Scum Bag Threatens Israel

This slime ball is an insult to humanity. He needs to be "Martyred"

TEHRAN, Iran –  Israel's existence is an "insult to all humanity," Iran's president said Friday in one of his sharpest attacks yet against the Jewish state, as Israel openly debates whether to attack Iran over its nuclear program.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said confronting Israel is an effort to "protect the dignity of all human beings."
"The existence of the Zionist regime is an insult to all humanity," Ahmadinejad said. He was addressing worshippers at Tehran University after nationwide pro-Palestinian rallies, an annual event marking Quds (Jerusalem) Day on the last Friday of the holy month of Ramadan.
The comments are "reminiscent" of a letter written about the Jews and signed by Adolf Hitler in 1919, Rabbi Marvin Hier, Founder and Dean of the Simon Wisenthal Center, says.
"Even though Ahmadinejad is attacking the state of Israel, we know what he means," Rabbi Hier said.
Israel considers Iran an existential threat because of its nuclear and missile programs, support for radical anti-Israel groups on its borders and repeated references by Iranian leaders to Israel's destruction.
Ahmadinejad himself has repeatedly made such calls, as has Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Rabbi Hier compares Ahmadinejad's comments to the notion found in Hitler’s letter referencing the "removal of Jews all together." "Twenty-two years later he implemented everything, and the same is true about Ahmadinejad," Rabbi Hier said.
"We assume it's only rhetoric, but we once paid a very high price for assuming Hitler was talking rhetoric," he said.
The leader of the Lebanese Shiite militant Hezbollah, which has ties to Iran, says his group will transform the lives of millions of Israelis to "hell" if Israel attacks Lebanon.
Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah says the group has a list of Israeli targets that it can hit with few rockets.
"We can transform the lives of millions of Zionists in occupied Palestine to a real hell," he said.
Israel and Hezbollah fought a deadly, inconclusive monthlong war in 2006, when Hezbollah fired about 4,000 rockets at Israel.
Iran has denied allegations that it is seeking to build nuclear weapons, saying its nuclear program is peaceful and aimed at producing electricity and radioisotopes used to treat cancer patients.
Israel has been carrying on an increasingly public debate about whether to attack Iran's nuclear facilities. Israel's official position is to favor diplomatic and economic measures to persuade Iran to halt its uranium enrichment program, but Israel insists that Iran must not be allowed to obtain nuclear weapons. Israeli leaders say "all options are on the table," a clear reference to a military strike, if they determine that other measures have failed.
"You are not going to make a deal with the Iranians, not under their current leadership," Rabbi Hier said.
Iran has warned it would hit back at Israel if it is attacked, also threatening to strike at American interests in the region.
Ahmadinejad called Israel "a corrupt, anti-human organized minority group standing up to all divine values."
 "Today, confronting the existence of the fabricated Zionist regime is in fact protecting the rights and dignity of all human beings," said Ahmadinejad, with a black and white scarf many Palestinians wear around his neck.
Iran and Israel have been bitter enemies for decades. Khamenei has called Israel a "cancerous tumor" that must be wiped out.
"This is a threat to wipe out the state of Israel," Rabbi Hier said. "We should take these people at their word."
Tensions between Iran and Israel have intensified since 2005, when Ahmadinejad said in a speech that Israel will one day be "wiped off the map."
But Rabbi Hier said he does not "subscribe at all with those who say this is a legitimate form of rhetoric."
"The only way to stop what's happening in Iran is for at least the United States and her allies to say, 'How long are we going to sit by and take this threat?'" he said.
The Iranian president has also described the Holocaust, when 6 million Jews were killed by German Nazis and their collaborators during World War II, as a "myth."
"Most intellectuals in 1939 and 1938 did not think Hitler was serious, they thought they knew better, but they didn't know better, and we paid a dear price that we were not on the right side of history," he said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2012/08/17/iran-calls-israel-existence-insult-to-all-humanity/#ixzz23rYcP4rt

Op-Ed: MEDIA MATTERS: Media Bias Against Israel

An expert talks about how Israel is damaged in the media. Everyone is responsible.

