I come today to bring you a very simple message. Iran must be free. The dictatorship must be destroyed. Containment is appeasement, and appeasement is surrender. The only practical goal is to support a movement to free Iran. After all, a dictatorship that appoints as its justice minister someone who killed 30,000 people is telling you everything you need to know about the core nature of that dictatorship. This is a regime which thinks it’s justice to kill 30,000 people … it’s justice to have an election where no one is allowed to run … threatens all of its dissidents, all of its critics, with jail at best and death at worst. ..
I’ve come here several years and I have been impressed with the growth of the movement, the dedication of the movement, The 3,000 people you just saw in Albania are an enormous victory over the dictatorship. And the dictatorship was determined to kill everyone. And when they failed, they now have 3,000 warriors for freedom in Albania, who understand that we have to replace the dictatorship, and that is a serious defeat for the current leadership in Tehran.
Freedom ultimately involves charismatic leaders who communicate both a sense of hope, a vision of a better future, a moral cause, and an ability to connect with people. In our country, that was George Washington and his young supporter, the Marquis de Lafayette. In Italy, it was Garibaldi. I can tell you from years of having come here that in history, the name of your president-elect, Maryam Rajavi, will go down in the same tradition of fighters for freedom as Washington, Lafayette, and Garibaldi. . And she’s a great leader because she has great followers, because so many of you are so dedicated. I know that this movement is going to be a movement that goes down in history as one of the great examples of the human spirit defeating the evils of dictatorship. And so I thank each of you on her behalf for helping make her a truly historic figure, because that’s what you’re doing.
All of us have an obligation to recognize that while you have a great interest in winning because it’s your country, we in America have a great interest in winning because freedom is threatened everywhere as long as this dictatorship stays in power. And so we are allies, just as much as Washington and Lafayette. And I’m here with my fellow Americans to pledge to you that we’re going to take the story of the hope that is embodied in the one thousand Ashraf strategy, and the potential that the next time that there is popular dissent, it will be across the whole country, it will be organized, and that at that point, unlike what happened last time when the American government shamefully did nothing, at that point the Trump administration needs to be prepared and leaning forward and ready to do everything it can to help freedom win and dictatorship lose in the great struggle that is underway in Iran.
• Newt Gingrich, a Republican and former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, represented Georgia’s 6th Congressional District for 20 years. This is an excerpt from remarks he gave at the July 1 rally in Paris.
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