Iran Freedom Quotes

One man’s fight is another man’s freedom.

The Shah stayed on the throne until 1979, when he fled Iran to escape the Islamic revolution. Since then, this old and great civilization has been discussed mostly in connection with fundamentalism, fanaticism, and terrorism. As an Iranian who has lived more than half of my life in Iran, I know that this image is far from the truth. This is why writing "Persepolis" was so important to me. I believe that an entire nation should not be judged by the wrongdoings of a few extremists. I also don't want those Iranians who lost their lives in prisons defending freedom, who died in the war against Iraq, who suffered under various repressive regimes, or who were forced to leave their families and flee their homeland to be forgotten. One can forgive but one should never forget.

We all have yavashaki, or stealthy, moments, but we become powerful as women the moment we stop living a lie.

Muslim women have the freedom of choice, taking away this freedom is non-Islamic, it is dictatorship in Islamic clothing.

I believe in freedom for women to have equal rights - the right to work, the right to hold high positions, the right to take custody of their children after divorcing. I always want to remain positive.

It is not important whether what he is chanting is true or not, whether you believe in it or not. Your decision to chant along with him is no measure of your commitment to justice or freedom or whatever lofty principle is at hand. Sometimes, radical slogans are a trap. They are shouted by infiltrators so that a group of students protesting a press crackdown can be depicted as seeking to overthrow the regime. Sometimes they are not traps at all but the frustrated stand of a brave person. But how are you to know? Your objective is to avoid being a pawn, to avoid getting dragged into trouble because you are curious, or believe you are seeing history being made." They

A man opposite me shifted his feet, accidentally brushing his foot against mine. It was a gentle touch, barely noticeable, but the man immediately reached out to touch my knee and then his own chest with the fingertips of his right hand, in the Indian gesture of apology for an unintended offence. In the carriage and the corridor beyond, the other passengers were similarly respectful, sharing, and solicitous with one another. At first, on that first journey out of the city into India, I found such sudden politeness infuriating after the violent scramble to board the train. It seemed hypocritical for them to show such deferential concern over a nudge with a foot when, minutes before, they'd all but pushed one another out of the windows. Now, long years and many journeys after that first ride on a crowded rural train, I know that the scrambled fighting and courteous deference were both expressions of the one philosophy: the doctrine of necessity. The amount of force and violence necessary to board the train, for example, was no less and no more than the amount of politeness and consideration necessary to ensure that the cramped journey was as pleasant as possible afterwards. What is necessary! That was the unspoken but implied and unavoidable question everywhere in India. When I understood that, a great many of the characteristically perplexing aspects of public life became comprehensible: from the acceptance of sprawling slums by city authorities, to the freedom that cows had to roam at random in the midst of traffic; from the toleration of beggars on the streets, to the concatenate complexity of the bureaucracies; and from the gorgeous, unashamed escapism of Bollywood movies, to the accommodation of hundreds of thousands of refugees from Tibet, Iran, Afghanistan, Africa, and Bangladesh, in a country that was already too crowded with sorrows and needs of its own. The real hypocrisy, I came to realise, was in the eyes and minds and criticisms of those who came from lands of plenty, where none had to fight for a seat on a train. Even on that first train ride, I knew in my heart that Didier had been right when he'd compared India and its billion souls to France. I had an intuition, echoing his thought, that if there were a billion Frenchmen or Australians or Americans living in such a small space, the fighting to board the train would be much more, and the courtesy afterwards much less. And in truth, the politeness and consideration shown by the peasant farmers, travelling salesmen, itinerant workers, and returning sons and fathers and husbands did make for an agreeable journey, despite the cramped conditions and relentlessly increasing heat. Every available centimetre of seating space was occupied, even to the sturdy metal luggage racks over our heads. The men in the corridor took turns to sit or squat on a section of floor that had been set aside and cleaned for the purpose. Every man felt the press of at least two other bodies against his own. Yet there wasn't a single display of grouchiness or bad temper

For decades, Lebanon had lured not just revolutionaries but also poets, ideologues, artists, and all types of opposition figures and plotters. A weak state was both a blessing and a curse. In Beirut, there was no dictatorship to muzzle opinions—or your guns. The war had made the small Mediterranean country even more of a haven, a live training ground with a casino and restaurants that still served smoked salmon and caviar during cease-fires. There were breadlines and economic hardship, massacres and literary conferences. Every spy agency was in town: the CIA, the KGB, the Mossad.