Ronn Torossian, CEO of 5WPR

The author is CEO of 5WPR, 1 of the 25 largest PR Agencies in the US.

► More from this writer

Through the years, the media has had repeated continual bias against Israel. As one who works closely with the media owning a leading PR Firm, there are many who criticize the media, from inside and outside the Jewish world.
This media coverage is biased, and does so much damage to Israel and the Jewish people worldwide:
-An adviser to Natan Sharansky, the head of the Jewish Agency, said a few years ago, "You can't brainwash people for four years that Israel is an illegitimate country and that Israelis are like the Nazis and that Israelis are monsters and expect that nothing will happen to Jews." He is right – words and actions have grave consequences.
-“The discrepancy between what actually happened and the version of what happened provided by sources is an enormous gray area.” Jay Epstein.
-Prime Minister Netanyahu was recorded in an interview as saying the two main enemies of Israel are the New York Times and Haaretz. He commented, ‘They set the agenda for an anti-Israel campaign all over the world. Journalists read them every morning and base their news stories … on what they read in the New York Times and Haaretz.’”
-“The quack, the charlatan, the jingo, and the terrorist can flourish only where the public is deprived of independent access to information. But where all news comes at second-hand, where all testimony is uncertain, men cease to respond to truths and respond simply to opinions. The environment in which they act is not realities themselves but the pseudo-environment of reports, rumors, and guesses. The whole reference of thought comes to be what somebody asserts and not what actually is.” Walter Lippman, Liberty and the News

-“We are still fighting, not just against terrorism, but for fair treatment in the media. Given the overwhelming influence of the media on public perception, this is a battle we must win.” Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein
-“If newspapers are useful in overthrowing tyrants, it is only to establish a tyranny of their own.” James Fenimore Cooper.
-“WHEREAS the conflict in the Middle East between Israel and her Arab neighbors has occupied much of the attention of American journalism, in all of its forms, since the founding of the modern State of Israel in 1948, making Israel a daily staple of print, audio and video news outlets; and WHEREAS news reporting is a subjective art, where facts, events, visual images and opinions are selected by the reporter in order to construct a narrative of a news story that is of interest, and that the personal bias of the reporter always governs the subjective process of selection; and WHEREAS numerous examples abound of gross violations of accuracy, imbalanced reporting and distortions of the truth in reporting about the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians…THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that the Rabbinical Assembly call upon Jews everywhere to pay special attention to the way Israel is portrayed in the media and the conflict in the Middle East is reported. BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that when a violation of accuracy or media bias against Israel occurs, that letters, emails and phone calls of protest be directed towards those media outlets and their sponsors.” Rabbinical Assembly of America
-“Is it not obvious that society cannot continue indefinitely to get its news by this wasteful method? One large section of the community organized to circulate lies, and another large section of the community organized to refute the lies! We might as well send a million men out into the desert to dig holes, and then send another million to fill up the holes.” Upton Sinclair, The Brass Check

-“A lot of this hatred and intolerance comes from ignorance. People don’t know the facts…Israel can do no right in the UK press. Israel always is wrong and everything has a very negative slant. It has become very black and white, where the Palestinians are right, and Israel is wrong… It is helping poison people towards Israel because they are not being told the truth of the conflict. I think there is a case of if you tell a lie enough times, people accept it as being true.” Kasim Hafeez, Muslim Zionist
-“Some people in the press, I think, are just lazy as hell. There are times when I pitch a story and they do it word for word. That’s just embarrassing. They’re adjusting to a time that demands less quality and more quantity. And it works to my advantage most of the time, because I think most reporters have liked me packaging things for them. Most people will opt for what’s easier, so they can move on to the next thing. “ Kurt Bardella, former press secretary for republican congressman Darrell Issa.
So many of us read the media regularly and yell at the TV, or throw the newspaper down in disgust. Wrongly disgraced former United States secretary of Labor Ray Donovan asked the court when he was acquitted of false charges that ruined his career: “Which office do I go to get my reputation back?”
Israel needs to visit that same place.

