Hounded and castigated by the ruling theocracy's plainclothes roughnecks, Iranian demonstrators called out — in English — to the free world for succor. They pled for Akbar Ganji, an imprisoned democrat journalist who is deathly ill from hunger strike.
One Western man responded:
As Tehran University students clashed with police in Iran yesterday during demonstrations demanding the release of political prisoners, President Bush, from Washington, joined the growing movement calling for the release of dissident journalist Akbar Ganji."The President calls on all supporters of human rights and freedom, and the United Nations, to take up Ganji's case and the overall human rights situation in Iran," a statement released by the White House yesterday read. Calls for comment to U.N. spokesmen were unreturned at press time last night. "The President also calls on the Government of Iran to release Mr. Ganji immediately and unconditionally and to allow him access to medical assistance."
Akbar Ganji won't get any help from the United Nations or Iran's fascist regime; the latter put him in jail for exhorting peaceful liberalization and the former grudgingly accepts Tehran's claims to sovereign brutality. Even with typed words President Bush has done more than his European colleagues, who in their preoccupation with the impossible — convincing strongmen, through nuclear freeze by committee, to yield the tools of subjugation — will be nonplussed.
Yet there are thousands of Ganjis, millions of followers. All despots may reign over people who know by divination that they inherit liberty but Iran is strong irony, the capital of terrorism and the epicenter of a miraculously potent democratic uprising. Saddam Hussein's deposition inspired Near Eastern liberals and placed civilization's military warrant at tyranny's borders. Only when Tehran's Khomeinist skeleton collapses can the war in the Near East be won, our having traded an enemy for close, long-captive allies. President Bush must do as he has promised, and call the Islamic fascists out.
ADVERSARIES WITHIN: A dictatorship's hostility to liberalism should be expected; from an American foreign affairs office, that opposition is reprehensible.