QUOTE OF THE DAY – AT 9:46 A.M. ET:  As freedom fighters in Iran commemorate the first anniversary of their failed uprising, failed in part because Barack Hussein Obama Jr. would not get behind it, Australian journalist David Burchell laments the West's behavior toward those who fight for democracy:

IT is surely one of the great paradoxes of this age that while many of our cleverest minds have fallen headlong in love with peoples whose causes are more or less entirely alien to us, we can find no stirring in our hearts for peoples whose greatest hope is to become . . . well, more like us.

Thus we artlessly dispatched our hearts on a sentimental journey to Gaza designed for our benefit by the canny Islamists in Ankara and their bloodstained allies in Gaza; people who, in any other context, would treat our Western soft-heartedness and woolly-mindedness with undisguised contempt.

And yet our hearts have no space whatever for the thousands of young Iranian students who, on Saturday, defied the threats of their government, the beatings of the extra-legal militias, and the pusillanimity of their erstwhile leaders, merely to ask for the right to have their votes treated with dignity, rather than being fabricated out of some dodgy Russian software in Iran's Ministry of the Interior.

To the best of my knowledge, not one single person has died at the hands of Iran's green opposition, even as thousands of their number have been arrested, hundreds sexually and physically tortured in prison, and dozens murdered in loneliness, often in the most squalid and humiliating of circumstances. Their cause has been Gandhian, almost to a fault. ("The students will die, but they will not accept humiliation", they chanted at Tehran University.)

And yet their plight leaves us entirely cold. Who knows: if they strapped bombs to themselves, or professed a secret admiration for the racial policies of the Third Reich, would they then become sufficiently exotic to pique our jaded imaginations, and would we then love them a little more?

COMMENT:  Burchell is, of course, referring to the Western left, that gang of political prostitutes who will do anything and say anything to be promoted in a university or on a newspaper, grab an award, acquire a commencement-speech invitation, or just be invited to a proper party on Manhattan's west side.

Now that left has a champion in the White House, a man who took four days to make it to a microphone to say a few boilerplate words about freedom when Iranians were in the streets.  Think about the implications.

June 15, 2010