Ron Paul's Dictator Fan Club
Ron Paul is back. Earlier this month, after retiring from Congress where he represented the 14th Congressional District in Texas as a Republican, he founded the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity. It sounds like a nice little institute, but as James Kirchick shows in The Daily Beast, it's actually more like a dictator fan club.
Take a look at the advisory board. Some of Paul’s staff are respectable figures, but Flynt Leverett is there, too. So is his wife Hillary. This team has made careers as American shills for the theocratic Islamic Republic regime in Iran. Despite virtually all evidence to the contrary, both Leveretts claim Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fairly won Iran's fraudulent presidential election in 2008, a vote rigging which triggered the (so far) unsuccessful Green revolution. In June of 2009, they co-wrote a rude piece for Politico called “Ahmadinejad Won. Get Over It.”
They don’t just defend the odious Ahmadinejad. They defend the whole system. Iran, says Hillary, “is a country that actually delivers for women...We’re not saying that the Islamic Republic of Iran has built by any stretch a perfect system. And they don’t say that either. But what’s so important about what they are trying to do is that they’re not trying to build an Islamic state, like the Taliban or Saudi Arabia. They are trying to do something very different. They are trying to build an Islamic Republic.”
They collaborate even with those who outright stick up for repression. Flynt, for instance, has worked closely with Tehran University's Mohamed Marandi who defends the execution of political dissidents.
John Laughland is also on the advisory board. He is, as Kirchick notes, “a British writer who has never met a Central or Eastern European autocrat he didn’t like.” The man wrote a book called Travesty which lambastes the international war crimes tribunal that put Serbian tyrant Slobodan Milosevic on trial for crimes against humanity and genocide, a genocide which Laughland denies even happened. Ramsey Clark, who defended not only Milosevic but also Saddam Hussein and Rwandan mass murderers, wrote the book’s Foreword.
http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/blog/michael-j-totten/ron-pauls-dictator-fan-club
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