Remarks to Iranian New Year Celebration

Thank you for your invitation and Happy Nowruz.

As I was visiting, someone said that this Iranian New Year comes at a dark time for Iran. It reminded me of the saying, "It is always darkest before the dawn."

In the most trying days of World War II, Churchill visited Harrow School. He asked that they change one word in the school alma mater that had been written in his honor. It was a line, "No less we praise in darker days." He asked that the word be changed from "darker" to "sterner." He said, "Do not let us speak of darker days: let us speak rather of sterner days. These are not dark days; these are great days - the greatest days our country has ever lived; and we must all thank God that we have been allowed, each of us according to our stations, to play a part in making these days memorable in the history of our race."

And so it is with the Iranian resistance.

I met with a group of Iranian expatriates last week, and the stories they told of living in this dictatorship are blood-curdling. One woman told of her young cousin who had been rounded up in a demonstration and taken to prison. After several years, the families of these prisoners were informed that they were to be released in the town square. The families dressed in their finest, excited to be re-united with their loved ones, and when they got to the town square, the prisoners were hanged before their eyes. This is Nazi Germany alive again in our own time -- with all its brutality, terrorism, genocidal intentions and expansionist ambitions.

Now imagine a Nazi Germany with nuclear weapons.

We're on the threshold of that day.

The folly of diplomacy with a rogue state like Iran should be obvious to all. And the fine point of it is that as long as that regime exists, it WILL acquire nuclear weapons and once acquired, it WILL use them.

And the ONLY way to stop that from happening -- short of war -- is for that regime to collapse from within.

Here is the good news: very strong opposition and resistance to the Islamist dictatorship has been seething and simmering within Iran for many years. It nearly boiled over in 2009.

Indeed, at that crucial hour, IF the United States had given the Iranian opposition the material and moral support it desperately needed, we might be facing a far happier world situation. Persia might today have redeemed its proud heritage and re-emerged to take its place among the civilized nations of the world.

Tragically, that did not happen. But internally, that regime is still weak, and now is the time to apply the maximum economic pressure upon it from without, while from within assuring that the Iranian opposition has all the material and moral support the civilized world can provide. The Iranian Human Rights and Democracy Caucus within the U.S. House of Representatives is determined to see this happen.

There is a growing and well organized opposition to the Iranian dictatorship both within Iran and among the five million Iranian expatriates around the world. It is long past time for the world to unite behind them.

Churchill's prophetic warning of 1938 is hauntingly relevant today:

"Dictatorship -- the fetish worship of one man -- is a passing phase. A state of society where men may not speak their minds, where children denounce their parents to the police, where a business man or small shopkeeper ruins his competitor by telling tales about his private opinions -- such a state of society cannot long endure if brought into contact with the healthy, outside world. The light of civilized progress with its tolerances and co-operation, with its dignities and joys, has often in the past been blotted out. But I hold the belief that we have now at last got far enough ahead of barbarism to control it, and to avert it, if only we realize what is afoot and make up our minds in time. We shall do it in the end. But how much harder our toil for very day's delay!"

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