For Shame!

“We cannot allow the American flag to be shot at anywhere on earth if we are to retain our respect and prestige.” – Barry Goldwater

Have the United States of America given up sovereignty so much to the point that leaders past and present of countries that sponsor terrorism against us, and our allies, can all but enter the country at will? Must a commitment to the free exchange of ideas between nations and peoples mean that when someone calls for our destruction at rallies – or listens to the crowds chant “Death to America” – we should let them in to hear what they have to say?

Do we not already know what they have to say? Have they not been quoted again, and again, and again, saying hateful, spiteful and intolerant things?

Right as former, so-called “moderate” Iranian president Mohammed Khatami was returning to the Islamic Republic from a visit to the U.S., guess what current president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said? He said that America and Britain may have won the Second World War, but that we’ll “lose World War III” because “Iran will win the coming war and America will be beaten.”

People openly declaring that they will defeat us in “the coming war” are the kind of people that the State Department gives visas to. Some lessons from 9/11 are still yet to be learned.

Ahmadinejad requested, and received, an entry visa for the upcoming opening of the U.N. General Assembly this week. Last week, he went to Cuba for a Non-Aligned Movement conference; all that is “Non-Aligned” about this grouping is that not all of the blatantly dictatorial or quasi-authoritarian, anti-democratic, anti-American members of the Non-Aligned Movement are Muslim nations. Saying the Non-Aligned Movement is actually “non-aligned” is like saying I am satisfied with the state of my life – it’s just not true.

“To insist on strength is not war-mongering. It is peace-mongering.” – Barry Goldwater

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad represents everything that is wrong with the United Nations – it’s a more-than-most-others hypocritical, anti-Semitic, anti-American, anti-democracy, anti-upholding human rights organization, with a few bright spots that would ordinarily tip the balance in the U.N.’s favor were it not for the fact that the U.N. has so often been a repeat offender in so many dangerous and destabilizing ways that the balance sheet will likely never be in the U.N.’s favor during our lifetimes.

Allowing President Ahmadinejad of the Islamic Republic to speak before the U.N. General Assembly, who with his repeated exhortations to destroy Israel, his Holocaust denial, and his mocking Holocaust cartoons has basically given his blessing to attempted genocide, is the last thing that damned organization needs right now, and also is the last thing America needs. It’s happened before already, and it’ll be happening once again: the president of Iran denouncing America before the world in America’s greatest city. While people clap.

When the hell are we going to stand up for ourselves before “leaders” the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or Venezuela’s dangerously antagonistic President Hugo Chavez? Shouldn’t we be an example of the principles we supposedly stand for, or should we be as hypocritical as Europe and talk sanctions with our enemies one day, and do tea with them the next? Do we have to be so accommodating to those who wouldn’t be as accommodating to us (by this, of course, I mean to those who openly state they will defeat us in a war)?

Have we become like Europe, that Continent which our nation set out from the very beginning to be as different from as possible?

Where the hell is our backbone?

“I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” – Barry Goldwater