Whose side is the Biden State Department really on? That’s a legitimate question Americans should be asking after the department, which is...
Whose side is the Biden State Department really on?
That’s a legitimate question Americans should be asking after the department, which is supposed to represent the United States in international affairs, this week posted on Twitter a quote from Vice President Kamala Harris, aimed at one of the nation’s most dangerous rivals on the world stage, to denigrate the country that elected her to office.
And it used language an Islamist propagandist would love — literally.
In a Twitter post on Wednesday, the United States’ “virtual embassy in Iran” – a State Department creation that allegedly exists to “inform and educate Iranian audiences about the United States” – shared a quote from the sitting vice president painting her country as a cauldron of ethnic enmity.
Just to make sure there was no misunderstanding, the tweet was in Farsi, the official language of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
.@VP: حقیقت این است: تبعیض نژادی در آمریکا وجود دارد. بیگانه ستیزی در آمریکا وجود دارد. یهود ستیزی، اسلام هراسی، همجنسگرا هراسی، ترنس هراسی، همه وجود دارند. رسیدگی به بی عدالتی هرکجا که باشد، فعالیت پیش روست. pic.twitter.com/mF14nwl9CZ
— USAbehFarsi (@USABehFarsi) February 16, 2022
The translation, according to Google, reads: “The truth is: there is racial discrimination in America. There is xenophobia in America. Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, homosexuality, transgression, all exist. Tackling injustice wherever it is, activity is ahead.”
So, that’s the image President Joe Biden’s State Department wishes to project to a country where “death to America” is practically a national slogan? This is the quote it uses from Biden’s vice president to communicate with the 80-million-plus people living under the heel of an Islamist dictatorship? (The USAbehFarsi Twitter account claims about 760,000 followers, but the propaganda value of a statement like that to a regime like Tehran’s is priceless.)
Even by the loathsome standards of appeasement, it’s appalling. And whatever kind of reaction the Biden State Department was hoping to get from Iran, it was condemned at home.
“Wow, so the U.S. is a terrible/dangerous country!” wrote one user, identified on Twitter as a Los Angeles resident, who used both Farsi and English. “Kamala Harris, why don’t you seek asylum & live in barbaric Islamic regime in Iran?”
Wow, so the U.S. is a terrible/dangerous country! Kamala Harris, why don’t you seek asylum & live in barbaric Islamic regime in Iran?
ای وای، پس ایالات متحده کشور وحشتناک و خطرناکی است! کامالا هریس, چرا پناهندگی نمیگیری و در رژیم وحشیانه اسلامی در ایران زندگی نمی کنی?— Maziyar Farhoud👑 (@farhoud_maziyar) February 16, 2022
Whoever is sitting there and tweeting should gain more experience. VP was talking to Americans and you just translate what sounds pretty bad in Persian for foreign readers. You should provide context.
— Mardo Soghom (@MSoghom) February 16, 2022
Check this out with any Iranian refugee in the US – it could end up as a much needed learning experience for you.
— Ally Bolour ☼𓃬 (@AllyBolour) February 17, 2022
The New York Post reported Thursday that the quote was originally posted by the State Department on Jan. 17, Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The White House had no explanation for the tweet being posted — in Farsi — by the State Department’s “virtual embassy in Iran.” (There is no American Embassy in Iran. The two countries have had no diplomatic relations since 1979.)
But that point is moot.
The tweet is tagged to Harris’ official Twitter account, which telegraphs that if the statement didn’t come from Harris herself, it at least received tacit approval from the vice president’s office for delivering the message in Farsi. That’s a move that effectively abdicates any moral authority the United States would have while engaging with the murderous mullahs of Tehran.
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo – a man who understands that representing the country internationally does not involve engaging in humiliating self-abasement – summed up the disgrace well.
“For Vice President Harris to suggest moral equivalence between the Iranian regime’s desire to eliminate Israel and a national policy of gender apartheid with American equality under the law is truly dangerous and ungrounded in reality,” he wrote on Wednesday. “Americans are better than this.”
For Vice President Harris to suggest moral equivalence between the Iranian regime’s desire to eliminate Israel and a national policy of gender apartheid with American equality under the law is truly dangerous and ungrounded in reality. Americans are better than this. https://t.co/fn1Cd7mzek
— Mike Pompeo (@mikepompeo) February 16, 2022
Well, Americans are certainly better than that. The question is whether the American administration currently in power is.
The generations that lived through the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-81, when the revolutionary government of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini humiliated then-President Jimmy Carter by keeping American diplomats prisoner for more than a year, should have no doubts about the depth of the Iranian leadership’s antipathy toward the United States.
Americans who have grown up since those dark days have the “benefit” of decades of Iranian behavior — from the bombing of a Jewish center in Argentina in 1994 to its support for murderous rebels in Yemen and persistent, low-grade military provocations to the U.S. — to know that Iran is up there with China and Russia as intrinsically dangerous to Americans.
Are Harris or the State Department planning similar tweets in Russian? Or Mandarin Chinese?
Of course, there’s racial discrimination in America, as there is the world over. And, of course, there is xenophobia, anti-Semitism, etc., in the U.S., as there is wherever humanity exists. Mankind is a fallen species, and American citizenship doesn’t change that.
But even the Biden State Department should understand that there is no equivalency between the greatest, freest country on earth and the oppressive violence of the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism.
The “truth,” as the Harris quote puts it, is that Iran’s oppression of Christians, of women and of the kinds of sexual behavior American progressives champion makes it a natural, ideological enemy of any human being who believes in freedom.
That fact that it’s hellbent on getting a nuclear weapon, with the assistance of the Biden administration and American progressives going back to the Obama years, makes it dangerous.
But the fact that the American people can’t rely on their own State Department to stand up for them and their country in the face of tin-pot totalitarians is intolerable.
Really, whose side are they on?
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