Women who get arrested and disappear because they dare to take a scarf off their head in Iran. Women who are arrested and disappear because they drive a car in Saudi Arabia. Women who are arrested or killed for showing their face and hair on social media in Pakistan or Iraq. Those brave women exist all around us, and they want nothing more than to be supported by feminists in the West. ... The free West, where these brave girls used to look to as beacons of light and hope, is supporting their oppressors and ultimately fighting against their progress. In Saudi Arabia, women are burning their niqabs. In Iran, women tie their hijabs on sticks and sway them silently, defiantly in the streets as they are arrested in droves. In the West, we put a Nike swoosh on hijabs.

One might pause here to wonder how it is that the United States claims to support democracy and freedom in the world when it so often backs dictators like the Shah and Somoza. As I tell my human rights class every year, the United States always supports democracy and freedom, except when it doesn’t, which is all the time…. As political analyst Stephen Gowans explains, the United States is simply not what it claims to be, and most likely never has been: The United States—which began as 13 former British colonies on the Atlantic coast of North America pursuing a “manifest destiny” of continental expansion, (the inspiration for Nazi Germany’s lebensraum policy); which fought a war with Spain for colonies; which promulgated the Monroe Doctrine asserting a sphere of influence in the Americas; which stole Panama to create a canal; whose special operations forces project US power in 81 countries; whose generals control the militaries of the combined NATO members in Europe and the military forces of South Korea; whose military command stations one hundred thousand troops on the territories of former imperialist rivals, manifestly has an empire. And yet this reality is denied, as assuredly as is the reality that the United States, built on the genocide of Native Americans and the slave labor of Africans, overtly white supremacist until the mid-1960s, and covertly white supremacist since, is unequivocally not a beacon of Enlightenment values, unless liberalism is defined as equality and liberty assigned exclusively to white men who own productive property. Indeed, so antithetical is the United States to the liberal values of the equality of all peoples and nations, freedom from exploitation and oppression, and the absence of discrimination on the bases of class, race, and sex, that it’s difficult to apprehend in what sense the United States has ever been liberal or has in any way had a legitimate claim to being the repository of the values of the Enlightenment.2

So effective has their propaganda been that an American official was moved to describe the Brotherhood as “a loose network of secular groups.”27 This kind of ignorance in the West about Egypt presents the Brotherhood with a tremendous opportunity for media manipulation. Scratch the surface, however, and you find a detailed political platform published in 2006. The president cannot be a woman because the post’s religious and military duties “conflict with her nature, social and other humanitarian roles.” A board of Muslim clerics would oversee the government. The freedom of association guaranteed civil organizations in the West would, in an Islamist Egypt, also be conditional, once again on their adherence to the strictures of Islamic law. Egypt would have a shura (consultative assembly) system, whereby a body of compliant old men nod through whatever the leader, who is assured “veneration,” sees fit, while a Supreme Guide presides benevolently over the personal morality of the masses.28 In Saudi Arabia and Iran, that system exists now.

What if many listeners hold a profoundly different understanding of the concepts of God, truth, right and wrong, freedom, virtue, and sin? What if their approaches to reality, human nature and destiny, and human community are wholly different from our own? For decades, this has been the situation facing Christian churches in many areas around the world — places such as India, Iran, and Japan. Evangelism in these environments involves a lengthy process in which nonbelievers have to be invited into a Christian community that bridges the gap between Christian truth and the culture around it. Every part of a church’s life — its worship, community, public discourse, preaching, and education — has to assume the presence of nonbelievers from the surrounding culture. The aesthetics of its worship have to reflect the sensibilities of the culture and yet show how Christian belief shapes and is expressed through them. Its preaching and teaching have to show how the hopes of this culture’s people can find fulfillment only in Christ. Most of all, such a congregation’s believers have to reflect the demographic makeup of the surrounding community, thereby giving non-Christian neighbors attractive and challenging glimpses of what they would look like as Christians.

There is much irony in the fact that Anglo-American Middle East policy, from Operation Ajax, the deposing of democratically elected, socialist, secularist Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq in Iran in 1953, to Operation Iraqi Freedom, the overthrow of secular nationalist dictator Saddam Hussein in 2003, has served in fact, if not intention, to ensure the continuing hold of Islam over nearly all the countries of the region.

