Ganji to UN: Don’t Forget About Us

In an open letter addressed to the U.N. Secretary General, Iranian pro-democracy activist Akbar Ganji (no stranger to the Shvitz) asked the organization not to lose sight of lived experience in Iran:

The dispute over the enrichment of uranium should not make the world forget that, although the 1979 revolution of Iran was a popular revolution, it did not lead to the formation of a democratic system that protects human rights. The Islamic Republic is a fundamentalist state that does not afford official recognition to the private sphere. It represses civil society and violates human rights.

In other words, it's about liberalism, stupid. Would we be having the nuclear discussion with a free and democratic Iran? Even if we were would anybody be freaking out? But the current U.S. strategy for fostering liberalism in Iran isn't working very well:

More recently the confrontation between various US Administrations and the Iranian state over the past three decades has made internal conditions very difficult for the proponents of freedom and human rights in Iran. Exploiting the danger posed by the US, the Iranian regime has put military-security forces in charge of the government, shut down all independent domestic media, and is imprisoning human rights activists on the pretext that they are all agents of a foreign enemy.

Unfortunately, between the pitiful U.N. he's addressing and the bumbling administration he's criticizing, it's difficult to know what might actually help. Certainly there's a great deal of urgency to his call for a resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. In the economy of Islamofascism, such a thing would be like Black Tuesday in terms of propaganda and recruitment.