Obama Whitewashes Iranian Record of Violence
The President’s outreach evades the record of U.S. policy toward Iranian aggression.
By Elan Journo, Ayn Rand foreign policy fellow
In his address to the joint session of Congress, President Obama said that “We cannot shun the negotiating table” in conducting our foreign policy. He’s previously elaborated that “if countries like Iran are willing to unclench their fist, they will find an extended hand from us.” And Iran’s president Ahmedinijad tentatively welcomes “talks based on mutual respect and in a fair atmosphere.”
The shared idea, evidently, is that our conflict with Iran stems largely from a past failure to use so-called diplomacy to settle disputes. Alluding to George W. Bush’s supposedly tough policy, Obama has said he wants to restore “the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years” ago.
Really? Thirty years ago this November, followers of Ayatollah Khomeini, who spearheaded Iran’s Islamic revolution, stormed the U.S. embassy in Teheran and took the personnel hostage. President Carter gently admonished Iran, but ruled out military retaliation. Instead his advisors spent months dreaming up schemes to bribe Iran into releasing the hostages--while bending over backward to enable the regime to save face. In the end Khomeini’s Islamist theocracy collected a handsome payoff for its aggression, and concluded, rightly, that if attacked, America would crumple to its knees.
Was Obama thinking of the 1980s? In April 1983 Iran’s jihadist proxies in Lebanon rammed a truck bomb into the U.S. Embassy in Beirut; the Reagan administration responded by doing nothing. Months later, encouraged by Washington’s inaction, Teheran issued a kill order--via its ambassador in Syria--to its allied groups in Beirut. Early one morning, an Islamist suicide bomber set off a massive explosion at the barracks where U.S. marines were sleeping and killed 241 of them.
Reagan spouted hot air about not backing down--and soon after ordered the U.S. troops to bug out. The jihadists wanted America out, they slaughtered our troops, and we caved in and gave them what they wanted.
Osama bin Laden, like jihadists in Iran and elsewhere, viewed our response to the Beirut bombings as further proof that their ideologically driven war was a viable cause. And so, inspired by Iranian aggression, the anti-American jihad kept ramping up.
Maybe Obama meant the fabled halcyon days of the 1990s, when President Clinton tried to mend fences with Iran?
In 1996 a team of jihadists--financed and trained by Teheran--blew up the Khobar Towers building in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 American servicemen. Clinton’s administration learned that Iran was behind the attacks. But Washington brushed aside any notion of retaliating against Iran, in order to facilitate a “reconciliation” with that murderous regime. In an eerie parallel with today, Iran expressed its openness to U.S. groveling--an opportunity Clinton seized.
So, Clinton attended a speech by Iran’s leader at the U.N.; the administration also permitted the sale of much-needed aircraft parts to Iran, among other sweeteners. Granted the cover of respectability, Iran was emboldened to continue fomenting Islamist aggression and avidly pursue its then-embryonic nuclear program.
Obama’s appeasing diplomacy re-enacts the disastrous policy of the past. Our policymakers evaded Iran’s character as an enemy, and by rewarding its aggression with bribes and conciliation, they encouraged a spiral of further attacks.
No. Bush was no exception to this trend. After 9/11 his administration invited Iran--the leading sponsor of Islamist terrorism--to join an anti-terrorism coalition(!). Talk of an axis of evil was quickly abandoned, and Washington backed the European scheme to bribe Iran to halt its nuclear program. By late last year, there was talk of opening a U.S. Special Interests Section (a step down from an embassy) in Iran. Meanwhile Bush’s welfare mission in Iraq negated U.S. security and left Iran untouched to grow more powerful and resolute.
A genuinely new, rational policy toward Iran would turn away from the last 30 years and begin by facing up to Teheran’s ongoing proxy war against us.
Read the Opposing Views debate, "Should the U.S. Use Military Force Against Iran?"
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Speaker Pelosi: Stand Up for Muslim Women, Not Islamists Like Rauf!
An open letter from the founder and president of the Alliance of Iranian Women.
September 5, 2010 - by Manda Zand Ervin
Honorable Speaker Pelosi:
I heard you say that the people who oppose the construction of the Ground Zero mosque should be investigated.