The ruling regime in Iran has many faults, but it is more representative than most in the Middle East outside Israel (though the trend is not encouraging—the Majles elections of 2004 and the presidential elections of 2005 were more interfered with and less free than previous elections). Despite repressive measures by the state, Iran is not a totalitarian country like the Soviet Union during the Cold War. It is a complex polity, with different power centers and shades of opinion among those in power. There is space for dissent—within certain boundaries. Iran still has the potential for self-generated change, as has been recognized by observers from Paul Wolfowitz to Reza Pahlavi, the son of the last shah. Important independent Iranian figures like Shirin Ebadi and dissidents like Akbar Ganji have urged that Iran be left alone to develop its own political solutions. One theory of Iranian history, advanced by Homa Katouzian and others,5 is that Iran lurches from chaos to arbitrary autocracy and back again. There is certainly some evidence of that in the record. Perhaps increased political freedom would merely unleash chaos, and no doubt there are pragmatists within the current Iranian regime who make just that argument for keeping things as they are. One could interpret the crisis of the reform movement in 2000, followed by the press crackdown, as another episode in the Katouzian cycle. There are signs of disillusionment and nihilism among many young Iranians after the failure of the Khatami experiment.6 But I don’t believe in that kind of determinism. There is real social and political change afoot in Iran, in which the natural dynamic toward greater awareness, greater education, and greater freedom is prominent. Other Europeans in the seventeenth century used to say that England was a hopelessly chaotic place, full of incorrigibly violent and fanatical people who clamored to cut off their king’s head. A century later England was the model to others for freedom under the law and constitutional government.

Yet lost in the debate about America’s true intentions in the Middle East was the fact that large majorities in every Muslim-majority state surveyed told pollsters they wanted to see their countries move toward greater democracy. A wave of democratic fervor across the Middle East created a renewed sense of hope for scores of people who had spent their lives in autocratic societies but who now looked forward to the possibility of having a say, even if in the most limited of ways, in their own political destinies. The Green Movement in Iran lit the fuse, employing new social media technologies like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to break the government’s monopoly over the media and to demonstrate to the world their aspiration for freedom and liberty.

Any key social upheaval, whether fueled by political or religious ambitions, that inflicts violence and civil unrest on ordinary citizens bears human suffering and sacrifice.

Broken Compass I will not pretend that these leaders I’ve referenced were motivated by their desire for biblical adherence. Perhaps there was a time when that case could have been made, but with the exception of Jerry Falwell Sr., who died long before the Trump evangelical was born, all of these men have utterly reversed their positions in favor of Donald Trump. After the Access Hollywood tape of Donald Trump leaked in October 2016, Ralph Reed, who was quoted in this chapter saying “character matters” in his condemnation of Bill Clinton, had a far more pragmatic view of the situation. In an email to the Washington Post, Reed referred to the contents of the recording as “disappointing” but ultimately dismissed the idea the recording should impact his endorsement of Trump, saying, “People of faith are voting on issues like who will protect unborn life, defend religious freedom, grow the economy, appoint conservative judges and oppose the Iran nuclear deal.” Translation: Character doesn’t matter now because voters don’t care.

Given that Israel has a profoundly democratic political system, the freest press in the Middle East, a fiercely independent judiciary and astonishing religious and racial diversity within its universities, including affirmative action for Arab students, the charge is rather strange. Made more so when you consider the state of human rights in Israel’s neighborhood. As we speak, Syria’s government is dropping “barrel bombs” filled with nails, shrapnel and other instruments of terror on its own cities. Where is the ASA boycott of Syria? And of Iran, which hangs political, religious and even sexual dissidents and has no academic freedom at all? Or Egypt, where Christians are being openly persecuted? Or Turkey, Saudi Arabia or, for that matter, massively repressive China and Russia?

Months later, Falwell was distributing $25 audio tapes of North’s commencement address, his “Freedom Message.” In a fundraising letter sent to supporters, Falwell framed what was at issue: “In my judgment, petty partisan politics have made Ollie North, his family and the very lives of the Nicaraguan freedom fighters pawns in a liberal campaign to humiliate President Reagan.” Critics accused leaders like Falwell of exploiting North in order to reap a “financial bonanza” in their direct-mail campaigns. Falwell’s spokesperson refused to say how much his campaign had brought in, but he wasn’t the only one cashing in on North. Beverly LaHaye’s Concerned Women for America offered a “beautiful full-color picture” of North being sworn in at the Iran-Contra hearings for a mere $20 contribution. Other conservative evangelical organizations also participated in the “Olliemania.” For American evangelicals, Ollie North was the perfect hero at the perfect time.4

Beyond the headlines about war and death, the region is alive with music, art, books, theater, social entrepreneurship, advocacy, libraries, cafes, bookshops, poetry, and so much more, as old and young push to reclaim space for cultural expression and freedom of expression.

