KEEP PRESIDENT OBAMA OUT OF THE DISPUTED IRANIAN ELECTION

By Kenny ‘Zulu’ Whitmore

For the last three weeks, key Republicans, and a few conservatives within the Democratic Party in the United States, have orchestrated a huge media-blitz, criticizing President Obama for not speaking out against the Iranian government for its crackdown on Iranians who have protested the outcome of their June 2009 presidential election.
President Obama has agreed that people around the world have the right to peacefully assemble. The Republicans say stronger criticism is needed. Why? And how would it benefit Iran to have President Obama interject in the Iranian political dispute?
Would we be appreciative if the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khomenei and the Iranian people had extensive media coverage urging American citizens to take to the streets and protest against the disputed US Presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore in 2000? No doubt there would have been cries of meddling and requests to bomb Iran.
The Republicans should instead ask the President to speak out against what’s going on at home, for example America’s police force; its preoccupation with African-American and Latino communities and excitable appetite to randomly murder women and men, often excused with claims that the victim appeared to be brandishing a gun. In recent years, numerous people of ethnic minority have been killed by the country’s police though they weren’t carrying a weapon: 22-year-old Oscar Grant, murdered in California on New Year’s Day this year; Sean Bell, gunned down by New York police on his wedding day less than three years ago; 20-year-old Terrance Mearis, killed by Oakland police in 2003; and Amadou Diallo, a Guinean immigrant shot by New York police in 1999.
These conservatives could point President Obama towards mass imprisonment in the United States, a country that holds 25% of the world’s prisoners, of which almost half are African-American and Latino. Or encourage him to decry America’s failing education system, severely lacking in funding, which is instead being allocated to incarceration; the huge and ever-growing homeless population in this land of milk and honey; and health care reform, which is so vital to millions of Americans who currently cannot afford to get sick.
Rather than having him meddle in the Iranian system, let him fix his own house first!