Tumult in Tehran 269
J Post reports on the continued riots.
Here’s a video of live ammunition being fired into the crowd.
Hard to tell how much is true of this, but there is no doubt of the cruel methods being used by the authorities:
“We can see the smoke and the helicopters from our house,” said a source in Teheran. “They have closed down all the roads, trapping the people, who are being bombarded.”
People were chanting “Allah Akbar” and “We will kill those who kill our brothers” from their windows, balconies, and rooftops, he said.
Most of Mousavi’s supporters “are not leaving our homes,” he went on.
“God help those people [who have gone out] in Freedom Square. The last we heard, helicopters are pouring boiling hot water on the people,” said another source. His account could not be confirmed, but other reports also spoke of boiling water being dropped from the helicopters, and of an undefined “acid” being sprayed at demonstrators by security forces on the streets. “Hospitals are overflowing and the embassies in Teheran have left their doors open to provide a haven for the injured for sanctuary,” the source added.
Obama’s starting to speak.
He is urging Iran’s leaders to “govern through consent, not coercion” And in a statement from the White House on Saturday, he said: “The universal rights to assembly and free speech must be respected, and the United States stands with all who seek to exercise those rights.”
No direct condemnation. A country that funds the murder of your soldiers in Iraq is crippled with angry young voters. If the protesters had the backing of the world’s most powerful man behind them, it would give their cause an energy and possibility of success. Some have argued that this would give the hardliners real ammunition: the chance to blame America – the interfering superpower. But this is nonsense, the protesters are people young and old, deeply religious and not at all. They have the chance to change something here. And they won’t for the most part believe that the whole protests are being fomented by Israeli and US agents – as the regime is claiming.
Iran seems to have a revolution every 35 years, and they’re overdue for one now.
Support the Iranian Students 133
If you’re a facebook user, you may want to join this group – it’s set up by a friend of mine, and he’s got some fascinating links on it, including this rather damning picture.
Also, Twitter users:
Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? 20
Obama’s response to the depostic Iranian suppression of the riots is appalling. Powerline points out what Reagan might have said:
Make no mistake, their crime will cost them dearly in their future dealings with America and free peoples everywhere. I do not make this statement lightly or without serious reflection.
Carter’s Folly 6
Carter is at it again, meeting with terrorist leaders. It doesn’t seem to faze him that this group murdered 63 people in the 1983 US Embassy bombings.
Appeasement has been the most disastrous policy of the last two centuries, but Carter is going to an extreme – he is condemning liberal, Western Israeli leaders and instead cultivating friendships with homosexual/Jew-murdering Islamic fundamentalists. Appalling.
The best nothing that money can buy 97
Thomas Sowell writes in part:
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‘An awful responsibility’ abandoned 20
From Investor’s Business Daily:
In the torrent of analysis of the president’s Muslim speech, a major policy shift went largely unnoticed. We now endorse equal opportunity regarding what countries can have atomic weapons.
President Obama’s Cairo University address to the world’s Muslims on Thursday squandered a historic opportunity that perhaps only a president with a Muslim father and a Muslim name could have utilized: effectively rallying the Islamic world against Iran as it pursues nuclear weapons.
Instead, he did pretty much the opposite, declaring that “no single nation should pick and choose which nation holds nuclear weapons.”
This is multilateralism taken to its reductio ad absurdum. Since the dawn of atomic weapons, it has been mostly the United States’ job — what Harry Truman called “an awful responsibility which has come to us” — to act as a kind of global nuclear custodian.
Truman made no bones about defending our building of the bomb, noting that the Nazis “were on the search for it” and that “we know now how close they were to finding it. And we knew the disaster which would come to this nation, and to all peace-loving nations, to all civilization, if they had found it first.”
That Democratic president made it clear to the world that “Great Britain, Canada and the United States, who have the secret of its production, do not intend to reveal that secret until means have been found to control the bomb so as to protect ourselves and the rest of the world from the danger of total destruction.”
If we are honest with ourselves today, we must admit that even now, nearly six-and-a-half decades into the nuclear age, there remains no foolproof means of controlling the bomb. It continues to be, in Give ’em Hell Harry’s words, “too dangerous to be loose in a lawless world.”
So it is chilling to hear a U.S. president go to Egypt and, after issuing an unprecedented apology for the 1953 CIA coup that kept Iran and its oil from the clutches of Iran’s direct neighbor to the north, the Soviet Union, declare that Iran has “the right” to nuclear power — which it can easily use to build bombs.
There is nothing new in a president calling for “a world in which no nations hold nuclear weapons,” as Obama did in Cairo. Ronald Reagan expressed such hopes. But isn’t contending that “no single nation should pick and choose which nation holds nuclear weapons” the opposite of zero nuclear tolerance?
How is it a step toward a nuclear-free world when we announce that the West should stop practicing what might be called “nuclear discrimination?” Tehran will interpret Obama’s words as carte blanche to pursue its goal of building a nuclear weapons arsenal.
According to the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran has now amassed 1,359 kilograms of low-enriched uranium hexafluoride. It has nearly 5,000 centrifuges up and running — and is making it more difficult for international inspectors to scrutinize its nuclear program.
Yet at the G-8 foreign ministers conference at the end of this month in Italy, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will rub shoulders with Tehran’s diplomatic mission, invited to attend by the Italians, just as if Iran were Finland or New Zealand or any other civilized nation, not the Islamofascist threat to the world that it is.
Neither Europe nor the U.N. has the willingness or the fortitude to “pick and choose” multilaterally which nations can be accepted into the nuclear club. Only the U.S. can lead in such an “awful responsibility.”
But last week in Cairo we apparently relinquished that grave duty.