Furthermore, in the case of Islamic Middle Eastern honor and shame culture, acts that Westerners view as reprehensible, such as terrorism, are portrayed as being right, or even praiseworthy.48 In fact, with regard to fighting nonbelievers, the Quran even instructs Muslims to ignore the promptings of their own consciences, because verse 216 of Surah Al-Baqarah (chapter 2) says, “It is possible that ye dislike a thing which is good for you, and that ye love a thing which is bad for you. But Allah knoweth, and ye know not.”49 Thus a radical Muslim can, in the name of Islam, commit atrocities such as mass murder, honor killings, or raping women and young children and feel no shame, because his religion and culture often condone and even encourage those atrocities.50 He receives no shame but rather great honor for committing them. The huge emphasis placed on cultural honor instead of objective values of right and wrong, therefore, allows the radical Muslim freedom to do virtually anything as long as his community approves of it, which makes Islam’s jihadist ideology all the more dangerous.51

The war we now face is a fundamental one. Democracy is a product of Western societal values that prize the individual and individual freedom. The very idea of a form of government in which power is vested in the people, who rule through their freely chosen representatives, is at odds with Middle Eastern and Islamic cultures in which the only sovereign is Allah. Because Allah alone is sovereign, man may not change Allah’s rules. There can be no room left for religious liberty or pluralism. Contrary man-made laws have no place in such a society. Accordingly, only one ruler is needed to enforce divine law, law that may not be questioned. Democracy, on the other hand, by its very nature gives people the room to enact new laws to meet with the changing needs—whether real or merely perceived—of a given society. Thus from the Islamic perspective, a democratic system of government is a direct affront to Allah’s supremacy.

In summary, because the collective religious and social identity of Islam is more important than individual identity, Muslims focus on the big picture that extends through many generations and the Islamic community as a collective whole.99 In contrast, Western culture is concerned with intrinsic values and is much more individualistic.100 It is primarily focused on personal freedom and achieving happiness for one’s own life, rather than the collective advancement of the societal and religious goals over many generations.101 This fundamental difference in thinking creates a distortion when Americans project Western motivations, values, and beliefs onto Islamic behavior. Unless we recognize the fundamental differences between these irreconcilable worldviews, we will proceed at our own risk and with very little chance of ultimate success. The actual motivations, values, and beliefs that radical Islamic terrorists take out of Islam cause death and destruction for communities and civilizations around the world. When Sharia is put into action, we all face peril.

Thirty-five years of intimidating and dreary Islamic rule had created a rose-tinted view of the pre-revolutionary era. The arrests, the intimidation, the decadence of the elite, the horrors of SAVAK; it had all been forgotten, replaced by a revised, romantic version of the good old days. Among Iranians of a certain age and class, the swinging sixties and seventies are recalled with a poetic yearning nostalgia; an era of mini-skirts, freedom and hedonism.

After the revolution most of the major roads in the cities, especially in Tehran, had been renamed with the appropriate amount of anti-western fervour, changing the likes of Eisenhower Avenue to Azadi Avenue (meaning ‘freedom’ in Persian) and Shah Reza Square to Enqelab Square (the Persian word for ‘revolution’). My map recce also showed up a liking for using street names to show allegiance to Iran’s friends and allies, such as the ubiquitous Felestin – Palestine – which cropped up in many Iranian cities. There were more pointed allegiances too; the street that housed the British Embassy, Winston Churchill Street, had been renamed in typically cheeky Iranian fashion as Bobby Sands Street (it was transliterated as ‘Babisands’), in tribute to the IRA hunger striker. In 1981 the embassy had been forced to move their official entrance to a side street so as to avoid the embarrassment of having Sands’ name on their headed notepaper.

The irony is that the Iran of the fundamentalist ayatollahs owes its ultimate birth pang to cities of sin and freedom: Beirut, capital of Arabic modernity, once known as the Paris of the Middle East; and Paris, birthplace of the Age of Enlightenment. If not for the permissive freedoms in both, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini—a patient man with a cunning mind—might have died forgotten in a two-story mudbrick house down a narrow cul-de-sac in the holy city of Najaf, in Iraq.

Thirty-five years of intimidating and dreary Islamic rule had created a rose-tinted view of the pre-revolutionary era. The arrests, the intimidation, the decadence of the elite, the horrors of SAVAK; it had all been forgotten, replaced by a revised, romantic version of the good old days. Among Iranians of a certain age and class, the swinging sixties and seventies are recalled with a poetic yearning nostalgia; an era of mini-skirts, freedom and hedonism. ‘I haven’t had a glass of wine since 1979,’ one man had told me at a petrol station in Qazvin; ‘I miss the 1970s,’ he had added with a mournful, faraway look.

