[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 98 (Friday, June 26, 2009)]
[House]
[Page H7690]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                              WE ARE FREE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Michigan (Mr. McCotter) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. McCOTTER. Mr. Speaker, from the hellish streets where Iranians 
demand freedom, voices arise to pray for deliverance and liberty; but, 
elsewhere, safely ensconced in freedom, others argue for appeasement 
and ``neutrality.'' We must choose wisely between these competing 
voices and visions, lest we betray our allegiance to liberty.
  Some voices allege America's support of Iranian democracy 
demonstrators harms their cause, strengthens the regime, increases the 
repression, and, once the freedom seekers are slaughtered, precludes 
``good'' relations with the murderous mullahs.
  Their siren song is wrong. Despite pronouncements, America has not 
intervened, the mullahs publicly accuse us of it, their illegitimate 
puppet Ahmadinejad demands our prostration at the regime's feet, and 
all the while, the regime butchers innocents.

                              {time}  1945

  On June 24, CNN recorded a call from a terrified Iranian girl, who 
told of democracy demonstrators being hacked with axes, shot or thrown 
from bridges. She pleaded: ``You should stop this. You should help the 
people of Iran who demand freedom. You should help us. It's time to 
act.'' She was pleading to America. She was pleading to us.
  Once, another generational chance for freedom was seized, as Soviet 
dissident and gulag prisoner Natan Sharansky attests, ``We developed 
our own tapping language to communicate with each other between the 
crawls of our cells. We had to develop new communication methods to 
pass on this great, impossible news.
  ``Reagan dared to call of the great Soviet Union an evil empire. That 
moment made it impossible for anyone in the West to continue closing 
their eyes to the real nature of the Soviet Union.
  ``It was one of the most important, freedom-affirming declarations, 
and we all instantly knew it. For us, that was the moment that really 
marked the end for them, and the beginning for us. The beginning of a 
new revolution, a freedom revolution. Reagan's revolution.''
  As for voices clamoring for a ``grand bargain'' with Iran's inhumane 
regime if it clings to power, Sharansky warns: ``How a government 
treats its own people cannot be separated from how that government 
could be expected to treat other countries.'' How did the regime treat 
the family of Neda Agha-Soltan, the student it shot in the streets? Her 
state executioners refused to tender Neda's body to her family; buried 
her without a funeral; banned all signs of mourning; and forced her 
family to flee from their Tehran home.
  To defeat such a regime, Sharansky offers Reagan's example: ``Ronald 
Reagan had the moral clarity to understand the truth, and the courage 
both to speak the truth and to do what needed to be done to support 
it.''
  What concrete actions can we take today to aid the Iranian people's 
march to freedom?
  We must increase funding for Radio Farda and other democracy building 
programs to provide the Iranian people with the free flow of 
information and communications in their struggle to be free.
  The President must use his full authority under the Iranian Sanctions 
Act to deter companies from investing in Iran's energy sector.
  We must place column 2 tariff rates on Iran's remaining exports to 
the United States. We must pass the Global Online Freedom Act to 
prevent American companies from assisting foreign governments, 
including Iran, from censoring and monitoring their people on the 
Internet. We must pass the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act and the 
Iran Threat Reduction Act to embargo the flow of refined fuel to and 
increase the pressure upon the regime.
  The President must prohibit regime members from entering the United 
States of America.
  We must seek a United Nations Security Council resolution denouncing 
the regime; demanding a new, internationally monitored election; and 
tightening the current U.N. sanctions against the regime until this 
election occurs and its outcome's integrity verified.
  We must work with American labor organizations to establish a support 
fund for Iranian workers striking in protest of the regime.
  Finally, we must link all of our relations with Iran, and with those 
nations abetting the regime's perpetuation in defiance of its people's 
freedom to human rights.
  If we pale and fail to take these measures, we will be haunted by the 
cries of the oppressed Iranians abandoned to preserve our neutrality in 
this time of moral crisis.
  But, when we act, we will expand freedom to the oppressed and 
enslaved; and ensure it for our children and ourselves. Only then will 
we have honorably performed our duty to liberty by guaranteeing 
generations of Americans and Iranians may proclaim, ``We are free.''

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