One of the reasons I who grew up in the Betar youth movement of Ze’ev Jabotinsky chose to work in public relations was to influence the words of the media. In 1932, Jabotinsky said:
“Who were the first to teach us to always interfere in matters that are not ours, to judge people and nations, even though we were never chosen for the position of judge? The work of the publicist is a legacy from the Prophets of Israel…Our passion is to speak, to proclaim—“Shouting” is what the same audience calls it, ‘we have no need for words, give us actions.’ One thing that audience forgets is that speech is also an action – Perhaps the most authentic of all other actions. Cities have been destroyed, and more will fall, but what was shouted in the wilderness thousands of years ago is alive and still relevant. The world was created by the Word. The world will be mended by the Article.”

Media bias harms Israel – and anyone who knows right from wrong has the obligation to speak out. In today’s world, we found out about the killing of Gadhafi or Bin Laden – and so much other relevant news from people sharing media themselves.
With the rise of digital media, and other tools, everybody today is a journalist, and everybody today is in media. Everybody has access to making a statement, to saying something, and that’s good and exciting, but also scary.

We all must help improve Israel’s public image and help Israel however we can.
Public Relations.
Ronn Torossian is CEO of 5WPR, and author of crisis PR book “For Immediate Release”

When did the Queen of England, star of the Olympic opening ceremony, become a Jewish grandmother?

Friday, August 3, 2012

Bubbe Elizabeth the Second

By Rachel Shukert|

Queen Elizabeth II speaks during the Opening Ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games on July 27, 2012. (Cameron Spencer/Getty Images)

 Most 86-year-old women, whatever their ethnic persuasion, do not arrive at important events via helicopter parachute, escorted by a hot piece like Daniel Craig; many of them can’t even stand up in the shower anymore. But everything else, from the ongepotchket peach lace dress to the passive-aggressive “oy, mein back” shuffle to the seats to that face, seemingly caught constantly in mid-kvetch, saying “For this you made me come out in the middle of the night, sitting outside in the rain like a dog?” Not a trace of her former impersonal friendliness, of smiling Gentile stoicism, remained. At the Olympic opening ceremony, somewhere in between the coal miners performing a Dickensian rendition of the “Stool Boom” number from Waiting for Guffman and the interpretive dance salute to the National Health Service, Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth the Second, became the whole world’s bitchy Jewish bubbe. I half expected her to take an ancient sucking candy from that famous purse of hers and unwrap it loudly during the moment of silence “for everyone” that the IOC creepily rammed into the ceremony at the last minute.