The whole world stands to be engulfed. The destruction, when it is unleashed, will be unprecedented. The totalitarians in Russia, China, Iran and the Arab world are preparing for war. Now that Bush's position is collapsing and the Party of Outright Appeasement has begun its reign, the enemies of freedom see their chance. Cowardice and stupidity have conspired, and the result is "opportunity." Western progress has finally given the totalitarian regimes a generation of "last men," about whom Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote: "The earth hath become small, and on it there hoppeth the last man who maketh everything small." The "last man" comes at the end, when civilization begins to die. And indeed, the Western democracies are dying. I am reminded of Titus Livius's description of Rome's descent into despotism as "the dark dawning of our modern day when we can neither endure our vices nor face the remedies needed to cure them." We congratulate ourselves on the interest-group demagogy that produces policy in the West, throwing up words like "democracy" and "freedom" when the reality of the situation is better described by words like "anarchy" and "licentiousness.

In a Global Research article,179 Chossudovsky recalls past CIA covert operations such as those in Central America, Haiti, and Afghanistan. Illicit dope funded the so-called “Freedom Fighters” Langley sponsored in those areas. As an example, Chossudovsky noted that Iran-Contra rebels and the Afghan “muj” got their funds through “dirty money” being transformed into “covert money” by way of shell companies and the lending structure. Weapons and drugs and money flowed across the borders of Albania with Kosovo and Macedonia. For hefty commissions, “respectable” European banks, far removed from the fighting, dry-cleaned the dirty dollars. The drugs went one way, and the greenbacks another, helping pay the fighters and their trainers. Writing in Global Research,180 Prof. Chossudovsky added to our knowledge of the sources of support for the Bosnian Muslim Army and the KLA—opium-based drug money direct from the Golden Crescent (Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran). Mercenaries financed by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait had been fighting in Bosnia.181 And the Bosnian pattern was replicated in Kosovo: Mujahadeen [sic] mercenaries from various Islamic countries are reported to be fighting alongside the KLA [Kosovo Liberation Army] in Kosovo. German, Turkish and Afghan instructors were reported to be training the KLA in guerilla and diversion tactics.182 Worse, The trade in narcotics and weapons was allowed to prosper despite the presence since 1993 of a large contingent of American troops at the Albanian-Macedonian border with a mandate to enforce the embargo. The West had turned a blind eye. The revenues from oil and narcotics were used to finance the purchase of arms (often in terms of direct barter): “Deliveries of oil to Macedonia (skirting the Greek embargo [in 1993–94] can be used to cover heroin, as do deliveries of kalachnikov [sic] rifles to Albanian ‘brothers’ in Kosovo.

I argued again for an American strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. America could still stop Iran from developing atomic bombs that would endanger America, Israel and the peace of the entire world. An American action now would give an enormous boost to the standing of the US and its president. Obama’s response floored me and Itzik Molcho, who sat beside me. “Bibi,” he said, “Nobody likes Goliath. I don’t want to be an eight-hundred-pound gorilla strutting on the world stage. For too long we acted that way. We need to lead in a different way.” I was stunned. In the Middle East as I knew it, with Iran racing to nuclear weapons, and with the shifting geopolitical balance toward Asia, I would want to be a 1,200-pound gorilla, not an 800-pound one. Often when I met officials of the Obama administration they waxed lyrical about the marvels of soft power. Culture, values, even Hollywood can do wonders to change the world, they said. “Soft power is good,” I acknowledged, “but hard power is even better.” By hard power I meant the judicious use of formidable military or economic power, or both. The values of individual liberty and national freedom give meaning and strength to free societies. But they are not enough. Power has the unfortunate quality of not being limited to the morally superior and the well intentioned. If malign forces amass enough of it and have the will to use it, they will overcome the less well-armed forces of good, especially if the good lack the tenacity to fight. Being a moral people won’t save you from conquest and carnage, which was the history of the Jewish people for two thousand years. Being perfect victims who harmed no one, we were perfectly moral. Being utterly powerless, we were led to the slaughter again and again. The rise of Zionism was meant to correct this flaw by giving the Jewish people the power to defend themselves. Enhancing this capacity was the central mission of my years in office.

To the brave women of my country who have been the pioneers of freedom in Iran and the Middle East since the beginning of our constitutional movement until now: the world has finally heard your voice.

For almost four decades, I have been a leader and advocate of the principles of freedom, democracy and human rights for the women and men of Iran.

