Those who didn’t catch Governor Scott Walker’s speech last Friday before The Citadel missed an impressive performance and thoughtful analysis linking together the problems of the Islamic State and Iran. “ISIS is a radical perversion of Sunni Islam,” Walker remarked, “but there is another face of Islamic extremism, and that is the Shiite regime in Iran. Today, the Islamic Republic of Iran remains the world’s leading state-sponsor of terrorism. Iran is not a country we should be doing business with.”
Indeed, the mullahs of Iran remain one of the gravest threats facing the United States around the world. The Iranian regime runs rampant over its own people’s human rights and destabilizes the region around it, while threatening to pursue nuclear weapons capability. “To believe that a stable and lasting Middle East can be built by working with Iran, any more than by working with ISIS, isn’t statesmanship,” Walker said. “It’s pure fantasy.”
Since his first year in office, President Obama’s pursuit of a nuclear weapons accord has led him to ignore the appalling human rights situation inside Iran. His administration betrayed Iranian pro-democracy activists in 2009 when it shunned the democratic-oriented Green Movement, leaving protestors in the streets of Tehran asking Obama, in English, “Which side are you on?” The democracy movement in Iran was a distraction from the President’s focus on nuclear issues.
“President Obama and Hillary Clinton refused to support those inside Iran who spoke out about the oppression of the regime, worrying it would undermine their outreach to the Supreme Leader,” Walker said in his speech. “This is wrong. America must always be a bright and steady beacon of hope for freedom.” Indeed, we should never leave in doubt that we stand with those who support democracy and human rights, whether in Iran or anywhere else around the world.
And yet sadly, for the past six-plus years, the Obama Administration has looked the other way while the Iranian regime has ramped up its torture of political prisoners, imprisoned journalists, and bloggers, treated women and religious minorities as second class citizens, and imposed the death penalty with greater frequency (nearly 700 have been executed already this year alone). The United Nations has expressed “alarm” at the increasing number of death penalty cases. “Iran continues to execute more individuals per capita than any country in the world,” according to Ahmed Shaheed, UN special rapporteur for Iran. The pace of executions has increased since Hassan Rouhani’s election as president in 2013, undercutting hopes some had that he would ring in a more liberal regime. Just within the past week, a Kurdish activist, Behrouz Alkhani, was executed by Iranian authorities despite the fact that he was waiting on an appeal of his case before Iran’s Supreme Court.
Due process is non-existent in Iran, reflecting a total lack of respect for human life and human rights. The way a regime treats its own people is often indicative of how it will behave on the international stage. Given the Iranian leadership’s brutal repression of the rights of its own people, it is an untrustworthy interlocutor in any international negotiations and a threat to the human rights of Iranians and people around the world.
Beyond the abysmal treatment of fellow Iranians, the regime remains the lead sponsor of terrorism and holds at least three Americans hostage—Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian, former U.S. Marine Amir Hekmati, and pastor Saeed Abedini; another American, Robert Levinson, was last seen in Iran eight years ago. This past Saturday (August 29) marked the fourth anniversary of the capture of Hekmati. His fate and that of the other hostages was never a factor in the nuclear negotiations. As Governor Walker rightly stated, “It is a stain on our nation’s honor that our countrymen languish in Iranian prisons while we are freeing up billions of dollars for the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism and legitimizing its massive nuclear program.” Indeed, money from the returned frozen assets will not benefit average Iranians but will instead maintain the system of repression and finance Iran’s support for terrorism.
Average Iranians may admire and respect Americans and want normalization in relations, but going back to the 1979 revolution and the takeover of the American embassy for 444 days, the Iranian mullahs have had it in for Americans, to say nothing of Israelis. As long as the regime in Tehran keeps Americans hostage, we cannot expect it to treat its own people, let alone foreigners, with respect and decency; nor can we expect it to abide by the international commitments it undertakes, whether related to human rights or nuclear weapons. To think otherwise is, to borrow a phrase, “pure fantasy.”
