Tag Archives: Iran

Obama silent following rigged Iranian election and protester beatings

Iranian woman shakes fist at police
Why doesn't Obama stand up for freedom and democracy in Iran?

Fox News reports that the election was fraudulent, accoring to U.S. analysts: (H/T Hot Air)

U.S. analysts find it “not credible” that challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi would have lost the balloting in his hometown or that a third candidate, Mehdi Karoubi, would have received less than 1 percent of the total vote, a senior U.S. officials told FOX News.

Hot Air has tons of updates at the link above, and a video of the protest.

The UK Times reports: (H/T Pajamas Media)

In the Iranian capital’s most serious unrest for 10 years, thousands of liberals who claimed the election had been rigged vented their fury in running battles with police.

They fought officers armed with batons and stun grenades, set fire to police vehicles and threw stones at government buildings.

I saw police in camouflage uniforms and black flak jackets respond by firing the grenades from motorcycles into a crowd that chanted “Down with the dictator” and denounced what it called a stolen election.

In a stand-off near the interior ministry, which oversaw the count, opposition supporters formed barricades of burning tyres, sending plumes of smoke over the city. Helmeted police chased protesters who became detached from the main group and beat them with truncheons.

Hot Air linked to this BBC video, in which protests cry for freedom are beaten by police: (H/T Hot Air)

Fox News reports on the response of the Obama administration: (H/T Gateway Pundit)

The Obama administration would not describe the outcome as legitimate or illegitimate or deem a victory by Mousavi as necessarily better.

“We’re not going to characterize what would have been a better or worse scenario,” the official said. “We will deal with this as it is, not as we wish it to be.

And they also report on the Republican response, which is quite different:

“There appears to be pretty good evidence that this is a cooked election,” Rep. Dan Lungren, R-Calif., told FOX News. “And the most depressing thing for me is we were going to see whether in fact the true leaders of this country, the religious leaders, were going to allow for a real election to have an expression of the people.

Michael Ledeen describes the atrocities:

  • Mousavi and Karrubi, the two “reformist” candidates in Friday’s “elections” are under house arrest, along with dozens of their followers;
  • “Reformist” journalists and activists have been rounded up and jailed;
  • Cell phones (including, after a day’s delay, international cell phones) have been blocked, access to internet has been filtered, facebook is unreachable, and you can’t tweet (can the silencing of Western reporters be far behind?);
  • In Tehran, student dormitories are surrounded by security forces.

The Tehran Journal claims 50-100 protesters are dead. (H/T Gateway Pundit)

The NYT reports on Obama’s response:

The Obama administration is determined to press on with efforts to engage the Iranian government, senior officials said Saturday, despite misgivings about irregularities in the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad…

Business as usual… just keep talking with them, and hope they will forgive us for all our misdeeds. There is not going to be a challenge to this coup from the White House… the Iranian people are on their own.

Gateway Pundit linked to some photos are here and here.

Hot Air has links to Twitter channels if you want to keep on top of the unfolding story.

Rich trust-fund leftists caught spying for Cuba

Heritage Foundation has the story:

Move over, Bill Ayers, you’ve got company. The arrest of retired State Department intelligence analyst Walter Kendall Myers has apparently uncovered yet another overweened Social Register Rebel in our midst. Myers and his wife, Gwendolyn, were arrested on June 5 and charged with being espionage agents for Fidel Castro for 30 years.

…Kendall Myers got his PhD and later taught at Johns Hopkins/SAIS…

Myers’s mother’s pedigree (AT&T money and top-drawer National Geographic Society founders) even topped Ayers’s father’s Commonwealth Edison/Chicago fortune. Both of these bad boys seemingly felt so bad about living large off the sweat of their ancestors that they became hard-core leftists and turned on their fellow Americans.

A bit more in a subsequent post:

Cases like those of Defense Intelligence Agency analyst Ana Belen Montes, convicted in 2002 of spying for Cuba, or the five Cubans convicted in Miami in 2001 on 26 counts of spying for the regime, demonstrate the ability of the Cuban operatives to work in the U.S. to the detriment of U.S. national security and interests.

What about Barack Obama?

Barack Obama launched his presidential campaign from the house of his friend, Bill Ayers. He was raised by a rich grandmother and went to expensive private schools, where he took illegal drugs like cocaine. His mentor Frank Marshall Davis was a member of the Communist Party and a Soviet-sponsored activist. I’ve posted before about whether Obama is destroying the United States with his policies. He voted against missile defense, but he favors nuclear plants for Iran.

And we know that Obama is traipsing around with dictators in Venezuela and is even trying to normalize relations with Cuba. Who cares about the torture and unlawful imprisonment that goes on in Cuba and Iran? Obama’s response to North Korea hasn’t been inspiring.

GREAT NEWS! Lebanon elects anti-Syrian coalition!

Wow! This is the best news I’ve heard all week!

Yahoo news reports: (H/T My Dad)

An anti-Syrian coalition defeated Hezbollah in Lebanon’s parliamentary election on Sunday in a blow to Syria and Iran and a boost to the United States.

…Lebanon’s rival camps are at odds over Hezbollah’s guerrilla force, which outguns the Lebanese army, and ties with Syria, which dominated Lebanon for three decades until 2005.

…The United States, which lists Hezbollah as a terrorist group, has linked future aid to Lebanon to the shape and policies of the next government. Hezbollah, which says it must keep its arms to deter Israel, is part of the outgoing cabinet.

The anti-Syrian coalition has enjoyed firm backing from many Western countries since the 2005 assassination of Hariri’s father Rafik al-Hariri.

The coalition took power in an election following Hariri’s killing, but struggled to govern in the face of a sometimes violent conflict with Hezbollah and its allies.

This good news follows on the good news of India’s election results, which I reported on here.