Sunday, April 8, 2012

A Passover message of solidarity with the captive nation of Iran

I stand in firm solidarity with my friend Dr. Roya Araghi, a follower of Ayatollah Boroujerdi in Iran who is a former political prisoner and now a refugee seeking political asylum in Turkey.  Roya is a friend to my people the Jews, and I appreciate her struggle for freedom and secular democracy and her support of Israel and the Jews.  I hope she gets political asylum very soon.  Her leader Ayatollah Boroujerdi is also a political prisoner in Iran who has been denied essential medical care for numerous diseases and is facing an effective life sentence in prison for the duration of this regime.

Today the Iranian people are in a state of captivity at the hands of Pharoahs who are openly committed to the destruction of Israel and the Jews.  Like Haman and Pharoah in ancient days and the Nazis more recently, the Islamist thugs leading Iran today are spewing venomous and genocidal hatred against the Jewish people.  They are also trying to build nuclear weapons so they can achieve their genocidal nightmare of a world without Jews.

The same Pharoahs who are waging war on the Jews are also enslaving and persecuting their own people.  The Iranian people rose up for freedom against their oppressors in 2009, and in response they were ruthlessly crushed.  Today the leaders of the Iranian freedom movement are serving long and indefinite prison sentences with no end in sight to their suffering.  Majid Tavakoli and Bahareh Hedayat are just two of the many student and political leaders who are serving obscenely long and illegal prison terms of 8.5 and 9.5 years.  Other political prisoners are also serving between 6 and 11 years in prison with no hope of freedom.  Many of these prisoners are tortured and denied medical care, warm clothing, and family visits, and some of them are being kept in solitary confinement. 

The Iranian people are groaning under the weight of their oppression.  They are a despondent ancient nation which silently longs for freedom from its Pharoah.  The Jewish message of Passover is designed to give you the strength to continue your struggle for freedom against impossible odds.  The message of Passover is that like all human beings, you deserve the right to live in dignity and freedom and not captivity and slavery.  Passover seeks to help you find the inner courage to keep alive your dream of freedom amid horrifically brutal conditions.   In addition, the goal of Passover is to help you end all the sources of fear, oppression, and captivity in both your personal and political lives.  I hope that one day soon you will rid yourselves of the Islamist tyrants who are strangling your country and rejoin the family of nations as a secular democracy at peace with Israel and the Jews.

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