June 15, 2009, - 12:12 pm
Much Ado About Nothing in Iran
By Debbie Schlussel
The most outrageous comment I’ve heard yet about the Iranian elections is one uttered by Michigan’s Communist U.S. Senator Carl Levin on a Detroit radio station, this morning.
Well, more people voted in the Iranian elections than in the U.S. elections. They had a higher turn out in Iran. 80%.
HUH? HUH?! HUH????!!!!
This U.S. Senator is comparing the United States with a totalitarian regime and somehow implying that they are better, more democratic, more committed to free elections. . . because they had a higher percentage of turnout (a forced-by-the-totalitarian-state turnout) at the polls of a fake election run and orchestrated by a theocracy? Absurd. Ludicrous. Ridiculous.
The whole Iranian election scene is a farce. Even more of a farce is the pandering by all of the cable news networks–CNN, FOX News, MSNBC, etc.–to the supporters of this radical Mir Hossein Mousavi who lost, as if they are some sort of liberty and freedom movement, some semblance of moderation. They are anything but.
On the other hand, the news coverage–on the left AND on the right and all over the mainstream media–pandering to these Iranian supporters of Moussavi is incredibly, jaw-droppingly ignorant–acting as though, if Moussavi had “won,” it would somehow be a legit election and somehow this guy would actually be the “moderate” they pretend that he is, but isn’t.
Moussavi is every bit as committed to development of Iran’s nukes–a program HE started–as Ahmadinejad. He is every bit as anti-Israel and committed to attacking Israel as Ahmadinejad. And, like Ahmadinejad, he was picked as a candidate for this election by the Ayatollahs who run Iran and who would run Iran no matter what. And only an ignoramus would ignore the fact that Moussavi was part of the Iranian “revolution,” which brought the Ayatollah Khomeini back to power from exile in France and which brought our embassies and plenty of Americans to a hostage situation consisting of over a year in captivity.
Any protest or outrage over the victory or loss of either Ahmadinejad or Moussavi on the part of the West is like America being upset that one HAMAS candidate lost to another HAMAS candidate who has Tourette’s Syndrome.
Calling Moussavi a “reformer” or “moderate” reminds me of when, about a decade ago, a cornucopia of “learned,” “astute” (but actually completely clueless and ignorant, per usual) American political analysts called then-Iranian President (and now “Supreme Leader” and Ayatollah) Ali Khamenei a “moderate” and a “reformer,” but he never turned out to be that. And they said the same about Iranian ex-President Mohammad Khatami. In fact, both turned out to be radicals with a nice smile, which anyone could have figured out, since they were installed by the Ayatollahs.
While most of CNN’s reporting predictably didn’t recognize the truth about Moussavi and his “reformer” followers (who are anything but), at least CNN’s website does:
He also was a hard-liner whom the Economist described as a “firm radical.”
He, like most Iranians in power, does not believe in the existence of Israel. He defended the taking of hostages at the U.S. Embassy in Iran in 1979, which led to the break in ties between the countries.
He was part of a regime that regularly executed dissidents and backed the fatwa against British author Salman Rushdie.
And as late as April, he opposed suspending the country’s nuclear-enrichment program but said it would not be diverted to weapons use.
“I wouldn’t go as far as (call it) a ‘Velvet Revolution,'” Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council, said of the phrase many are using to describe the rallies in Iran.
“At the end of the day, Moussavi has been more involved and been there from the very beginning of the revolution in a way that Ahmadinejad never was,” Parsi told “CNN Newsroom” on Sunday. “Moussavi was one of the founders of the revolution.”
And while an Iran with Moussavi atop of it, would be no different than an Iran with Ahmadinejad at the top in terms of policy and radicalism, it might have been more dangerous. That’s because Moussavi thinks all of the same things as Ahamadinejad, but he’s not prone to stating these nutty views out in the open. We would be stuck negotiating with a kinder, gentler face of a man who is, privately, every bit as committed to the idea of Holocaust denial and Holocaust cartoons.
So, I don’t really care what happened over the weekend in the fake Iranian elections. To me, it’s the equivalent of two competing ants pissing. I couldn’t care less.
If anything, I’m glad the guy with the perpetual truth serum–who tells us exactly what they’re thinking about the Jews, Israel, nukes, and America–is the guy that’s still in there.
He’ll make it much tougher–and far less palatable to the American and Western public–for Barack Hussein Obama to sit at the table with him.
80 percent voter turnout in Iran! Big deal. Saddam Hussein had, what was it, 95 or was it 99 percent turnout? Remember that? Voter turnout means nothing in a fascist or totalitarian state.
norman on June 15, 2009 at 1:13 pm