Speaking to a large group of Iranians and U.S. Senate staff members in a meeting in the U.S. Senate on the occasion of the Iranian New Year, former U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman said ‘the evil empire of the Islamic Republic of Iran will be vanquished in our time and the world will begin anew.’
Addressing Iranian opposition activists, Mr Lieberman said: “I say to you today based just not on faith but on history, yes, the regime in Iran can be overthrown and I believe it will be soon.”
Excerpts of Senator Lieberman’s speech:
I’ve always been focused for a long time on Iran and the threat that it represents to the States, what this regime represents to the world but I wanted to work more closely with the National Council of Resistance in Iran and the MEK [the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran] and I’m very pleased to be able to do that.
This is not a case of the enemy of my enemy is my friend, people in the Iranian-American community and the global Iranian community who are fighting the regime in Tehran are our friends and I’m very glad that all of you are here today.
Because of the importance of stopping the radical extremist regime in Iran from getting nuclear weapons we’ve all been naturally focused on the negotiations between the P5+1 and Iran. The President has said, President Obama said, “No deal is better than a bad deal,” and we ought to make sure that congress has the power through Corker-Menendez to reject bad deal. They have masterfully manipulated the United States and the other members of the P5+1 to a point where I think they have concluded, the Iranian regime has concluded that we want an agreement much more than they do and is anybody who has ever been involved in negotiations of any kind knows that’s a bad place to be.
Why are we so fearful of the Islamic Republic of Iran getting nuclear weapons? That’s what I really want to focus on today. Obviously it’s bad in itself when nuclear weapons proliferate in the world but I want to focus on the government that is involved in the most horrific and also aggressive human rights violations in the Middle East stifling democracy and fueling the sectarian conflict throughout the region and that of course is Islamic Republic of Iran.
Today there are at least 900 political prisoners in jails in Iran. People who are there for no other reason than they expressed their political opinion. The UN reports that at least 753 individuals were executed by the current Iranian government in 2014, last year, that’s the highest total in a dozen years and as many of you know executions have occurred at a far more rapid pace since the self-proclaimed moderate Hassan Rouhani became President than they did under his predecessor Ahmadinejad.
What about gender equality? Well, Supreme Leader Ali Khamanei has called gender equality and I quote, “One of the biggest mistakes of western thought,” I guess he’s not too happy about the National Council of Resistance and the MEK because it happens to be led by a great woman, Mrs. Rajavi.
So Iran treats women as second class citizens they can’t enter public stadiums, they must adhere to dress codes, they face restricted access to employment, they can be forced into marriage as children this is an extraordinarily gifted group of people who are pushed out of the mainstream of society and one reason high profile case of just extreme abuse the Tehran government executed a 26 year old woman for killing a man who was attempting to rape her this is primeval.
What about the internet? The internet is just plain blocked. Google is blocked, Wikipedia is blocked, the Amazon is blocked, we can go on and on, YouTube, a group called Reporters without Borders that monitors this kind of behavior called Iran an enemy of the internet and in 2013 said that they were the worst country in the world in freedom of the internet.
Why do they do this? These are not acts of strength or security by the government these are acts of weakness and insecurity by the regime that currently governs a great country, Iran. They’re afraid of the people, their people, they’re afraid of their people talking to each other, they’re afraid of their people going out on the internet and finding out what’s happening in the rest of the world.
Iran’s fingerprints can be found on terror plots across the world as you know even in Washington, DC, where it sought to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador in 2011 at the Cafe Milano here which we had thought until that time was a sanctuary but apparently not so.
We’ve seen perhaps one of the greatest atrocities, genocide, go on with the rest of the world essentially standing by passively in Syria since March of 2011 fueled primarily by the Iranian government. We know what’s happening with the Islamic state in Iraq now provides Iran with the opportunity to pursue its own agenda there and there and elsewhere in the region lately. Qasem Soleimani, head of the Iranian revolutionary guard core is publicly on the battlefield directing those troops in Syria, in Iraq; don’t be surprised if he turns up in Yemen or Afghanistan soon. Already these militias have committed atrocities and fighting against Sunni majority areas once held by ISIS.
That’s why retired General David Petraeus has said that the foremost threat to Iraq’s long term stability is not the Islamic state rather it is Shia militias many backed by and some directly guided by Iran. I know that you agree with me that this is an abysmal record of human rights violations and terrorist killing sponsored by the Islamic Republic of Iran.
To me one of the most perverse arguments being made now is that if there is an agreement on nuclear weapons with Iran that will pave the way to a broader strategic re-orientation by Tehran which ideally would include an abandonment of its hegemonic ambitions in the region, an abandonment of its terrorist proxies and an end to its human rights abuses. Does anyone really believe that? I have a trouble asking the question.
I want to just take a moment to talk about Camp Liberty starting in 1986 this organization was headquartered at Camp Ashraf in Iraq until 2012 when it was relocated to a small section of Camp Liberty which is directly east of the Baghdad International Airport.
Camp Liberty had been built and maintained by the US Army until the departure of most of our forces in 2011. Shortly after the coalition invasion of Iraq in 2003 all the residents of Ashraf again Iranian dissidents, I would say freedom fighters were provided written assurances of protected person status under the 4th Geneva Convention if certain actions were taken on the part of the residence and all of them were taken. They met every expectation that we, the United States government, placed on them unfortunately in 2009 the protected person status was revoked summarily arbitrarily without a clause, and the residence, their security, was turned over to the Iraqi government at the time which was heavily influenced by Tehran which would like nothing better than to take violent action against these enemies of theirs because they’re fighters for freedom in Ashraf.
There’s a lot more I could say about that but let me just say as we work hard here in Capitol Hill and elsewhere to liberate the people who are trapped in Camp Liberty. We owe them and I promise you that I will do everything I can to make sure that the United States does everything it can to keep its word.
So, let me say in summary and speak to you directly, those of you who fight and work so hard in this movement you may occasionally ask yourselves how can the movement of events going in such a terrible direction in a country that means so much to you and should mean so much to everybody who fight for freedom and cares about it be stopped? And the answer I think is that it can be stopped by good and courageous people who are prepared to fight to stop it. The people of Iran typified and represented in many ways by the National Council of Resistance in Iran are really the answer.
As much as I know you believe in your cause even you must sometimes ask yourself is it possible? Can the regime in Iran with all its weapons, all its money and the control it has over its people internally really be stopped and overthrown? And I say to you today based just not on faith but on history, yes, the regime in Iran can be overthrown and I believe it will be soon.
I say to you today that the evil empire of the Islamic Republic of Iran will be vanquished in our time and the world will begin anew. And part of why that will happen is because of the principle, the devotion, the steadfastness, the courage, the intellectual energy, the remarkable intelligence work done in Iran by the National Council of Resistance, led as I mention briefly earlier by Mrs. Rajavi who is a remarkable figure in her own right and a powerful figure, strong, gifted, modern, religious and clearly tolerant and what a message to the Ayatollah and the other Mullahs that she happens to be a woman and what a change that would be.
Dear friends, I wish you a Happy Nowruz, I know Nowruz means new day, with you I pray that this is the year in which and I pray with faith that this is the year when we will see not just a new day in Iran but a new government that will reflect and represent and protect the people of this great country.