Was she like this all along? The question of any stray Jewish heritage within the British Royal Family has been explored mainly by the British Israelite movement—for the most part a cheerful and benign group of loonies who since the time of Queen Victoria have held that the Ten Lost Tribes somehow found their way to the sceptered isles, where they became the progenitors of the British people, making the Windsors direct-line descendants of King David—and the usual bunch of anti-Semitic Internet crazies who believe that everyone in a position of power today is somehow a secret Rothschild taking part in a crypto-Zionist Judeo-Bolshevist conspiracy to control the world.
Whether it’s the Jewish question of her own family, or indeed, in any other capacity, the queen’s personal views on the Chosen People are, as on all other matters, a mystery. The princess royal “regrets to say that she has never been to Israel”—as it was written to me in the letter I received from her male secretary (early feminist click moment, there) when I wrote to her for a school project at my Jewish Day School in approximately 1988 in a manner so politely chagrined I was ashamed I had asked. Prince Philip has been to the Jewish state, albeit in an unofficial capacity, when his mother Princess Andrew of Greece and Denmark was honored as one of the Righteous of Nations, and of all the many, many, many groups, ethnic or otherwise, upon which he has aired, shall we say, impolitic remarks over his equally numerous years in the public eye, Jews have, almost shockingly, not been among them.
On the other hand, well, let’s just say it’s not missing any fingers. Prince Harry’s youthful swastika-wearing may have been a genuinely innocent, and well-atoned-for, joke gone wrong, but the Duke and Duchess of Windsor’s habitual Heil Hitler’s certainly were not. And even the cuddly Queen Mother, the Lots O’ Huggin’ Bear of the British aristocracy, had, typically of her time and class, plenty of not-so-nice things to say about the Jews behind closed doors. More recently, the late Princess Margaret became so discombobulated at a dinner party by comedian and U.K. national treasure Stephen Fry’s admission of matrilineal descent that she allegedly started screaming: “He’s a Jew! He’s a Jew!” to the assembled guests. Although, to be fair, the issue was a touchy subject for Margaret; the most memorable note of several her vengeful ex-husband Lord Snowdon apparently left around the house for her to find in the waning days of their marriage read: “You look like a Jewish manicurist and I hate you.”
It’s an observation not totally out of left field. When you look at pictures of the aged Princess Margaret, sans tiara and imperial sash, she does look not unlike your mother’s cousin Frieda who started doing nails after her divorce from that schmuck with the dry cleaner. Similarly, if there’s a more classic example of the archetypal nebbish than the young Prince Charles, I have yet to see him. Of course, one could argue that rather than Jewish, they just look German, perhaps lending some credence to Kafka’s famous assertion that these two groups are far more inextricably linked than either is entirely comfortable with, but that’s a whole rabbit-hole of head-measuring pseudo-science I don’t even want to get into.
The point is the queen, and her increasing forays into Judaic grumpiness of late: the shpilkes at the opening ceremony, the hissy fit with Annie Leibowitz, the open disapproval for the “creepiness” of the headless mannequin wearing Kate Middleton’s wedding dress that someone put right in the middle of her living room. Has she been hanging out with Camilla’s friend Joan Rivers lately? Or is she just really, really old? Which itself begs the question: Do Jews act like old people or do old people all act like Jews? Are we just born without the self-censoring part of the brain that takes other people eight decades and/or a massive stroke to attain, or is there something in the pool water at the indoor aquatic aerobics classes? Which came first, the suffering or the refusal to do it in silence?
As for Her Madge, if at the closing ceremony she starts complaining about the angle of the chair back and would it kill them to get her a cold glass of water, but not too cold, because oy, it bothers her dentures, I guess we’ll see if the Bubbification of the Sovereign is complete. In the meantime, pass the sucking candy and G-d save the Queen.
***
Like this article? Sign up for our Daily Digest to get Tablet Magazine’s new content in your inbox each morning.

Rachel Shukert, a Tablet Magazine columnist on pop culture, is the author of the memoirs Have You No Shame? and Everything Is Going to be Great. Her Twitter feed is @rachelshukert.

Ahmadinejad: Annihilate Israel, 'Axis of Unity of World Powers'

 by Chana Ya'ar

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has once again called for the annihilation of Israel, which he labeled “the axis of unity of the world hegemonic powers.”
Speaking in advance of International Qods Day, set this year for August 17, Ahmadinejad repeated his annual litany of hate for the Jewish State in a meeting with ambassadors and embassy personnel of Islamic nations in Tehran, according to the official state-run Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA), quoting from a statement posted on the website of his presidential office.
"It has now been some 400 years that a horrendous Zionist clan has been ruling the major world affairs, and behind the scenes of the major power circles, in political, media, monetary and banking organizations in the world, they have been the decision makers...” the Iranian president claimed.
"The Zionist regime is both the symbol of the hegemony of the Zionism over the world and the means in the hand of the oppressor powers for expansion of their hegemony in the region and in the world,” he went on.
"The Qods Day is not merely a strategic solution for the Palestinian problem, as it is to be viewed as a key for solving the world problems; any freedom lover and justice seeker in the world must do its best for the annihilation of the Zionist regime in order to pave the path for the establishment of justice and freedom in the world,” he declared.
"Zionism is the modern times plight of the human society and when we meet the European politicians they say speak transparently about everything, but they refrain from talking about the Zionist regime, which proves that Israel is the axis of unity of the world hegemonic powers,” he added.

