Liberty’s voice falls still, quiet

The air was thick with anger. Young men hurled rocks and shouts. Shots rang out and protesters dropped to the ground where pools of blood formed. Americans may remember the scene, not from flickering YouTube video images but from the yellowed pages of history. It happened March 5, 1770, on snow-covered streets during what came to be known as the Boston Massacre, an event that did not spur revolution but helped ensure that the moment would not fail in coming.

Moments that followed are lesser known in America’s fraying memory. France, favorable to revolutions until they turned to a storm at the Bastille, supplied military support eyeing a weakening of the despised British Empire, and Holland supplied badly needed financial support eyeing enhanced commercial trade for their pulsing capitalist system. Absent these helping hands, America’s experiment in liberty likely would have collapsed upon itself, felled by a power superior in might and resources.

A revolutionary spirit courses now in Tehran, where rebels yearn for kindness from the power that arose from the thwarting of British tyranny. But they seek nothing of the kind afforded patriots of yore. Battered for three decades by the same wild-eyed radical Islamic fury that dropped towers into dusty heaps of rubble, Iran’s bravehearts seek principally recognition from the world’s civil bastions that the cause is right.

This does not require military backing – for which no reasonable people have called – but it might include diplomatic aid to those seeking to tear down a government whose original acts included a raid on the U.S. embassy in Tehran and the taking of hostages amid another administration’s weakness. Obama says picking a side – something France has been willing to do – only will allow Tehran to saddle America with blame for unrest over a rigged presidential election and provide further impetus for a bloody crackdown.

The president forgets, apparently, that Iran’s ruling theocracy regards America as the “Great Satan,” and fails to notice that his reticence has not subverted the regime’s bent toward brutality. Obama has ventured far enough on this thin diplomatic limb to refer to Iran’s Ayatollah Khameni under an appellation no other American president has been willing to use, “Supreme Leader.” Still, Khameni sneers, raising the specter of Waco: “Do you know what human rights are?” he sniffed. “During the time of Democrats, the time of Clinton, 80 people were burned alive in Waco. Now you are talking about human rights?”

Obama has foisted on America a delusion that we can only conclude he himself holds, that President George W. Bush fomented Islamic thugs’ hatred of the United States with his insistence on waging a war in isolation when allies failed to join. But the Iranian hostage crisis, the embassy bombing in Yemen, the attack on the USS Cole and 9/11 all preceded the invasion of Iraq. Radical Islamists hate that which rebels in Iran now seek and which is uniquely found in America, authentic freedom and a meaningful voice in how they will be governed and by whom.

At this writing, Obama stands in the Rose Garden brandishing terms like “insidious” in reference to Big Tobacco. Cigarette makers now will bow to the Food and Drug Administration. Despots in Iran will not respond similarly to the president’s feeling “troubled” by the crushing of free speech in Tehran’s streets. They will laugh insidiously and proceed, unrestrained by faint whispers from a country formed by cries for freedom raised by lovers of liberty and echoed by more powerful voices rippling across the Atlantic. How sweet the sound would be now as another cruel regime wobbles.