From the Archives: 'They won and we blinked' says former Sen. George Allen on Iran deal

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on September 13, 2015. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site is scheduled to go dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

'They won and we blinked' says former Sen. George Allen on Iran deal

Former Virginia Governor and U.S. Senator George Allen spoke in Charlottesville on Saturday, September 12, at the monthly breakfast of the Albemarle County Republican Committee. His message to the gathered activists was one of inclusion, saying that political parties win elections by addition, not subtraction.

Before he delivered his remarks, the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner asked him about some foreign policy matters that are in the news. Allen said that, if he were still in the Senate, he would vote against the proposed deal with Iran on nuclear technology. He also said that the best solution to the refugee crisis in the Middle East is to build a “safe haven” in Syria rather than encourage migrants to come to Europe or the United States.

'Sanctions worked'
One aspect of the agreement with Iran that bothers Allen is the unfreezing of assets.

“One of the things I worked on when I was in the Senate,” he explained, was the issue of people who had been held hostage, injured, and killed by Iran over the years.

Going back to the Carter administration, he said, there were court judgments in favor of those injured parties that could be paid out of frozen Iranian assets in the United States and elsewhere.

“We have all these assets,” Allen said, “and they ought to be able to get their judgments paid out of those assets. Those assets are being released back to [Iran], going back to a regime that's going to use that money to support Hamas and Hezbollah and all sorts of terrorist organizations around the Middle East.”

On the nuclear aspect of the agreement, he said, “People will argue over the verification and so forth of that, and you can argue endlessly. But here's the other point: they are a state sponsor of terror and in five years the arms embargo is off. Then in seven or eight years the ballistic missile sanctions are removed.”

Iran, he said, is “a dangerous force and they can be even more dangerous after this when they can get more arms and they can get more missile technology.”

Acknowledging that the agreement will go forward, Allen said “I hope that I'm wrong but I see no evidence to evince any sort of confidence that this theocracy will change its ways and will only be stronger. In fact,” he added, from Iran's perspective, “they won and we blinked.”

Stated flatly, he concluded: “Sanctions worked. What we ought to do is keep the sanctions on but these other countries” that are party to the agreement “are all capitulating because they want to go [into Iran] to make a little money.”

'Safe haven'
On the matter of the refugee crisis in the Middle East – over four million refugees from Syria are now in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan but the United States has promised to take in just 10,000 – Allen was reluctant to suggest that the United States should commit to receiving more asylum seekers.

“I think the best solution to all of this is to create an area, a safe area, in Syria, maybe along the Jordanian border,” he said, “and just create a safe-haven city so that the folks from Syria don't have to leave their country on risky boats going to Greece.”

That solution, he said, “would be a whole lot less expensive to our government, to the governments of Europe and the world, to create that sort of a situation rather than having them so desperate to live and get food they have to make these risky trips. To me, that's the solution to it rather than creating this diaspora from” Syria in the United States and Europe.

Noting that he understands asylum laws and how they affect refugees from conflict zones, Allen concluded that “to me the solution would have been, and should be, and in fact, can still be, to create a safe haven for them in Syria.”

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Original URL: http://www.examiner.com/article/they-won-and-we-blinked-says-former-sen-george-allen-on-iran-deal

Iranian Journalist Wins Milton Friedman Liberty Prize

The Cato Institute has announced that it has awarded Iranian journalist Akbar Ganji the 2010 Milton Friedman Liberty Prize.

From the news release that was distributed today:

Akbar Ganji, an Iranian writer and journalist who spent 6 years in a Tehran prison for advocating a secular democracy and exposing government involvement in the assassination of individuals who opposed Iran's theocratic regime, has been named the 2010 winner of the Cato Institute's Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty.

Ganji may be best known for a 1999 series of articles investigating the Chain Murders of Iran, which left five dissident intellectuals dead. Later published in the book, The Dungeon of Ghosts, his articles tied the killings to senior clerics and other officials in the Iran government, including former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani....

Ganji now lives in New York. His first book in English, The Road to Democracy in Iran, was published in April 2008. He was chosen to receive the award through a public, worldwide nomination process.

The award presentation will take place in Washington on May 13.

