There are at least 19 confirmed fatalities in Iran and as many as 150 unconfirmed (per CNN). Here is Obama’s response:
The White House said the president had been monitoring the situation during the day, meeting repeatedly with senior advisers. But the statement largely echoed the president’s measured response since the election crisis began a week ago.
“The Iranian government must understand that the world is watching,” the president’s statement said. “The universal rights to assembly and free speech must be respected, and the United States stands with all who seek to exercise those rights.”
The president has not yet said whether he thinks the election was stolen but he hinted at that with a reference to “truth” in the later part of his statement.
“Martin Luther King once said — ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’ I believe that. The international community believes that. And right now, we are bearing witness to the Iranian peoples’ belief in that truth, and we will continue to bear witness,” the president said.
The ‘truth’ being, of course, that the Iranian government stole an election and is now slaughtering people in the street like dogs.
It would be nice if his Administration didn’t block the arc as they are doing now.
How so?
Torture photos and FISA . No accountability for the Bush Administration’s war crimes.
ya know, my feelings exactly.
when I saw the comment about his belief in the “arc of the moral universe bending toward justice”, my immediate reaction was “no you don’t.”
i realize how deeply cynical that sounds, but seriously. this country has no moral standing right now to lecture others about “justice”.
by the way, that fact is also terribly sad and shameful.
Well, it’s a little odd that the strongest response he can muster is to tell them that the whole world is watching. Considering that he is extending an invasion and occupation of Iraq which never had any rational reason for existing and he is expanding the war in Afghanistan in which we are losing ground by the day and seem to have little support from the Afghanis.
Now he’s presented with a situation where people demonstrably thirsting for freedom and democracy are being massacred and all he can do is wag his finger at their tormentors.
Three theaters and he hasn’t claimed the moral high ground in any of them.
What exactly is the moral high ground here? Let me guess… somewhere in between what he’s said and what the neocons want him to say?
yet another measured response…not that it’s unwarranted. in fact, hands off may well be the best policy here given that we’re, the u.s., is already being accused of complicity.
l’m curious about who’s running the show at state… they’ve got to be burning the midnight oil over there since hillary’s scheduled for surgery for her broken elbow…steinberg?…an old clintonite
Yes, the CIA has mucked around in Iran so much for so long that we should keep our hands off, because they are dirty and bloody.
A suicide bomb at the shrine of Khomeini shows some element is trying to steer these protests from seeking to correct a system to threatening it directly.
The weakness of Iran’s regime has always lain with it’s supposed strength: the theocracy is simply unable to attain it’s stated goals, and short of that, all the population control jazz stops being tolerable and festers.. until..
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31457916/ns/world_news-mideastn_africa/
Interesting tines indeed.