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Iran Provides a Good Lesson

” When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another….”
This is the beginning of our Declaration of Independence, one of the seminal documents of the past three centuries regarding government and its powers and limitations over the people government presides over. The other major document, The Constitution, delineates the powers and the limits of those powers the government may impose.

One of the rights the Constitution provides is Freedom of Speech- a “right” the Iranians are really trying to exercise, through networking, the Facebook and MySpace sites, twitter, and text messaging. Because the Iranian government is a totalitarian regime, and seeks to control their people, they have been busy censoring these various messaging mediums as soon as they can.

Luckily for the Iranians, this is tantamount to plugging holes in a dyke with a finger- it won’t hold for long before another hole springs up.

These people are truly brave- here in our country, if you protest, you might be called a bad name- there, you might be shot, or worse. What’s worse than being shot? Would you really want to know first hand? I doubt it- I know that I would not, but these people risk worse than being shot just by protesting their governments stolen election.

Shortly after Neda Agha-Soltan bled her life out on the Tehran pavement, the man whose 40-second video of her death has ricocheted around the world made a somber calculation in what has become the cat-and-mouse game of evading Iran’s censors. He knew that the government had been blocking Web sites like YouTube andFacebook. Trying to send the video there could have exposed him and his family.

Instead, he e-mailed the two-megabyte video to a nearby friend, who quickly forwarded it to the Voice of America, the newspaper The Guardian in London and five online friends in Europe, with a message that read, “Please let the world know.” It was one of those friends, an Iranian expatriate in the Netherlands, who posted it on Facebook, weeping as he did so, he recalled.

nytimes.com

Yep, these Iranian thugs of the government would have gone after not only the people texting and taking videos, but also their families. What a free and fair government they are. This is stifling free speech on a grand scale, over the little matter of a stolen election. Jimmy Carter would have said it was a fair and free election, but Iran is one country where he has not the fortitude to travel to, even if they would let him.

What is truly disheartening, is the fact that despite all of Hussein’s high and  mighty rhetoric on freedoms that he espoused in Cairo, there has not been a statement coming from the White House that could be said to even remotely have a spine to it.

I understand that Hussein has a calculating mind, but it seems that he wants the current regime to stay in power, thus the limp- wristed commentary he has issued. Perhaps he has more in common with the current dictators than first appears to meet the eye. I hope not, but there could be at least a statement of solidarity with all who seek freedom- but nooooooo.

At least the Internet, and all its permutations, make free speech more possible, and not less so, and this is a good thing- now, if only the President might use his personal bully pulpit, employ his freedom of speech, and at least get his butt off of the fence long enough to say something substantial about a peoples struggle for freedom.

Perhaps he could use his powers to Twitter.
Blake
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