Yesterday there were two fairly significant events: Bibi Netanyahu's grand policy speech, and continued and escalating riots in Iran protesting the stolen election.
All told, I don't think things could have turned out better in either situation.
I'm not going to dissect Bibi's speech here; there are some very good analyses from
Jameel and
Barry Rubin, among others. I will just say that I think he played his hand very well. He made an offer to the Arabs that incensed the Right, but it's got as much chance of coming to fruition as, we have of, well, the Arabs acknowledging Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state, with Jerusalem as its undivided capital, and not flooded with millions of Arab "refugees". He also had the guts to say "NO" to Obama's noxious demands that we effectively sterilize the Jews who live over the Green Line; and he gave a good lesson to the Prez about Jewish history in Eretz Yisrael not having started with the Holocaust. Just a pity that he failed to call for the release of Jonathan Pollard. Maybe he felt that he'd pushed his luck enough already... but still...
In summary, I would have been ecstatic if he'd given the
speech that Moshe Feiglin wrote for him, but I don't think Bibi, given that he does not believe in G-d, could have done any better than he did last night.
Strangely enough, I'm much more captivated by the goings on in Iran than I am by the repercussions of Bibi's speech. Before the elections I was in contact with an 19-year-old Iranian programmer whom I met on
StackOverflow. I asked him what his feeling was on the election, and he said he wasn't even going to bother to vote. There was originally a field of hundreds of candidates, but the list got sanitized by the mullahs until there were only 4 candidates who got the hechsher of Iran's Supreme Leadership. If they got the hechsher, that basically automatically disqualifies them as a real hope for the people. They could only choose between Bad, Filthy, Disgusting and Utterly Repulsive.
So I thought, perhaps it's actually worse if Ahmadinejad loses! Coz then the new guy can come in and pretend that he wants to talk with the West, while buying more and more time to continue developing nuclear weapons apace, and still spewing the same hatred and genocidal invective against Israel. At least if Ahmadinejad wins, he can't even fake moderation! It'll be more difficult to pretend that talking to him is going to help things - although I think Obama has already decided that he has no problem with Iran having the Bomb.
But lo and behold! The Iranian people turned out in their masses to vote for Bad instead of Utterly Repulsive - and when their votes were stolen, they decided they had had enough! They have tasted freedom, and they are not going to let go! And it's not just about rallying around the guy who lost. I don't think the Iranians just want a change in government; if they did, I wouldn't be so interested. I think they want a change in
regime.
Take a look at all the
Twitter traffic emanating from Iran. People aren't just chanting, "Down with Ahmadinejad," or "Long live Moussavi" - they are shouting, "Death to Khamenei!"
It's really amazing, seeing as I'm in the middle of rereading Natan Sharansky's
The Case For Democracy - to see how perfectly accurate his words are. We are watching a fear society in its last stages before collapse. The people have tasted freedom, and the regime is being forced to spend every last iota of its power to repress them and beat them into submission. As his last throw of the die, Ahmadinejad is playing his only trump card - the bogeyman of "foreign enemies" who are plotting against Iran and trying to sabotage its internal affairs. Sharansky identified this, too - the only way to keep True Believers as TBs, and to prevent doublethinkers from becoming dissenters is to focus their attention on outside enemies, to serve as a rallying point. Looking at the footage of the Iranian riots, I think it's too late for that.
IMO it's going to go either one of three ways from here.
- The mullahs carry out their own version of Tiananmen Square, crushing people's will to resist. Try papering over a massacre when you're trying to fake moderation to the West. Even Europe will have a hard time justifying doing business with Iran after that.
- They will give in to pressure and either annul the election results or institute some kind of power sharing between the candidates. There will also have to be some kind of regime reform to accompany that if they want the people to calm down. Yet another crack in the fear society's brittle fortifications.
- The people storm the Bastille, as it were, and literally throw the mullahs from power. Not so far-fetched; from what I'm reading on Twitter, the army has declared it will not fight against the protestors, and the government is being forced to use Hizbullah Arabs for crowd control, because the local Farsi police are to compassionate on their brethren.
I'm rooting for number 3. But whatever happens, Iran's fear society is crumbling, and we can look forward to the liberation of the Iranian people from their dictatorship sooner than you think. The only thing that can save them now is if the West, in its infuriating "realist" delusions, decides to give the mullahs and Ahmadinejad a hand-up, all in the name of "regional stability". Right now what the people of Iran really need is for the USA and Europe to come out publicly supporting their struggle for freedom. If they fail to do so, then when the Iranians finally do liberate themselves, they will resent us all the more for failing to come to their assistance.
You can also make a difference. Use the social networking web sites to post messages of encouragement to the Iranian people, who deserve freedom no less than any other nation on Earth. Tell them we are with them; encourage them to liberate themselves - and show them that they have friends in the Weat, and especially in Israel.
