U.S. needs to tread softly in new Middle East

Editor,

Those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it.
The U.S. government and U.S. campuses appear to have not learned much from the 1979 Iranian revolution and subsequent kidnapping of Western professors.

Anyone familiar with yesterday’s history knows that before the current mullahcracy in Iran there was a Western-backed secular government in Tehran.

Relative to Tehran’s Mahdi-obsessed jihadist government today, Iran was liberal, secular and quite tolerant.

Naively, former President Jimmy Carter turned his back on the shah and encouraged revolution for “greater democracy in Iran”.
Thirty years and countless atrocities to its own people later, Iran is entrenched in Lebanon, Gaza, and has Turkey (another former ally of the U.S.) on its side. It also hangs homosexuals, alcoholics, political dissidents and “promiscuous women” in public squares. The Internet is rife with such horrible crimes against humanity.

Mohammed ElBaradei, the former International Atomic Energy Agency director general, who single-handedly aided Iran’s delay tactics and cover up of its nuclear bomb development, is what Stalin would call a “useful idiot.”

The Muslim Brotherhood, in a temporary marriage of convenience, uses the academic nationalist left like ElBaradei to seat themselves in power. Of course, Iran must be smiling in the background, as the U.S. influence grows weaker, and fundamentalist Islam continues to grow stronger.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak must bring his country into the 21st century not only economically, but also with education and media. He can’t continue to have hate-filled textbooks about Jews, the Western world, Jewish nationalism, Holocaust denial, etc., while trying to become a country of peace and prosperity. The two don’t go hand in hand.

Without drastic education and media reformation, peace in the Middle East is a small plastic Band-Aid for open-heart surgery and will inevitably backfire far, far worse.

I hope education and media reform become the principle mantra for future State Department sorties into the Arab and Muslim world.
Paying their corrupt leaders just doesn’t do it anymore, and come to think about it, it never did. Yet it is inconceivably better to have a non-Islamist Mubarak than a jihadist Ahmenijahd or Hamas, and that is a painful lesson the U.S. may soon find out — again.

Alex Moreno
Community member