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/

Tehran Takedown

 How to Spark an Iranian Revolution 
by Michael Ledeen 

Focusing on Iran’s nuclear program misses the point. Defending the United States and its allies from Iran and its proxies requires regime change in Tehran, which cannot be achieved with sanctions and diplomacy alone. Since war is neither necessary nor desirable, Washington should start backing a domestic revolution in Iran.
MICHAEL LEDEEN is Freedom Scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. His blog, Faster, Please, is at PJ Media. The nuclear question is at the center of most countries’ Iran policies. China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States have all engaged in negotiations to convince Tehran to give up its presumed quest for the bomb. Now, with talks sputtering, Western powers have implemented increasingly tough sanctions, including the European Union’s recent embargo on Iranian oil, in the hope of compelling the regime to reverse course. Yet history suggests, and even many sanctions advocates agree, that sanctions will not compel Iran’s leaders to scrap their nuclear program. In fact, from Fidel Castro’s Cuba to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, hostile countries have rarely changed policy in response to Western embargoes. Some sanctions advocates counter that sanctions did work to get Chile to abandon communism, South Africa to end apartheid, and Libya to give up its nuclear program. But the Chilean and South African governments were not hostile — they were pro-Western, and thus more amenable to the West’s demands. And Libya’s Muammar al-Qaddafi ended his nuclear pursuit only after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, fearing that he would suffer the same fate as Saddam Hussein. Iran, which is clearly hostile and which watched what just happened to a disarmed Libya, will not back down. Some therefore see sanctions as only a prelude to military action — by Israel, the United States, or both. In other words, current Iran strategy boils down to an eventual choice between appeasement and attack. Neither outcome is attractive. However, if the United States and its allies broadened their perspective and paid attention not merely to Iran’s nuclear program but also to the Islamic Republic’s larger assault on the West, they would see that a third and better option exists: supporting a democratic revolution in Iran. Obsession with the nuclear question has obscured the fact that, since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran has waged a low-level war on the United States. That war began in earnest in 1983, when, evidence suggests, Iranian-backed operatives bombed the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut. Such violence continued throughout the 1980s, as Hezbollah, a terrorist organization created by Iran, kidnapped and murdered Americans in Lebanon. In addition to supporting Hezbollah, Iran started funding other terrorist groups, such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. In the last decade, Iranian agents have attacked U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. Late last year, the Obama administration revealed that Iranian agents had attempted to assassinate the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States and to blow up the Saudi and Israeli embassies in Washington, D.C. In January, Ali Saeedi, Khamenei’s representative to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, admitted that the regime continues to fear the strength of the Green Movement. In short, the nuclear program is not the central issue in Iran policymaking — defending the United States and its allies from Iranian terrorists and their proxies is. To meet that goal, Washington must replace the Islamic Republic’s regime. The theocrats in Tehran call the United States “the great Satan,” and waging war against it is one of the Iranian leadership’s core missions. The Ayatollah Khomeini proclaimed that as his goal very soon after the shah was overthrown in 1979. Calls of “Death to America” have been a constant refrain ever since. Regime change cannot be achieved by sanctions and diplomacy alone. And, although war might bring down the regime, it is neither necessary nor desirable. Supporting a domestic revolution is a wiser strategy. The Iranian regime is not only at war with the United States and its allies; it is also at war with its own people. The regime represses Iranian citizens, restricting their civil liberties and imprisoning, torturing, and killing political opponents. Popular discontent boiled over into open protest after a rigged election in June 2009, as what came to be known as the Green Movement launched an open challenge to the political status quo. The regime brutally suppressed the protests and is keeping the movement’s two leaders, presidential candidates Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, along with Mr. Mousavi’s wife, under house arrest. Conventional wisdom describes the Green Movement as a spent