AND IN IRAN – AT 10:17 A.M. ET:  Our friend Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi, an Iranian human-rights activist of the first rank, yesterday reported the following:

On Monday, March 13th, the Iranian regime executed, in secret, a Jewish-Armenian (Orthodox Christian) couple along with three other individuals in Tehran’s Evin prison. Ms. Adiva Mirza-Soleiman was of the Jewish faith who along with her Armenian husband, Varouzhan Petrossian, was executed. The Iranian regime has refused to disclose the specific charges against the five, that lead to their execution.

Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) reports that though Iranian court part 28 confirmed that the five were in fact executed, they refused to surrender their bodies to their relatives for burial. The families of the couple who had planned to bury each of them according to each of their faith’s funeral customs have been threatened and arrested.

COMMENT:  It is easy, with all that's happening in the Mideast, to forget the cruelty of the Iranian regime toward its own people.  It's also easy to forget that Iran is emerging as the great power in the region, thanks in part to the ineffectivness of American foreign policy.   Obama's meekness in the face of a general revolt of Iranians in 2009 set the tone, and sent a signal to the Iranian mullahs that we weren't going to do much, or even say much, in defense of democracy in Iran.

And the Iranian nuclear program forges ahead.

March 27, 2011