Investigate me. I oppose the construction of that mosque.
This mosque, built in such close proximity to Ground Zero, is intended to send a message to America and another message to the Muslims who are gravitating toward human rights laws and secularism. We are sure that this mosque will cause nothing but division and justified ill will towards Muslims in this country.
I came to America as a political refugee, fleeing from the Islamic rule in Iran that subsumed a secular, woman-respecting government. As a human, woman, and a mother, I could not live under nor subject my daughter to such brutal, barbarian tyranny. What I see now occurring in my new home, America, is Islamists forcing their policies in bits and pieces, here and there. It is terribly disconcerting, not only to me but to all Iranian Americans and the large majority of Muslims who came to America to live in peace, freedom, and prosperity.
Madam Speaker: The Islamists are using the laws of this greatest of democracies to implement their ideology in any way they can — whether by propaganda, intimidation, the misuse of political correctness or anti-discrimination policies, or the minority status that this society puts at their disposal. Plus the most powerful of all tools, the money — the limitless petrodollars coming from foreign Islamist dictators with anti-democratic agendas.
Because the American Constitution calls for the separation of religion and government, the Justice Department, the ACLU, and others constantly minimize the influence Christianity and Judaism have on American secular society. What we, American Muslims, wonder: why is there an exception for Islam from the rules applied to others, even though the Islamic human rights record is deeply problematic and contrary to all the civil rights and individual rights laws of this great republic?
Why is Islam given a pass that is not given to Christianity or Judaism?
Madam Speaker: You are a powerful woman in the world, but you don’t care much about the human rights of hundreds of millions of women and children who need the support of the people like you to gain their individual freedom. You claim to be for the women’s right to choose, but then you ignore the right of women and children to have human dignity!
A large majority of America’s Muslims, women and girls, are living under sharia laws. Stripped of their human dignity.
You support the construction of the mosque but you don’t support the women and girls who are forced to wear hijabs against their will. Muslim women and girls live in seclusion, on the fringes of society, without recourse because of their families’ religion. In the name of religious freedom, political correctness in America only pleases the patriarchal hierarchy of the Muslim world. In the name of religious freedom, America permits Muslim communities to run a state within a state, perpetuating the patriarchal crimes against helpless women and children who should have their constitutional rights defended.
When “Muslim men” are given extra privileges that are definitely not granted to those of other religions, my Muslim sisters and I see this as the gravest discrimination committed in America. (Continued)
Speaker Pelosi: Stand Up for Muslim Women, Not Islamists Like Rauf! (Continued)
Madam Speaker: We came to America to live in peace and harmony with Americans. We don’t want to be identified by our religion. We want to be identified by our cultures and the content of our characters. We want to be Americans, not Muslim-Americans.
We don’t want our girls forced by their fathers to wear hijabs, and to be embarrassed among their peers in American schools. We want to be free to practice — or not practice — our religion. We also want to be free to “choose.”
Unfortunately, politicians like you have chosen to cater to the worst among us — the Muslim dictators and the so-called community leaders. Ignoring the rest of us, Muslim women and children, as if we don’t exist.
The Islamists will not stop until Islam rules the world. Ayatollah Khomeini declared that Iran was a platform toward a Muslim world.
All of us American Muslims know that this is the most democratic country on Earth, and we are well aware of the Constitution and the meaning of freedom of religion in America. We luxuriate in that freedom, and we celebrate it, and we defend it.
You know well that the question here is not freedom of religion, or respect for Muslims! This is nothing but pure politics — sacrificing humanity in the name of religion for the sake of ideological politics.
We want America to treat Islam like it treats Christianity and Judaism, and to stop exempting Muslims from requirements imposed on others. We want Islam to be challenged by the same questioning, criticism, and control that is applied to other religions. Please stop pampering Islam to appease the terrorists and dictators.
Madam Speaker: The Age of Enlightenment changed the face of Judaism and Christianity, but Islam remains trapped in the 6th century. Here we have the Constitution and law. Apply it evenly to all — no exceptions for Islam. Support freedom from religion for the women and children suffering under Islamic law in America.
Manda Zand Ervin is the founder and the president of the Alliance of Iranian women. She was the U.S. delegate to the UN Commission on the Status of Women in 2008.