More details are available on the Cato Institute's web site.

Surfing Along the Axis of Evil

The Canadian newsmagazine Maclean's has uncovered the web sites of the remaining members of the Axis of Evil and other sordid types. What Maclean's has found -- in an article entitled "Websites of Evil" -- turns out to be (from the perspective of the web site owners) unintentionally humorous.

Take North Korea, for instance:

If there was one country you'd expect not to have a website, it might be Kim Jong Il's so-called "Hermit Kingdom," North Korea. Then again, Kim could claim to have invented the Internet himself and it wouldn't look out of place at korea-dpr.com. The "brief history" of dear leader's life runs 160 pages; his father's clocks in at 2,161. And the website has a shockingly liberal relationship with facts. For instance, the regional map provided acknowledges the significance of the 38th parallel, as does the "geography" page—but, in boasting 222,209,231 square kilometres of surface area, it seems to be claiming the entire peninsula for the revolution.

In the "business opportunities" section, visitors learn that North Korea "will become in the next years the most important hub for trading in North-East Asia." How will this be accomplished, considering the country's 85th-ranked GDP—149th, per capita? Thanks to the "lowest labour cost in Asia," a "very stable political system, without corruption," and the unbeatable convenience of dealing directly with the government and state-owned corporations. No middlemen!

You can see all this for yourself on one of the periodic tourist junkets organized by the Korean Friendship Association. Undoubtedly the slickest section of the website, it teases the adventuresome traveller with an idyllic panorama of Pyongyang, including a strangely blurred but nevertheless impressive view of the mammoth Ryugyong Hotel. You won't be staying there, however. Conceived as a little slice of Las Vegas on the Taedong River, complete with capitalist decadences like nightclubs, casinos and no fewer than seven rotating restaurants, it is best described nowadays as an empty 105-storey poured concrete shell with a giant crane marooned on top of it. It has been described as "the single most unsettling structure ever erected by the hand of man."

Then there is Iran -- you know, the place that has no homosexuals:

Thousands of miles west, but still along the Axis of Evil, you'll find Iran's surprisingly large English web infrastructure. Parts are almost charming. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's personal site, for example, includes a sample gallery of gifts he's received from visiting dignitaries both domestic and international. An unnamed lawmaker from the city of Neyshabor brought an ornamental pomegranate, while the Indian foreign minister favoured the President with a covered bowl. Both gifts are described as "inorganic."

Those with questions about their faith can send them directly to the Ayatollah [Khameni]...

"If somebody masturbates during the month of Ramadan but without any discharge, is his fasting invalidated?" another asks. Depends, says the Ayatollah. "If he do not intend masturbation and discharging semen and nothing is discharged, his fasting is correct. But, if he intends masturbation or he knows that he usually discharges semen by this process and semen really comes out, it is a ḥarām intentional breaking fasting."

I guess the Ayatollah Khameni is Iran's answer to "Ask Amy."

Maclean's correspondent Chris Selley looks elsewhere in the Middle East, and then to Latin America, but the results of its explorations are mixed:

The content at Hamas' palestine-info.info, likewise, is of the tenor one would expect from the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The "comment" section includes a recent piece by Khalid Amayreh, who compares the Ukrainian Holodomor to what he believes is a looming genocide in Gaza. "Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert, as well as the rest of the ruling class in Israel are more or less trying to emulate Lazar Kaganovitch and Genrich Grigorivic Yagoda, another Soviet Jewish mass murderer who probably killed or caused the death of more people than Hitler ever did," he writes. "We must mobilize … in order to prevent Israel from turning Gaza into another Auschwitz, another Treblinka, another Bergen Belsen, or another Theresienstadt. We must cross all the red lines if necessary."

Despite the freedom of information the Internet offers, however, some sites don't last. The various incarnations of Al Qaeda's web presence have disappeared. And the official website of the Colombian guerrilla organization FARC is also currently inoperative. By some accounts, the site was uncommonly slick for a terrorist organization; its content was certainly spirited. According to the Google cache, the final post, on December 20, called Colombian president Alvaro Uribe a Mafioso, a paramilitary, a buffoon, a vulgarian and a slanderous liar. But while Uribe might well have objected to this characterization, it's unlikely he was behind the website's demise. It was hosted, of all places, in Switzerland—proof, perhaps, that free speech is where you find it.

