz’ Lillian, Jimmy’s sister Ruth, and his beer-guzzling brother Billy, who came to receive a mysterious payment of $2.5 million from the Libyan government.
Determined to end dependency on foreign oil, Jimmy moved to regulate domestic oil prices. The result was the creation of a price-gouging OPEC cartel that sent oil prices soaring, created rampant inflation, and drove the U.S. economy into deep recession. The misery index, Carter’s own invention for determining the well-being of the American people, rose by 50% during his four years in office.
Jimmy went on to relinquish control of the Panama Canal, to oppose the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan by pulling the U.S. team out of the Olympics, and by attempting to normalize relations with Cuba through the opening of ‘interest sections’ in Washington and Havana. His Cuban policy resulted in the Mariel Boatlift whereby Fidel Castro sent 120,000 refugees - - including mental patients and hardened criminals - - to Miami, thereby transforming the resort city into the crime capital of the United States.
Space does not a permit a discussion of his Latin American policy that gave rise to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua of his ALT-2 agreement with the Soviet Union, which resulted in lobbyists gaining more power than the highest-ranking Pentagon officials.
Carter’s real legacy remains in Iran with the Islamic Revolution and the rise of the murderous mullahs.
Before Jimmy entered the White House, America’s closest friend and ally in the Muslim world was Iran’s Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who ascended to the Peacock Throne as shah (the Persian word for king) in 1941.
The shah modernized Iran by launching the so-called ‘white revolution,’ a massive attempt to Westernize the Persian country through the construction of roads, railways, airports, dams for power and irrigation, agribusiness, pipelines for the oil companies, steel and petrochemical plants, heavy metallurgy, and public health, education, and welfare programs. He bolstered the expansion of U.S. business and industry throughout Iran; shared the spoils of his country’s oil reserves with Britain and the United States; endorsed (at the request of President Eisenhower) the Baghdad Pact to ward off the spread of communism in the Middle East, and never voted against America in the United Nations.
By the 1960s, Iran’s back-alley bazaars became transformed into Fifth Avenue shops. Rock ‘n roll blared from the radio stations. Movie theaters showed the latest Hollywood flicks, and programs like Rawhide and I Love Lucy played on Iranian television. Restaurants served beer and hotdogs. Nightclubs and casinos catered to foreign tourists, foreign contractors, and foreign military advisers.
And let’s remember that the shah, unlike the fat Mid Eastern despots and dictators, never asked or received a dime in U.S. foreign aid.
But not all Iranians were pleased with the changes. The Shi’ite clerics viewed the democratic changes as diabolic. The straw that broke the camel’s back came with the shah’s democratic ruling that Iranian officials were free to take their oath of office on whatever holy scripture they preferred - - including the Christian Bible. The mullahs under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini rose to condemn the shah in mosques and seminaries and to demand his removal from the throne.
Enter Jimmy Carter.
Instead of supporting America’s ally, Jimmy, true to his form as a turncoat, supported the Ayatollah as a ‘fellow man of religion.’ Andrew Young, Carter’s ambassador to the UN, went so far as to call Khomeini, who sanctioned sex with cows and camels, a ‘misunderstood saint.’
When Khomeini launched his evil revolution, Carter refused to provide the shah with any kind of military assistance despite the pleading of the shah.
Instead, Jimmy demanded that he release from prison all the murderous mullahs and militant radicals who were bound and determined to overthrow the government and to impose an intransigent interpretation of shariah (Muslim law) on every Iranian.
The shah acquiesced to this demand and the rest in history.
The Ayatollah - - Carter’s misunderstood saint - - came to power and launched a bloodbath that resulted in the deaths of twenty-thousand pro-Western Iranians. Churches and synagogues were razed, cemeteries desecrated, and shrines vandalized and demolished. The judicially murdered included the 102 year-old Kurdish poet Allameh Vahidi and a 9 year-old girl convicted of ‘attacking revolutionary guards.’ Women were reduced to servitude. They lost their rights to attend school, to initiate divorce, or to retain custody of their children. When they appeared in public, women were obliged to wear the hijab (the traditional Islamic head cover). All American music was outlawed. The movie theaters were shut down; the nightclubs closed. To top things off, the Muslim militants overran the U.S. embassy in Teheran and seized sixty Americans as hostages.
Good ole Jimmy responded by his infamous ‘malaise speech’ of July 15, 1979 in which the former peanut former expressed his belief that America had lost its guts and remained in a state of near senility.
The shah was treated by the Carter White House as a pariah and died of cancer in Cairo on July 27, 1980.
The Islamic Revolution in Iran fanned the flames of jihad throughout the world and gave birth to al Qaeda and hundreds of other Muslim terror groups.
In recent years, the former peanut farmer has been cultivating friendships with such rabid anti-American dictators as Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, and Kim Jong-il.
And now Jimmy, ever true to form, is demanding that we embrace Hamas and Hezbollah as our friends - - just as he embraced the crazed Khomeini and the mad mullahs.
