Donald Trump expressed solidarity with the Iranian people and all those subjected to “oppression and religious persecution” around the world, at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington DC.
On February 8, Trump said: “We know that millions of people in Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, and other countries suffer under repressive and brutal regimes. America stands with all people suffering oppression and religious persecution.”
These comments are in response to the incredible suppression that the Iranian people are facing as a result of their nationwide anti-regime protests, which began after a draft budget was released showing additional military funding paid for by cutting subsidies for the poor.
The crackdown
So far, at least 50 protesters have been gunned down in the streets by the Regime’s security forces, 8,000 have been arrested and threatened with the death penalty, and 12 have died under torture in prisons.
In many cases, the imprisoned were not even involved in the protests, but were arrested anyway in violation of Iranian and international law. The Regime rounded up university students from campus because they feared that the students might join the protests and they have also imprisoned relatives of the protesters because they are unable to locate the activists and hope that the activists will turn themselves in to free their relatives.
Tahar Boumedra, former chief of the Human Rights Office of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI), wrote that with the crackdown on dissidents worsening, the international community must condemn these human rights abuses in Iran or risk another massacre like the one in 1988, when 30,000 political prisoners, mainly members of the Resistance group People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK), were slaughtered.
Boumedra wrote: “If the international community in general, and the UN in particular, fail to send a clear message of intolerance for both current and past human rights abuses, it is all but certain that Tehran will continue to escalate the current situation, perhaps even to reach the level of the 1988 massacre.”
Trump’s support
This is far from the first time that Trump has supported the Iranian people in this way. He first tweeted his support for the protesters in December and warned the Iranian Regime against a violent crackdown.
Then, in his State of the Union address, Trump said: “When the people of Iran rose up against the crimes of their corrupt dictatorship, I did not stay silent. America stands with the people of Iran in their courageous struggle for freedom.”
Source » ncr-iran