Where is our love for freedom now?

June 29, 2009 by Matthew Jarzen 

Lack of support for Iranian protestors shows Obama’s reality

For the past couple of weeks Iran has been engulfed in a wave of violent protests over the disputed presidential election.

Ayatollah Ali Khomeini, Iran’s supreme leader, recently declared that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the election over Iran’s former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi. Mousavi and supporters are claiming the election was fraudulent.

Protests have been happening all over the country, but the focal point is the nation’s capital of Tehran, where thousands upon thousands went to the streets in protest not only against the election result, but also against the Iranian Mullahs—the religious elite who essentially run the country.

When the Ayatollah declared that Ahmadinijad had won, it was clear who the Mullahs had been supporting, regardless of how the election went.

Realizing this, the government in Iran is cracking down hard on the protestors. There have been unconfirmed reports to the BBC that some have been killed. Pro-Ahmadinejad militias have also attempted to break up protests.

While this is happening, the Iranian people, a majority of whom are under the age of 30, are asking “Where’s President Barack Obama? Where’s the U.S.?”

I echo that sentiment. Where is Obama? Where is the U.S.?

I’ll give you the answer. Obama, who is never a prude about hopping in front of a camera, is locked inside a White House bathroom like Sen. John Edwards avoiding the National Enquirer. He’s avoiding contact with his usual bedfellow, the media, whenever possible.

Instead, he issued two wimpy press releases, one of which stated, “The universal rights to assembly and free speech must be respected and the U.S. stands with all who seek to exercise those rights.”

On the surface that sounds legitimate, but what Obama failed to express in his press release was that the U.S. stands with the protestors in their fight for freedom and that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of the political will of the citizens, the U.S. supports the right of the Iranian people to alter or abolish it.

That’s what Obama should have said. Instead, he hides in the White House like a coward. This is a pivotal moment for his administration—an actual revolution in Iran—and Obama is letting it slip by. Why?

Well, for one, Obama is more concerned with reshaping reality here at home to be bothered by pesky revolutions in Iran.

On a CBS interview, Obama claimed he didn’t want the U.S. to “interfere” in Iranian affairs, lest the U.S. be used as a target for the Mullahs. Also, there’s fear of Iran escalating attacks in Iraq and possibly Afghanistan.

So Obama claims he doesn’t want to meddle in Iranian affairs. He says this because in his eyes, Iran isn’t his real enemy. However, he is all too willing to meddle in the affairs of Israel, claiming Israeli settlements in the West Bank are a bigger problem. Obama is prepared to take a strong stance on that issue.

The fact of the matter is that Obama is a very meddlesome person. Where he doesn’t see fit to meddle in Iranian affairs, he sees fit to meddle in the affairs of General Motors, our financial and banking industries, our health care and anything else he wants to change. I would bet that by the end of the summer he’ll see fit to meddle in the affairs of our energy companies as well, but not with Iran.

What’s happening is quite possibly a very real revolution in Iran, which can go one of two ways. It can be a revolution like the one that happened in Poland in the 1980s, with the Solidarity movement and former President Ronald Reagan declaring his undying support for the Polish people in their fight for freedom: At the height of the Cold War, Reagan stood in a divided city and called on the Soviet leader to tear down that wall of division.

Or, these protests can become another Tiananmen Square-type event. Even worse, this could become like the first Iranian Revolution in 1979 when former President Jimmy Carter abandoned the Shah of Iran and our allies, leaving Iran to become the theocratic state-sponsorer of Islamic terrorism that it is today.

Even though Obama has blamed George W. Bush for just about everything under the sun, perhaps he could take a page from Bush’s book and actually take a stand.

Bush may have been a lot of things, but if there’s one thing you can definitely claim about him it’s that he was devoted to the cause of freedom and was ready and willing to stand by any people who fought for it.

Greg Gutfeld had a good point recently, when he commented on the protests in Iran and Obama’s limp-wristed reactions. He said, “This is real change you can believe in, and it’s better than when it’s written on a shirt you’re wearing trying to impress the barista at Starbucks.”

During last year’s U.S. presidential campaign, then-senator Joe Biden said Obama would be tested with a foreign policy crisis within his first six months in office. It would appear that Obama failed that test.

So, where are you, Mr. President? There are people yearning for freedom. Don’t we represent them anymore?