force, citing the lack of mass demonstrations over the past year and half. Iranian authorities regularly restrict and censor the Internet and intercept and block cell phone and satellite communications, and they have increased deployments of security forces in cities across the country. In such an atmosphere, skeptics argue, there can be little opposition to speak of, let alone one with the leadership and mass support to challenge the regime. But this was also the conventional wisdom back in early 2009, and it is as wrong now as it was then. The West was caught unawares by the explosion of popular rage after Mousavi’s election was stolen, and it failed to support the opposition. The regime paid no price for its crackdown. In fact, despite the government lockdown, dissenters today have continued to strike out against the regime through acts such as the sabotage of oil and natural gas pipelines. The disruption of the natural gas line between Iran and Turkey in late June, which was reported by the state-run Press TV, is only the latest of many such attacks. Last March, opposition activists privately claimed responsibility for attacks on two Revolutionary Guards Corps installations. One was Zarin Dasht, where missile fuel and warheads are manufactured. The other was Natanz, a major uranium enrichment center. The explosion took place deep underground, leading to a shutdown of the entire complex. Meanwhile, although the Green Movement’s leaders are still under house arrest, they continue to issue statements to their supporters. And according to a recent online government poll, the population is fed up. Nearly two-thirds of respondents said that they favored giving up the nuclear program in exchange for an end to sanctions. The poll was quickly yanked off the Web site. For their part, Iranian authorities are worried. In January, Ali Saeedi, Khamenei’s representative to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, admitted that the regime continues to fear the strength of the Green Movement. Regime leaders are at pains to reassure the public that Mousavi and Karroubi are being well treated. If Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei wanted to demonstrate the weakness of the opposition, he would have subjected both to the same harsh treatment that has been meted out to many of their followers. But as Saeedi told Fars, the Iranian state news agency, Mousavi and Karroubi have “supporters and followers,” as well as “a few [clerics] who continue to back elements within the sedition” — the term used by the regime to refer to the Green Movement. The regime’s anxiety about the Green Movement also led it to delay all elections in the country for three years. And when it finally held parliamentary elections this past May, it banned scores of candidates from running and deployed thousands of security forces at polling stations to prevent protests. Their fear might also be the reason that Khamenei avoided speaking at the Revolutionary Guards Day festivities in late June, the first time he had done so in over two decades. Similarly, the regime has reduced the number of anti-American protests it stages, perhaps worrying that the reformers would hijack them. When two popular (and apolitical) Iranian artists died this summer — the actor Iraj Ghaderi and the musician Hassan Kassai — their funerals were held without fanfare and in the middle of the night. The regime is clearly doing all it can to keep Iranians from gathering in the streets. By themselves, the strength of the opposition and the regime’s fears do not justify Western intervention. After all, several Middle Eastern dictators have fallen of late, only to be replaced by actors more hostile to U.S. interests. And some experts contend that the same could happen in Iran. Mousavi served as prime minister of Iran from 1981 to 1989 and played a key role in the creation of the Islamic Republic. Many, including U.S. President Barack Obama, have raised the possibility that his accession might not change much. So, before jumping into the fray on behalf of the opposition, the United States and its allies must ask whether the Green Movement would end Iran’s support for terrorism against the United States and its allies, stop oppressing its own people, and terminate the country’s nuclear weapons program. Although it is dangerous for opposition leaders to be totally explicit about all such matters, their answers are encouraging. During the 2009 electoral campaign, and on several subsequent occasions, Mousavi promised to end Iranian backing for terrorist organizations — a promise that resonates with large numbers of Iranian citizens. In February 2011, demonstrators carried banners decrying the regime’s support for foreign terrorist groups, with slogans such as “Don’t talk to us about the Palestinians, talk about us.” The Green Movement has also pledged to dismantle many oppressive practices of the Islamic Republic. Although the group’s leaders claim that they want to restore the values of the 1979 revolution, during the 2009 