Thanks, Jimmy, but no thanks.”
It’s not particularly comforting to know that the Iranians must count on Jimmy Carter’s clone, President Obama, during this potential opportunity to experience freedom. Mousavi may very well be no better than Ahmadinejad, but America’s president should encourage the freedom fighters and convey to them that we are supporting them in their efforts to gain freedom. That’s what JFK, Reagan, and George W. Bush would have done.
UPDATE: Read about how Obama is cutting funding to Iranian protesters fighting for freedom.
2 comments:
Amazing, simply amazing. An entire post taking us from the ascension of the Shah to the throne in 1941, through the 1950s and the 1960s, straight to the Islamic Revolution in 1979, pinning all the blame on Jimmy Carter.
And not ONE MENTION of how the US's CIA and Britain's MI6, under the direction of Kermit Roosevelt (Teddy's grandson) staged a coup in 1953 to depose the only truly democratically elected leader in Iran's history, Prime Minister Mohammad Mossedegh, to turn the reins over to a gutless Shah. A Shah who, true, was a friend of the U.S. but who was brutal in dealing with Iranians. A Shah who was a walking, breathing excuse for a revolution.
Which is exactly WHY we have to tread so lightly with events now in Iran. Despite your contention to the contrary, there are an awful lots of Iranian experts that are claiming that the LAST thing that today's protesters need is for an outpouring of official support from the American government, because Iranians up and down the line have a large (and understandable) distrust, if not hatred, of America.
What is it, exactly, that you would like to see President Obama do? Send in troops? Give them a great Ronald Reaganesque "win one for the Gipper" halftime speech? Assume for themoment that it might do significant harm to the cause, as those Iranian expats claim it would. What GOOD might come out of it? Do you really think that a few (more) words of encouragement from Obama will be a shot of adrenaline for the kids in Iran, and that they'll overthrow Khamenei and Ahmadinejad and install Mousavi? As you previously posted yourself, nobody is too sure that Mousavi wouldn't be as bad or worse than Ahmadinejad! And if you think that what this will eventualy lead to is a complete overthrow of Islam as the guiding religious and political force in Iran, that's delusional.
Like it or not, Iran is a sovereign nation. Now, I realize that for the eight years prior to Obama's inauguration, we didn't realy care if other countries were sovereign nations or not, we did what we wanted (or, more accurately, what Bush wanted). But that's part of being the biggest leader in the world, as opposed to being the biggest bully: we have to respect, to some extent, other nations' sovereignty.
And if Bush ever stopped to think about it (which he obviously did not, since it's been pretty well established that deep thinking gave him a headache) he might not ever been President himself, had foreign nations stepped in to stop election fraud in America in 2000!
Hey, don't take my word for it (not that you would anyway). Try listening to the words of George WIll and Dick Lugar, two noted conservatives:
GEORGE WILL, ABC NEWS: It will never be the same there. And the legitimacy of the regime, such as it was, is much diminished. Whether or not that's a good thing is another matter. The president is being roundly criticized for insufficient rhetorical support for what's going on over there. It seems to me foolish criticism. The people on the streets know full well what the American attitude toward that regime is, and they don't need that reinforced. Furthermore, there's an American memory of encouraging things like the Hungarian revolution in 1956, with rhetoric about rolling back communism. We had balloons flown in and dropped medals with the Statue of Liberty on it and leaflets. Came to crunch, there was nothing we could do about it.
SENATOR RICHARD LUGAR ON CNN, with John King:
KING: If President Ahmadinejad or the supreme leader, Mr. Khamenei, came back now and said, we want to sit down with the United States at a high level, Secretary Clinton perhaps to the foreign minister, or president to president, should the United States say yes or would you be rewarding the unjust, to use the president's word, behavior he sees on the streets of Iran right now?
LUGAR: We would sit down because our objective is to eliminate the nuclear program that is in Iran. This is...
(CROSSTALK)
KING: Even though -- even though they are shooting people in the streets and beating people in the streets and arresting political opponents, if they called tomorrow, you would sit down with them?
LUGAR: Yes, it's totally improbable. And the reason is that this regime now is under fire. This is not a stable regime in which two people suddenly sit down with the United States. They may not be able to impose their will. This is what -- this is all about in the streets. But in direct answer to your question, of course, we really have to get into the nuclear weapons. We have to get in the terrorism of Iran in other areas in the Middle East. Now we have a new opportunity in which we might very well say we want communication with Iran. We want openness of the press. We don't want to have use Tweeter (ph). We want to have to press on the ground. But in order to have any kind of relationship, we need to be able to talk to people, hear from people, argue with people. This is not imposing our will, but it's fundamental to our democracy and to the development of democracy and or better governments in Iran at this point."
http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/06/22/1972886.aspx
But I guess your foreign policy experts, Sultan Knish, Pamela Geller, Deborah Schlussel, etc. know better than these guys. After all, who has a deeper understanding of the subtle nuances of international diplomacy than a rightwingnut blogger?
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