So the next time you're surfing the web late at night, be sure to leave a comment for Kim Jong Il or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. I'm sure they'll appreciate the thought. You might even get a reply -- if black-hooded thugs knocking down your door at 3:00 a.m. is your idea of a reply.

No Gays in Iran, Prez Sez

Here, courtesy of the Arizona Daily Star, are some excerpts from the remarks of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at Columbia University today, when asked about gays and women.

MR. COATSWORTH: Let me just -- let me pursue this a bit further. It is difficult to have a scientific discussion if there isn't at least some basis -- some empirical basis, some agreement about what the facts are. So, calling for research into the facts when the facts are so well-established represents for many a challenging of the facts themselves and a denial that something terrible occurred in Europe in those years.

(Applause.)

Let me move on to -- (pause).

Mr. President, another student asks, Iranian women are now denied basic human rights, and your government has imposed draconian punishments, including execution on Iranian citizens who are homosexuals. Why are you doing those things?

PRESIDENT AHMADINEJAD: Those in Iran are genuine true freedoms. The Iranian people are free. Women in Iran enjoy the highest levels of freedoms. We have two deputy vice -- well, two vice presidents that are female at the highest levels of speciality; specialized (roles ?) in our parliament and our government and our universities, they are present in our biotechnological fields and our technological fields. There are hundreds of women scientists that are active in the political realm as well.

It's not -- it's wrong for some governments, when they disagree with another government, to sort of -- try to spread lies that distort the full truth. Our nation is free. It has the highest level of participation in elections. In Iran, 80 percent -- 90 percent of the people turn out for votes during the elections, half of which -- over half of which are women, so how can we say that women are not free? Is that the entire truth?

But as for the executions, I'd like to raise two questions. If someone comes and establishes a network for illicit drug trafficking that affects the (use ?) in Iran, Turkey, Europe, the United States by introducing these illicit drugs and destroys them, would you ever reward them? People who lead the lives -- cause the deterioration of the lives of hundreds of millions of youth around the world, including in Iran, can we have any sympathy to them? Don't you have capital punishment in the United States? You do, too. (Applause.)

In Iran, too, there's capital punishment for illicit drug traffickers, for people who violate the rights of people.

If somebody takes up a gun, goes into a house, kills a group of people there, and then tries to take ransom, how would you confront them in Iran with -- in the United States? Would you reward them? Can a physician allow microbes, symbolically speaking, to spread across a nation? We have laws. People who violate the public rights of the people by using guns, killing people, creating insecurity, sell drugs, distribute drugs at a high level are sentenced to execution in Iran, and some of these punishments -- very few are carried in the public eye, before the public eye. It's a law based on democratic principles. You use injections and microbes to kill these people, and they are executed or they're hung, but the end result is killing.

MR. COATSWORTH: (Off mike) -- and drug smugglers. The question was about sexual preference and women. (Applause.)

PRESIDENT AHMADINEJAD: In Iran, we don't have homosexuals like in your country. (Laughter.) We don't have that in our country. (Booing.) In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon. I don't know who's told you that we have it. (Laughter.)

But as for women, maybe you think that being a woman is a crime. It's not a crime to be a woman. Women are the best creatures created by God. They represent the kindness, the beauty that God instills in them. Women are respected in Iran. In Iran, every family who's given a girl is given -- in every Iranian family who has a girl, they're 10 times happier than having a son. Women are respected more than men are. They are exempt from many responsibilities. Many of the legal responsibilities rest on the shoulders of men in our society because of the respect culturally given to women, to the future mothers. In Iranian culture, men and sons and girls constantly kiss the hands of their mothers as a sign of respect, a respect for women, and we are proud of this culture.

And here, courtesy of a blog called "Hot Air," is a photo of two (non-existent?) gay Iranian teenagers moments before they were executed:


Here is another image, taken moments later, found on another website:



Perhaps the Iranian president was mistranslated. Rather than saying "we don't have homosexuals," he actually said, "we are trying to eliminate homosexuals."

That would be so much closer to the truth.