Political Quotes

“With regard to our policy toward Iran and the recent revelation of a potential attack involving not just foreign embassies and ambassadors but Americans, potentially Senators, being killed by a plot hatched by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and Quds Force, there should be consequences, not just concerns expressed from the administration. We have witnessed a growing aggressiveness by the Iranian regime toward the United States and toward their own people. For example, recently, an Iranian actress who appeared uncovered in an Australian film was then sentenced to 90 lashes for her so-called crime. With regard to the 330,000 Baha'is, a religious minority in Iran, first they were excluded from all public contracting, then they were told all their children had to leave Iranian universities, and then all their home addresses were registered in secret by the Iranian Interior Ministry. I would suggest we have seen this movie before in a different decade wearing different uniforms. But this is the bureaucracy necessary to carry out a Kristallnacht in Farsi. We have seen, for example, the Persian world's first blogger, Hossein Ronaghi, who was thrown into jail simply for expressing tolerance toward other peoples and other religions. Probably most emblematic, we saw the jailing of Nasrin Sotoudeh, a young mother and a lawyer, whose sole crime was to represent Shirin Ebadi, a Noble Prize winner, in the courts of Iran.…”