Obama Makes a Statement on Iran

The NY Times reports on the situation in Iran and includes the following as a statement from President Obama:

In a statement on Saturday afternoon, Mr. Obama called the government’s reaction “violent and unjust,” and, quoting Martin Luther King Jr., warned again that the world was watching what happened in Tehran.

“We mourn each and every innocent life that is lost,” he said, adding: “Suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away. The Iranian people will ultimately judge the actions of their own government. If the Iranian government seeks the respect of the international community, it must respect the dignity of its own people and govern through consent, not coercion.

“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.”

Those words sound noble, but are they real? I was going to include a clip showing the brutality of the Iranian regime. When I checked the clip before I inserted it here I discovered that it had been removed by YouTube with this note "removed due to terms of use violation". In other words, President Obama says "the world is watching" but YouTube has decided to side with the repressive regime and make sure we remain innocent of knowledge of the brutality. Talk about mixed messages!

The odd thing for me is that just over a century ago people went to public executions for "entertainment". Now we are too delicate a creature to see violence and bloodshed. If you can get past the YouTube censors you will see that Iranians treat the shed blood symbolically. They dip their hands in it and show it to all around to pass the message that life is sacred and that blood was shed. But the executives at YouTube think that showing the world as it really is is "morally wrong". In their world, we hide our eyes from the truth. Obviously if we live in a bowdlerized world we will be morally pure and safe.

I'm outraged. How can people act intelligently if they don't have access to the truth? Why do corporations decide to treat us as children unable to stare directly at the truth?

It is hypocritical for the US President telling people that we must "bear witness to the truth" while US corporations are censoring what desperate Iranian people can uploading onto the Internet. The US corporations are censoring the videos because they find them "morally offensive", but this is the ultimate in hypocrisy. On the one hand we are supposed to be offended by the violence in Iran. On the other hand we aren't allowed to see the violence. So how can you be offended? What is Obama talking about? Without seeing the truth all we are doing is shadow-boxing with opinions. The media is making sure that our "opinions" are sanitized, just like the Iranian regime has sanitized it media by turning off YouTube, Twitter, and all the other social media.

Hypocrisy!


A supporter of Iran's defeated presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi shows her hand covered in the blood of a wounded person during a demonstration on June 20, 2009 in Tehran, Iran.