In the West, he noted, criticism of religion had led to freedom of thought and the growth of science. But in Islamic societies, religion was the last line of defense against imperial domination and cultural decay.

she said. “They’re all worried about Iran.” By the time I took office, the theocratic regime in Iran had presented a challenge to American presidents for more than twenty years. Governed by radical clerics who seized power in the 1979 revolution, Iran was one of the world’s leading state sponsors of terror. At the same time, Iran was a relatively modern society with a budding freedom movement. In August 2002, an Iranian opposition group came forward with evidence that the regime was building a covert uranium-enrichment facility in Natanz, along with a secret heavy water production plant in Arak—two telltale signs of a nuclear weapons program. The Iranians acknowledged the enrichment but claimed it was for electricity production only. If that was true, why was the regime hiding it? And why did Iran need to enrich uranium when it didn’t have an operable nuclear power plant? All of a sudden, there weren’t so many complaints about including Iran in the axis of evil. In October 2003, seven months after we removed Saddam Hussein from power, Iran pledged to suspend all uranium enrichment and reprocessing. In return, the United Kingdom, Germany, and France agreed to provide financial and diplomatic benefits, such as technology and trade cooperation. The Europeans had done their part, and we had done ours. The agreement was a positive step toward our ultimate goal of stopping Iranian enrichment and preventing a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. In June 2005, everything changed. Iran held a presidential election. The process was suspicious, to say the least. The Council of Guardians, a handful of senior Islamic clerics, decided who was on the ballot. The clerics used the Basij Corps, a militia-like unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, to manage turnout and influence the vote. Tehran Mayor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner. Not surprisingly, he had strong support from the Basij. Ahmadinejad steered Iran in an aggressive new direction. The regime became more repressive at home, more belligerent in Iraq, and more proactive in destabilizing Lebanon, the Palestinian Territories, and Afghanistan. Ahmadinejad called Israel “a stinking corpse” that should be “wiped off the map.” He dismissed the Holocaust as a “myth.” He used a United Nations speech to predict that the hidden imam would reappear to save the world. I started to worry we were dealing with more than just a dangerous leader. This guy could be nuts. As one of his first acts, Ahmadinejad announced that Iran would resume uranium conversion. He claimed it was part of Iran’s civilian nuclear power program, but the world recognized the move as a step toward enrichment for a weapon. Vladimir Putin—with my support—offered to provide fuel enriched in Russia for Iran’s civilian reactors, once it built some, so that Iran would not need its own enrichment facilities. Ahmadinejad rejected the proposal. The Europeans also offered

But fighting compulsory hijab is about much more than hair and dressing modestly, just as Rosa Parks refusing to giver her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955 was about more than an unjust seating policy. It's about fighting for what is right.

FORGIVE ME, FOR I HAVE SINNED . . . for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God . . . Romans 3:23 Every single human being has sinned and will sin again. Darn it. I’m right there at the top having to acknowledge mine. Double darn. I was baptized Catholic as a baby, part of a big, loyal Irish Catholic family led by our patriarch, Grandpa Clem Sheeran. Later, when I became of age to make the conscious decision to publicly testify of my walk with Christ, I was baptized in the icy waters of Little Beaver Lake. When Pastor Riley dunked me under the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, I was then lifted out of the water and . . . I was still the same Sarah Heath. Yes, I’d just testified to joining the “righteousness of Christ Jesus,” but I still lived in the fallen world, a world overrun by sin, which is easy to see just by looking at the news, or in the mirror. No one is perfect, and in case we forget that, this verse bluntly reminds us we all need the mercy of God in the midst of our mess. And friends, with all due respect, we are a mess. Consider the example of our elected national leaders supporting a treaty with Iran that lifts sanctions against this enemy nation instead of punishing its evil acts—while still fully acknowledging that it’s the top sponsor of worldwide Islamic terrorism and is hell-bent on destroying both America and Israel. Yes, we are a mess. Lord have mercy. And what about us? It may be a hard-to-accept truth, but fallen man’s nature puts us all in the same boat until we ask for the life-saving newness God offers. Accepting it is the only way to clean up the mess. It’s an important step to honestly admit that we try to excuse things in our own lives because they don’t seem as bad when compared to what someone else has done. But we’ve got to call those things what they are: sin. Only then can we repent and be forgiven. SWEET FREEDOM IN Action Today, examine your conscience, confess your sins, and rest in the comfort of the Lord’s forgiveness.

