"Iran Has Executed Its Tiananmen Square"

At Threats Watch.org (warning, fairly graphic photo at bottom of page), Steve Schippert writes:

Iran has executed its Tiananmen Square. Baharestan Square has become synonymous with barbarity, cruelty, massacre and inhumanity.

An Iranian blogger (whose URL I will not publish) live blogging from Baharestan Square in central Tehran today captures but brief glimpses of the unimaginable horror that took place today. Bus loads of protesters were stopped and unloaded from their buses by “black-clad police” and literally herded. When the massing was sufficient, as the barely controllably distraught Tehran caller to CNN described first hand, hundreds of the regime’s Basij thugs poured out of an adjoining mosque and commenced a massacre with axes, clubs, guns and gas.

From the live blogger’s eyewitness account:

>More than 10.000 Bassij Milittias get position in Central Tehran, including Baharestan Sq.
>Army Helycopters flying over Baharestan and Vali Asr Sq.
>The streets, squares and around BAHARESTAN (Approx. South-eastern of Tehran) is swarming with military forces, civilian forces, the security motorists
>The croud have moved to the south of baharestan, the situation is bad, the shooting has started
>In Baharestan Sq. in the Police shooting, A girl is shot and the police is not allowing to let them help
>In Baharestan we saw militia with axe choping people like meat – blood everywhere – like butcher

This is the Iranian regime, wading into its own unarmed people and axing them to death, bludgeoning women (seen as the greatest threat to the regime) and throwing them to their deaths from pedestrian bridges. The same Iranian regime whose embassy officials are invited to American embassies around the world to celebrate on July 4th, of all things, a successful revolution.

In response, the White House’s overtures of “Weenie Diplomacy” has been canceled:

The Obama administration is seriously considering not extending invitations to Iranian diplomats for July 4 celebrations overseas, senior administration officials tell CNN. [Cancellation confirmed here. –Ed]

The officials said intense discussions on the issue were taking place, but the final decision had not been made.

Late last month the State Department sent a cable to its embassies and consulates worldwide informing them they “may invite representatives from the government of Iran” to their July 4th celebrations. …

But officials said the violence against protesters that has ensued since the June 12 election has caused the administration to rethink the timing of such engagement.

One senior administration official said Wednesday the reconsideration of the July 4th invitations is consistent with Obama’s comments Tuesday, in which he said he was “shocked and appalled” at the violence against demonstrators.

Andrew Klavan contrasts this month’s equivocations by President Obama with the tone and determination of a former American president:

The tragedy of bad ideas unfolds from a moral flaw in a worldview or philosophy as inevitably as classical tragedy unfolds from a flaw in individual character. Tragedies of bad ideas are the most common, pervasive and destructive man-made mass disasters. Yet our thinking class has become powerless to oppose them or even recognize them for what they are.

The reason is that too many of our intellectuals are themselves ensnared in a bad idea. That idea is multiculturalism — the notion that no system or government is inherently better than any other, that the rules of morality are just a doctrine written by history’s winners. Thus there are no enduring human truths, only “narratives” by which almost any beastliness can be explained away if committed by a people with a claim to having been victimized by a dominant culture.

This bad idea has all but silenced our nation at a moment when the world most needs our voice. Thousands of people in Iran are marching in the streets, protesting a sham election, heroically risking life and limb to try to tear some little breathing space in the smothering shroud of theocracy. Yet President Barack Obama, the leader of the most powerful free nation on earth, responds with mealy-mouthed strategic dithering. The man who in his recent speech in Cairo drew an absurd moral equivalence between Western errors and Islam’s unstinting history of oppression has condemned the Iranian government’s violent reaction to the demonstrations but remains canny and vague in his support of the protestors.

This is too shrewd by half. There comes a time in the affairs of men when bad ideas can be — and therefore must be — powerfully opposed by good ones.

Compare, if you can bear it, President Ronald Reagan’s response to the 1982 crackdown on the Polish union Solidarity by the Soviet Union: “The struggle in the world today for the hearts and minds of mankind is based on one simple question: Is man born to be free, or slave? In country after country, people have long known the answer to that question. We are free by divine right.” In less than a decade, in startlingly large measure because this one idea found so mighty a voice, the Soviet Union was gone.

President Reagan took office knowing that Soviet Union was an Evil Empire, and was not afraid to (a) publicly use such language and (b) do whatever he could to end that regime’s stranglehold over its citizens and satellite nations such as Poland.

Does President Obama believe either of those items when it comes to Iran?

(H/T: SG)