presidential election, Mousavi’s wife, Zahra Rahnavard, campaigned alongside him and declared her support of women who dispense with wearing the veil. It was a stark act of defiance against a deeply misogynistic regime. Mousavi, meanwhile, has promised tolerance of religious dissenters, the release of all political prisoners, and greater separation of church and state. As the Green leaders wrote to the Obama administration in November 2009, “religion, by the will of the Iranian people of today, has to be separated from the state in order to guarantee unity of Iran.” Even from house arrest, Mousavi has continued to send signals that he would overturn the policies of the current regime. In the past year, he urged Iranians to read two books: News of a Kidnapping, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and The Right to Heresy, by Stefan Zweig. The first volume, which deals with a wave of kidnappings in Colombia by drug gangs, inspired a popular Iranian Facebook page called “News of a Kidnapping, the status of a president in captivity.” The second book addresses a revolt against John Calvin by the sixteenth century cleric Sebastian Castellio, after the torture and execution of the heretic Michael Servetus. It is at once a call for religious toleration and an essay on those thinkers who were crushed during their lifetime, only to emerge triumphant in death. By turning to these texts, Mousavi issued a direct challenge to Khamenei and oriented his movement with Western values. It is hard to pinpoint the nuclear intentions of the Green Movement’s leaders, but there is reason for guarded optimism; they have repeatedly condemned the regime’s “adventurism” in foreign affairs, and would certainly seek better relations with the West. As Iranian crude oil production drops, a democratic Iran might opt for nuclear energy, but it seems unlikely that such a government would continue the secret weapons program. And the West, including Israel, would have far less to fear from a free Iran, whatever weapons it might possess, than it does from the current regime. Given the potential for a successful democratic revolution in Iran — and the potential for a democratic government to end Iran’s war against us — the question is how the United States and its allies can best support the Green Movement. Although an Iranian revolution may seem unlikely to the casual observer, the Iranian people can be said to have revolution in their DNA, having carried out three revolutions in the twentieth century. Many skeptics argue that any Western aid to the Green Movement would delegitimize it in such a nationalist country. Yet, during the mass demonstrations in 2009 and 2010, protesters waved signs and banners saying “Obama, where are you?” Moreover, in a carefully unsigned letter to the White House in late 2009, Green Movement leaders responded to an administration query by saying that “it is up to the countries of the free world to make up their mind. Will they… push every decision to the future until it is too late, or will they reward the brave people of Iran and simultaneously advance Western interests and world peace?” Even so, the West snubbed the uprising, insisting that the Iranian opposition did not want outside help. As far as I know, there is no evidence to suggest that an attempt has been made since then to speak directly with the Green Movement inside the country. (Mousavi has said several times that the Green Movement does not have spokespeople or representatives outside Iran.) Unable or unwilling to engage with the opposition, the West has devoted its energy to the nuclear question alone, pursuing a policy that will produce war or diplomatic and strategic failure. That is why the time has come for the United States and other Western nations to actively support Iran’s democratic dissidents. The same methods that took down the Soviet regime should work: call for the end of the regime, broadcast unbiased news about Iran to the Iranian people, demand the release of political prisoners (naming them whenever possible), help those prisoners communicate with one another, enlist international trade unions to build a strike fund for Iranian workers, and perhaps find ways to provide other kinds of economic and technological support. Meanwhile, the West should continue nuclear negotiations and stick to the sanctions regime, which shows the Iranian people resistance to their oppressive leaders. Iran’s democratic revolutionaries themselves must decide what kind of Western help they most need, and how to use it. But they will be greatly encouraged to see the United States and its allies behind them. There are many good reasons to believe that this strategy can succeed. Not least, the Iranian people have already demonstrated their willingness to confront the regime; the regime’s behavior shows its fear of the people. The missing link is a Western decision to embrace and support democratic revolution in Iran — the country that, after all, initiated the challenge to the region’s tyrants three summers ago.