At first, on that first journey out of the city into India, I found such sudden politeness infuriating after the violent scramble to board the train. It seemed hypocritical for them to show such deferential concern over a nudge with a foot when, minutes before, they’d all but pushed one another out of the windows. Now, long years and many journeys after that first ride on a crowded rural train, I know that the scrambled fighting and courteous deference were both expressions of the one philosophy: the doctrine of necessity. The amount of force and violence necessary to board the train, for example, was no less and no more than the amount of politeness and consideration necessary to ensure that the cramped journey was as pleasant as possible afterwards. What is necessary? That was the unspoken but implied and unavoidable question everywhere in India. When I understood that, a great many of the characteristically perplexing aspects of public life became comprehensible: from the acceptance of sprawling slums by city authorities, to the freedom that cows had to roam at random in the midst of traffic; from the toleration of beggars on the streets, to the concatenate complexity of the bureaucracies; and from the gorgeous, unashamed escapism of Bollywood movies, to the accommodation of hundreds of thousands of refugees from Tibet, Iran, Afghanistan, Africa, and Bangladesh, in a country that was already too crowded with sorrows and needs of its own. The real hypocrisy, I came to realise, was in the eyes and minds and criticisms of those who came from lands of plenty, where no-one had to fight for a seat on a train. Even on that first train ride, I knew in my heart that Didier had been right when he’d compared India and its billion souls to France. I had an intuition, echoing his thought, that if there were a billion Frenchmen or Australians or Americans living in such a small space, the fighting to board the train would be much more, and the courtesy afterwards much less.

The political scientist John Ikenberry lauds the liberal international order America has built.11 The global order is today durable and stable thanks to the many multilateral mechanisms America helped build and continues to support: institutions such as the UN, the World Bank, and NATO that have fostered security and development, or the EU and NAFTA, which have promoted prosperity and lured the likes of Mexico and Turkey to embrace capitalism and democracy.12 America has lost some of its own authority to international institutions it created and sustained. But that is a good thing. It means that the liberal international order has legs; it will last longer and continue to define the world order around values and practices that will foster peace, freedom, and prosperity. As Ikenberry notes, “The underlying foundations of the liberal international order will survive and thrive” without America’s guiding hand.13 In the Middle East, though, where simmering instability threatens global security and prosperity, America has done very little institution building of the kind Ikenberry writes about. There is no equivalent to ASEAN or APEC (the Asia Pacific Economic Council), or rival to the SCO, which is backed by China, Russia, and Iran. Perhaps America should help create those kinds of institutions, which could foster order but also make the region’s security and prosperity less dependent on the exercise of American authority. Only then should America think about pivoting somewhere else.

In Iran after the 1979 revolution, the Islamists reduced the minimum age of marriage for girls to nine. In 2000, under pressure from women’s rights activists, the Iranian parliament voted to raise it to fifteen. However, the Council of Guardians, an anti-democratic oversight body dominated by traditional clerics, vetoed the reform, saying that the new ruling was contrary to Islamic law.

Some people he said, think that freedom means men being able to wear shorts or women to go about without the hijab. Others think that freedom means having a full belly.

In the United States, matters have not yet progressed this far, but we must remain vigilant. Some Muslims, such as Imam Rauf, who tried to erect the Ground Zero Mosque, argue that Sharia law is compatible with the U.S. Constitution.50 Make no mistake, he is not saying the Constitution and Sharia are similar; rather he wants to amend the Constitution, to fundamentally alter our government from one that allows freedom to flourish to one that squelches liberty in the name of Sharia. We cannot allow this. Andrew McCarthy, former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, says, What I think the imam means about this is that there are mechanisms within the Constitution [such as amendments] that can be exploited to completely change the Constitutional system. . . . If laws get enacted, or if litigation is brought in courts, the Sharia agenda can be advanced. So he sees in our Constitution the sort of loopholes and mechanisms that he can use to advance Sharia, in that sense it’s Sharia-compliant.51 The practice of advancing jihad by implementing Sharia is perhaps one of the most strategically coordinated and far-reaching politico-religious agendas in the world today, and Americans must recognize it in order to protect America from such laws. This chapter examines some fundamental principles of Sharia and then considers how American legal principles differ in significant ways.

