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 Militias get position in Central Tehran, including Baharestan Sq.
>Army Helicopters 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 crowd 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 chopping 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.
This frantic phone call from a Tehran woman will break your heart as you consider our standard response has been "that there are sets of international norms and principles about violence" and that "the international community is watching." Part of yesterday's response by President Obama in a press conference included "that there is a peaceful path that will lead to stability and legitimacy (of the Iranian regime) and prosperity for the Iranian people. We hope they take it." The Iranian theocratic regime clearly is not interested.
There should not be - nor should have there ever been - invitations to the ruthless Iranian regime's international ambassadors to celebrate anything with us, anywhere, unless it is an invitation to a tribunal on charges of crimes against humanity.
To my intelligent friends who have been arguing the logic of our president's near silence on the issue of Iran - and not without merit on certain points - you can disengage from me now. I will entertain none of it any longer.
There was a brutal murder of an assuredly unarmed protester of the up-close-and-personal variety. An act, and one not isolated, which requires the presence of inhumane malice and aggression and the absence of humanity. The traits required for massacres upon the unarmed. There is no nuance, no logical approach, no deft explanation that covers near silence and inadequate, tepid condemnation of the meekest sort. To decline any mention of possible repercussions on the regime for these acts "because we don't know how this is going to turn out" is moral cowardice of the highest order. Look at the picture above and listen to the frantic woman calling in to CNN again. They seem to "know how this is going to turn out."
There is a way to condemn a regime axing its citizens in the streets of Tehran and other cities across Iran without "making this about the US."
http://threatswatch.org/rapidrecon/2009/06/unimaginable-horror-in-tehran/ (Threats Watch)
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