Nile Gardiner published this report at The Telegraph today-
“Iranian protesters are dying for freedom – where is Barack Obama?”
I wrote back in June about the shameful silence of the Obama administration during the mass street protests that greeted Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s fraudulent re-election victory as President of Iran. As White House spokesman Robert Gibbs ludicrously put it, the administration was “impressed by the vigorous debate and enthusiasm this election generated.” Or in Vice President Joe Biden’s words on NBC’s Meet the Press, describing Ahmadinejad’s victory – “we’re going to withhold comment… I mean we’re just waiting to see.”
Embarrassingly for Washington, even many European leaders showed more backbone in condemning the Iranian regime’s brutal suppression of protestors, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton humiliatingly outflanked by her French and German counterparts, who had no qualms about speaking out quickly and firmly against the election result and the actions of the Iranian government.
In the six months that have followed, Barack Obama’s high-risk engagement strategy has simply encouraged more repression from the Mullahs, as well as ever greater levels of defiance over Iran’s nuclear weapons programme. As Con Coughlin noted in an excellent piece for The Wall Street Journal last month, Obama’s Iran diplomacy isn’t working:
“Iranian human-rights groups say that since the government crackdown began in late June, at least 400 demonstrators have been killed while another 56 are unaccounted, which is several times higher than the official figures. The regime has established a chain of unofficial, makeshift prisons to deal with the protesters, where torture and rape are said to be commonplace. In Tehran alone, 37 young Iranian men and women are reported to have been raped by their captors.”
Now once again huge street protests have flared up on the streets of Tehran and a number of other major cities, with several protestors shot dead this weekend by the security forces and Revolutionary Guards, reportedly including the nephew of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi, and dozens seriously injured. And again there is silence from the White House. And where is the president? On vacation in Hawaii, no doubt recovering from his exertions driving forward the monstrous health care reform bill against the overwhelming will of the American people and without a shred of bipartisan support.
So where is Barack Obama?
Here he is:
President Barack Obama is playing golf and basketball in Hawaii.
He’s decided to sit out this Iranian Revolution.
UPDATE: The Canadian Government today condemned the brutal Iranian regime after news broke the the government was shooting protesters in cold blood.
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