Two detained Christian women are “in danger of being forgotten” amid concerns they may face execution, Iranian Christians said Tuesday, July 7.
Marzieh Amirizadeh, 30, and Maryam Rustampoor, 27, have been held for over four months in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison apparently for converting to Christianity from Islam.
Iranian Christians and rights investigators said the two young women, who were arrested March 5, suffered sleep deprivation as part of police interrogations and were held in solitary confinement for three weeks in May and early June.
…There was still no clarity regarding the case of the two Christian women, Tuesday, July 7, with one judge reportedly telling them they were both to be executed as ‘apostates’. “Maryam and Marzieh have responded with courage, however, telling the judge to ‘expedite his sentence’,” said Pray for Iran, an Internet initiative of Iranian churches.
I find this story to be the most depressing thing in the world. I look at the pictures of the two women and I just want to cry. Here I am in the USA, surrounded by postmodern-relativist “Christian” feminists who vote for abortion, big government and higher taxes. Meanwhile, the real Christian women that I should be protecting and providing for are on the other side of the world in a filthy jail cell.
Female Iranian pro-democracy protester was a Christian
Neda Soltani was a Christian
One other thing. That woman who was murdered by the Iranian dictatorship while peacefully protesting the rigged Iranian election was also a Christian. You can read more about her here on Robert Spenser’s Jihad Watch. (H/T Nice Deb, Atlas Shrugs)
He writes:
This is the poor young woman who was shot dead by Iranian security forces, and whose bleeding face became an image of the brutality and humanity of the mullahs. Now it turns out the Neda Soltani was a Christian — a telling indication that the analysts who dismissed the protesters as simply wanting more Sharia, or better Sharia, or Sharia with a different face, were wrong: it just wasn’t that simple.
Christians don’t want any Sharia. We want the freedom to convert and to live publicly and authentically as Christians.
Video of her assassination: (WARNING: GRAPHIC!)
Where are all the feminists? Oh yes – they are running the Human Rights Commissions that suppress the free speech of Christians whenever Muslim agitators complain about being offended. And Obama didn’t do anything to help the voters in Iran or Honduras, either.
Newsmax has learned that the Obama administration also has zeroed out funding for pro-democracy programs inside Iran from the State Department budget for fiscal 2010, just as protests in Iran are ramping up.
Funding for pro-democracy programs began in 2004, when Congress earmarked $1.5 million of the State Department budget for “educational, humanitarian, and non-governmental organizations and individuals inside Iran to support the advancement of democracy and human rights in Iran.”
The funding ramped up dramatically two years later, when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice requested $75 million for pro-democracy programs. More than half of the $66.1 million Congress finally appropriated went to expand U.S. government-funded Persian language broadcasting services at Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
But no money has been earmarked for such programs in the administration’s fiscal 2010 foreign operations budget request. Congressional sources told Newsmax they doubted that a Democrat-controlled Congress would add it when the budget comes before a committee next week.
Here is Obama’s lame, insecure, moral equivalence, moral relativist, politically correct response:
“The Iranian government must understand that the world is watching. We mourn each and every innocent life that is lost,” Obama said in a statement.
Something tells me that Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush would have gone a lot further. But those two are coming from a worldview where humans have certain inalienable rights, grounded by a Creator, and that no one has a right to take away those rights. Reagan and Bush were not afraid to speak divisively in order to condemn evil, and praise the good. Is that so hard for Democrats to do?
President Obama’s tepid response to the evidence the Iranian election was stolen from the people of that country by current president President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his thuggish allies is disappointing. …
The president says he entertains “deep concerns about the election” in Iran. Well, who doesn’t? Expressing concern is “nice,” it’s “diplomatic”–in the worst sense–but it is not sufficient to the circumstance…
The Nation article also has some nice citations of conservative French leader Sarkozy, who has courage, moral conviction, and moral clarity.
ECM sent me this link to a post on Ace of Spades, regarding the Department of Defense written exam. Do you know know what counts as a form of “low-level terrorism” in Obama’s regime? Is it attacking the Pentagon? IEDs? Hate crimes? or PROTESTS?Click here to find out.
SILENCE is complicity. Our president’s refusal to take a forthright moral stand on the side of the Iranian freedom marchers is read in Tehran as a blank check for the current regime.
The fundamentalist junta has begun arresting opposition figures, with regime mouthpieces raising the prospect of the death penalty. Inevitably, there are claims that dissidents have been “hoarding weapons and explosives.”
Foreign media reps are under house arrest. Cellphone frequencies are jammed. Students are killed and the killings disavowed.
And our president is “troubled,” but doesn’t believe we should “meddle” in Iran’s internal affairs. (Meddling in Israel’s domestic affairs is just fine, though.)
We just turned our backs on freedom.
This article by Ralph Peters is MUST-READ. We used to be a great nation that cared about the plight of the oppressed peoples abroad. But not anymore.
The Berman Post post has a HUGE number of links, if you’re into this story, as I am.
Republican Mike Pence
His resolution condemning the Islamic fascists brutal suppression of peaceful pro-democracy protesters passed in the House.
His speech can be viewed here:
Excerpt:
“This resolution simply states that the House of Representatives expresses its support for all Iranian citizens who embrace the values of freedom, human rights, civil liberties and the rule of law. It also condemns the ongoing violence against demonstrators by the government of Iran and pro-government militias, as well as the ongoing government suppression of independent electronic communication through interference with the Internet and cell phones. And lastly, it affirms the universality of individual rights and the importance of democratic and fair elections.
His full statement following the passage of his pro-democracy bill is here. I should just note that Mike Pence is a devout Christian, and that human rights and human dignity are grounded by his worldview. He is saying such things because it is rational for him to say such things, on his worldview of Christian theism.
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.
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)
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.
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 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.
WINTERY KNIGHT 