as in the Islamic Republic of Iran, where large numbers of women turned out during the June 2009 post-election demonstrations. Clearly, these women’s grievances went far beyond a single rigged election. One explained, “I see lots of girls and women in these demonstrations. They are all angry, ready to explode, scream out and let the world hear their voice. I want the world to know that as a woman in this country, I have no freedom.” This was not surprising, since Iranian law was formulated in scrupulous adherence to the Koran and Islamic tradition and law. Even the Ayatollah Khomeini’s granddaughter, Zahra Eshraghi, declared that under Islamic law, “a woman is there to fill her husband’s stomach and raise children.” And just weeks after President Barack Obama defended the right of women in non-Muslim countries to cover their heads, brave Iranian women were throwing off their head coverings as a sign of protest against the Islamic regime—with no peep of support from Obama. Journalist Azadeh Moaveni, author of the feminist book Lipstick Jihad, noted that “while it’s not at the top of women’s grievances, the hijab is symbolic. Taking it off is like waving a red flag. Women are saying they are a force to be reckoned with.”10

It is impossible for me to think of Iran, or of the United States’ long-time relationship with it, without thinking of the Shah’s violent reign and the SAVAK, which carried out torture on a massive scale to keep the Shah in power. To me, the very existence of the SAVAK belies any claims that the United States somehow cares about human rights, democracy, or freedom, or that it wants such things for the Iranian people.

And certainly, the Iranian people must be forgiven if they do not believe that the United States has their best interests at heart. Indeed, knowing about the SAVAK, and the United States’ critical role in creating and supporting it, leads me to feel no offense, and certainly no surprise, to hear that some Iranians to this day continue to chant “Death to America,” or continue to label the United States “the Great Satan.” Iranians have every reason and right to feel anger and even hatred toward the United States, not just for what has been done to them, but also because the United States continues to do so while holding itself out as a bright beacon of democracy and freedom in the world. The US pretense of being a uniquely righteous country must be hard to bear for many in the world, not just the Iranians. And in truth, it has become unbearable for me, and I live here!

As Noam Chomsky so well explains in his book, What Uncle Sam Really Wants: When his rule was challenged by the Sandinistas [the insurgent group named after Augusto Cesar Sandino] in the late 1970s, the US first tried to institute what was called “Somocismo [Somoza-ism] without Somoza”- that is, the whole corrupt system intact, but with somebody else at the top. That didn’t work, so President Carter tried to maintain Somoza’s National Guard as a base for US power. The National Guard had always been remarkably brutal and sadistic. By June 1979, it was carrying out massive atrocities in the war against the Sandinistas, bombing residential neighborhoods in Managua, killing tens of thousands of people. At that point, the US ambassador sent a cable to the White House saying it would be “ill advised” to tell the Guard to call off the bombing, because that might interfere with the policy of keeping them in power and the Sandinistas out. Our ambassador to the Organization of American States also spoke in favor of “Somocismo without Somoza,” but the OAS rejected the suggestion flat out. A few days later, Somoza flew off to Miami with what was left of the Nicaraguan national treasury, and the Guard collapsed. The Carter administration flew Guard commanders out of the country in planes with Red Cross markings (a war crime), and began to reconstitute the Guard on Nicaragua’s borders. They also used Argentina as a proxy. (At that time, Argentina was under the rule of neo-Nazi generals, but they took a little time off from torturing and murdering their own population to help reestablish the Guard -- soon to be renamed the contras, or “freedom fighters.”)3 Again, we see Jimmy Carter not really living up to all of his lofty human rights rhetoric.

Over two-thirds of the populations in countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Egypt are under the age of thirty-five. To these young people, who have grown up under monarchs and dictators for decades, never having seen anything else, freedom of speech is often a completely alien concept. Just as people born and raised in the United States find it almost impossible to comprehend the idea of a government imprisoning and publicly flogging a man simply for expressing his ideas, it is unthinkable for many people in these countries to imagine living in a society where we can openly criticize our political leaders without any repercussions.

We will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends.

Today’s GOP wants to strip women of their bodily autonomy and empower rapists to force births on their victims. They want to end free and fair elections, ban books, and pass anti-freedom cultural and religious laws better suited for oppressive theocracies like Iran. If you consider yourself middle class, they believe you ought to pay higher taxes. If you rely on Social Security or Medicare, today’s Republican leaders want to leave you high and dry. That’s how we need to frame the stakes. And as draconian as all this sounds, it’s all true! And if you don’t believe it’s true, it’s because the GOP’s own messaging works so damn well.

always had to pretend to be a good Muslim, while at the same time professing to me how much he hated his religion. There was never any question that he would never leave Islam, because leaving Islam meant leaving his family. Apostasy always entails loss. Loss of family, respect, livelihood, and – in countries like Pakistan, Iran or Saudi Arabia – even one’s life. I wish our politicians and NGOs could understand all that. Apostates from Islam are treated abysmally even in Europe.