Mick Hartley

Hen Massig:

Iranians are calling the regime’s massacre a ‘genocide.’ They are already talking about the day the regime will fall and promising ‘Nuremberg-style trials’ for those who have spilled the blood of their children.

For three weeks, we watched history repeating itself.

Religious and ethnic minorities, who have already faced the brunt of the regime’s cruelty, are facing it even more harshly now. Just today, reports came out that Iran has arrested many in the Bahai community, Iran’s largest non-Muslim religious group.

Regime propaganda machines are insisting the Bahai are closely linked with Israel and are responsible for the “riots.” How many more, besides the 800 already marked, will be executed in the coming days?

When all is said and done, experts may indeed look back at this time and label it a genocide by the regime. At the very least, this heartless bloodshed is an offense to humanity itself.

So it is no wonder that Iranians feel so betrayed right now. They, with everything to lose, were promised help and walked out to the streets of Iran to face bullets with no defense. US President Donald Trump promised them that there would be action. “Help is on the way,” he said, which spurred even more Iranians to the frontlines. After so long, reinforcements were coming.

But they haven’t come.

Iranians are fighting with nothing but their own bodies, taking bullets in the name of the freedom we all know they deserve.

But where is Trump? Where is Netanyahu? Where is anyone who can do anything to help them?

Iranians are saying this is an even greater betrayal than Obama’s in 2009.

I don’t know what’s worse: to promise to help and do nothing, or to insist that diplomacy with this brutal, deceiving, and fanatic regime is the only way, and then doing nothing.

I baulk at this use of “genocide” for any mass killing, but if the Bahai are being targeted then, yes, it’s justified. Otherwise, massacre. That’s what this is. A massacre of the innocent.

It’s typical of Trump. The two major issues he has to deal with, Russia and Iran, he just talks big and does nothing – the reverse of Theodore Roosevelt’s “Speak softly and carry a big stick”. Where he does act is where it’s easy: removing Venezuela’s Maduro just to replace him with Maduro’s deputy, and Greenland, for god’s sake.