The West Betrays the Iranian Protest Movement

From Matthias Küntzel:

The Iranians who are resisting the electoral putsch are not only being humiliated and beaten by the batons and bullets of the Pasdaran but also by the inaction of the so-called freedom-loving world: no call for a special session of the UN, no threats of sanctions, no boycott declaration, no economic embargo, not even the smallest warning—let's just not take sides or make any commitments as long as the result of the struggle in Iran remains open. The West, so the argument goes, has to be careful to avoid providing any pretext to vilify the Iranian opposition. So Obama doesn't need days but weeks to slowly pull back his outstretched hand, while the German Foreign Ministry argues all the more emphatically for a dialogue with the putsch-regime. Undauntedly, the German-Iranian Chamber of Industry and Commerce in Tehran advertises the building of a German-Iranian Business Center in Berlin, while the German-Iranian Chamber of Commerce in Hamburg reported today that its upcoming seminar on "Export Certification in Iran Trade" (July 13) is already overcrowded. And haven't we gotten along somehow or other with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during the past four years?

But this time this optimistic hope that things will just go on is a self-deception. Khamenei and Ahmadinejad represent the apocalyptic wing of the regime that has just carried out a coup d'etat. Both of them have politicized the mystical image of the Shiite Messiah, the "twelfth Imam," and they have mystified politics through appeals to the alleged will of that imaginary creature. In his Friday sermon, Khamenei attributed even the high electoral participation to the influence of that same twelfth Imam. For Ahmadinejad the return of the Messiah, so longed for, depends on maximal chaos and unrest in the world and on the destruction of Israel. It is therefore only consistent for him to regard the "nuclearization of Iran" as the "beginning of a fundamental change in the world."

More at the link.

See also, "Devastating: Obama's Abandonment of Democracy and Human Rights."

Additional commentary at Memeorandum, especially, José María Aznar, "Silence Has Consequences for Iran," and Astute Bloggers, "Aznar: "This is no time for hesitation on the part of the West."