Why Iranian Activists Speak English

By George Capsis

Senator Schumer lost it for me when he came out against the Iran agreement.

Yes, he is Jewish, but he is also a US Senator and a Democrat. Every time they mention his name, they say he is slated to become the Democratic leader, but how can he be leader if he does not support his president?

One of the reasons offered by Israeli President Netanyahu and dutifully echoed by Schumer is that after fifteen years the Iranian’s can go full steam and build a bomb.

OK, let us not do an agreement so they can just go ahead and build a bomb right now.

It is just a matter of time before some fanatical group like those who blew up an irreplaceable temple in Baalbek will get hold of a stolen H-bomb or the ability to spread the plague and just do it for the exhilaration of acts of collective ignorance.

When he was young, did we compete for the mind of that twenty-four-year-old sitting in the French train evoking dreams of immortality to gain the courage to stand up and kill as many as he could? The total cost for the war in Afghanistan and Iraq is $3.7 trillion.

If we had used a very small part of those trillions to build schools in his country and others like it, that young man could have been riding that train to his freshman year in a college in Paris or the US

It is ignorance which is true the enemy—not Iran.

Right after I wrote this, the Times came out with an article that the Iranian activists were using the Internet in English to campaign for the agreement. They want to keep the door open and how far that door has opened may be gauged by my story The Shah is Falling, also in this month’s issue, about my trip to Iran in 1979.