They can talk to the hand, or talk to who or what ever they want to, but nothing any of the worlds political leaders can say will make President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad change. He is still going to be the puppet dangling at the end of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s strings, the Iranian supreme leader, and he isn’t up for election.
However, there is no proof that the election result has been manipulated. And there wont be any proof, since no one has access to the full election results, most likely because the ballots haven’t actually been counted. But Obama, and Brown and everybody else, focus their comments on what they can condemn, and that is the Iranian security services heavy handed way of dealing with the demonstrators.
Two points I would like to make here: 1) Condemning the violence isn’t going to make them beat and shoot their people any less. All it will perhaps do is tell the demonstrators that the outside world cares. However, the opposition in Iran probably already knew this. 2) Am I the only who thinks that considering the forms of punishment Iran has for crimes not even considered crimes in our part of the world, their reaction to these demonstrations seem, in comparison, mild.
