DEATH TO AMERICA

Obama doesn’t take the Iranian chant seriously. He should.

Mona Charen writes: Maybe I’m too sensitive, but when a foreign autocrat leads his people in chants of “Death to America,” I take it personally.

President Obama and Secretary Kerry apparently don’t. The chant, which became a staple of the Islamic Republic during the 1979 revolution, is not a relic of the past. Just last weekend, at a rally in Iran, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was interrupted by the chant as he was denouncing American “lies” and “arrogance.” He smiled and responded, “Of course yes, death to America, because America is the original source of this pressure.”

[Read the full text here, at National Review]

Some in Iran have said that during negotiations over a nuclear deal, Iranians should downplay the “Death to America” chant, common after Friday prayers and at political rallies. But the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) rejects this advice, insisting, according to the semi-official Fars news agency, that the United States “is still the great Satan and the number-one enemy of the [Islamic] revolution, and the Islamic Republic and the Iranian nation.”

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Senator Tom Cotton (R., Ark,) responded bluntly: “When someone chants, ‘Yes, certainly, death to America,’ we should take him at his word, and we shouldn’t put him on the path to a nuclear bomb.”

We are left to wonder at the equanimity high-ranking members of this administration show toward the unyielding hostility of the Iranian regime. In late February, Iran blew up a full size model of U.S.S. Nimitz, an aircraft carrier, in the Persian Gulf. The Supreme Leader’s representative on the IRGC, Ali Shirazi, recently boasted: “When we look at the Islamic world, we see that the culture of the Islamic Revolution has reached all countries and all Muslims throughout the world. . . . We shall not rest until we raise the flag of Islam over the White House.”

A few days later, President Obama responded by sending Nowruz greetings to the “people and leaders of Iran,” quoting a Persian poet to say, “Many a flower will bloom while you will be in clay.”

Throughout the protracted negotiations…(read more)

National Review

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