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“We Are Free”:
A Generational Chance for Freedom, Part II
Thaddeus G. McCotter, United States Representative (MI-11)
United States House of Representatives, Floor
June 26, 2009
Mr./Madam Speaker,
From the hellish streets where Iranians demand freedom, voices arise to pray for deliverance and liberty; but, elsewhere, safely ensconced in freedom, others argue for appeasement and “neutrality.” We must choose wisely between these competing voices and visions, lest we betray our allegiance to liberty.
Some voices allege America’s support of Iranian democracy demonstrators harms their cause; strengthens the regime; increases the repression; and, once the freedom seekers are slaughtered, precludes “good” relations with the murderous mullahs.
Their siren song is wrong. Despite pronouncements America has not intervened, the mullahs publicly accuse us of it; their illegitimate puppet Ahmadinejad demands our prostration at the regime’s feet; and, all the while, the regime butchers innocents.
On June 24th, CNN recorded a call from a terrified Iranian girl, who told of democracy demonstrators being hacked with axes, shot, or thrown from bridges. She pleaded: “You should stop this…you should help the people of Iran who demand freedom…you should help us….it’s time to act.” She was pleading to America…she was pleading to us.
Once, another generational chance for freedom was seized, as Soviet dissident and gulag prisoner Natan Sharansky attests:
“We developed our own tapping language to communicate with each other between the walls (of our cells)… We had to develop new communication methods to pass on this great, impossible news.
“Reagan (dared) to call the great Soviet Union an evil empire…that moment made it impossible for anyone in the West to continue closing their eyes to the real nature of the Soviet Union.
“It was one of the most important, freedom-affirming declarations, and we all instantly knew it. For us, that was the moment that really marked the end for them, and the beginning for us….the beginning of a new revolution, a freedom revolution – Reagan's Revolution.”
As for the voices clamoring for a “grand bargain” with Iran’s inhumane regime if it clings to power, Sharansky warns: “How a government treats its own people cannot be separated from how that government could be expected to treat other countries.”
How did the regime treat the family of Neda Agha-Soltan, the student it shot in the streets? Her state executioners refused to tender Neda’s body to her family; buried her without a funeral; banned all signs of mourning; and forced her family to flee from their Tehran home.
To defeat such a regime, Sharansky offers Reagan’s example:
“Ronald Reagan…had the moral clarity to understand the truth, and the courage both to speak the truth and to do what needed to be done to support it.”
What concrete actions can we take today to aid the Iranian people’s march to freedom?
We must increase funding for Radio Farda and other democracy building programs to provide the Iranian people with a free flow of information and communications in their struggle to be free.
The president must use his full authority under the Iran Sanctions Act to deter companies from investing in Iran’s energy sector.
We must place Column 2 tariff rates on Iran’s remaining exports to the United States.
We must pass the Global Online Freedom Act to prevent American companies from assisting foreign governments, including Iran, from censoring and monitoring their people on the internet.
We must pass the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act and the Iran Threat Reduction Act to embargo the flow of refined fuel to, and increase pressure upon, the regime.
The president must prohibit regime members from entering the United States of America.
We must seek a UN Security Council resolution denouncing the regime; demanding an internationally monitored election; and tightening the current UN sanctions against said regime until this election occurs and its outcome’s integrity verified.
We must work with American labor organizations to establish a support fund for Iranian workers striking in protest of the regime.
Finally, we must link all of our relations with Iran – and with those nations abetting the regime’s perpetuation in defiance of its people’s freedom – to human rights.
If we pale and fail to take these measures, we will be haunted by the cries of the oppressed Iranians abandoned to preserve our neutrality in this time of moral crisis.
But, when we act, we will expand freedom to the oppressed and enslaved and ensure it for our children and ourselves. Only then will we have honorably performed our duty to liberty by guaranteeing generations of Americans and Iranians may proclaim, “We are free!”
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Click here for video of Iranian caller to CNN.