Today was supposed to be a momentous day for the revolt against throcracy in Iran, but sadly, according to a Reuters article, it appears that the mullahs' arrests, murders and threats have struck terror into those hoping to speak out: Iran students cancel protest to mark 1999 unrest. We'll see what actually happens throughout the day.

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Yahoo News is reporting that Islamic Vigilantes Seize Three Iran Student Leaders. Excerpts: "Armed Iranian Islamic vigilantes seized three student leaders on Wednesday as they left a news conference where they announced they had canceled protests to mark the anniversary of 1999 university unrest, witnesses said. ... Authorities have banned off-campus rallies, closed campus dormitories, postponed summer exams and vowed to deal strictly with any unrest after arresting 4,000 people during 10 nights of sometimes violent protests across the country in June. [...] Witnesses said police and military units were posted outside the Tehran U.N. headquarters on Wednesday and photographers and camera crews were prevented from taking pictures at the scene." (Via Little Green Footballs)

A sworn enemy dedicated to our destruction is censoring, kidnapping and murdering dissidents right before our eyes, and all the media and the administration are talking about is Liberia. This is outrageous.

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Yahoo News reports: Islamic Vigilantes, Police, Youths Fight in Iran. Excerpt: "Hundreds of Iranian hard-line Islamic vigilantes, police and pro-democracy youths fought three-sided running street battles near Tehran University on Wednesday on the anniversary of 1999 student unrest. ... A witness said police had fired tear gas at groups of youths near the campus and also fought fistfights with plainclothes Islamic militiamen to prevent them from engaging in more running battles with youths."

CNN and Fox News have nothing on this crucial story. One would think that after 9/11 the media would consider it a priority to report news of an anti-Islamist revolt in Iran, a country that even the State Department lists as the world's biggest sponsor of terrorism. But apparently not. It is a horrible error.

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BBC reports: Raid anniversary sparks tensions. Excerpts: "[T]he students agreed to call off all protests after an intervention by reformist members of the Iranian parliament, who told them their demands would stand a better chance of being met -- and their leaders of being freed -- in an atmosphere of calm. ... Despite their compliance, three more student leaders were detained immediately after giving a news conference [...] One of them is believed to have had his nose broken as he was being detained. 'If I am arrested today, I don't guarantee that I won't come out with confessions against myself after they've held me for a while, because of the pressures they put people under,' Ameri-Nassab told journalists only minutes before he was seized."

Apparently detained student leaders were used as hostages to pressure the remaining student leaders not to protest. Once the protest was suppressed, the remaining leaders were taken hostage.

The BBC story notes more of the government censorship measures: "The authorities have also taken steps to silence the radio and TV stations run from California by Iranian exiles bitterly hostile to the Islamic regime. Residents who defy the ban on satellite dishes and watch the broadcasts said they had been jammed for several days. ... Several of the stations had openly incited Iranians to rise up against their rulers."

No need for mullah censorship in the American media. As of 2:30pm CST, CNN had buried the Update 2 story in their World section. Still nothing on Fox that I could find.

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Iran-Va-Jahan reports that Clashes Are Spreading in Iran. CNN online has finally moved their story to the bottom portion of their front page (under World tab). Still nothing on Fox online.

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More editorials on the Iranian demonstrations against the mullahs:

Reading the Popular Mood in Iran by Patrick Clawson of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. This contains good background information on the protests. (Via Iran-Va-Jahan)

It's Mullah time! by Mark Steyn. Excerpt: "[W]hatever the defects of post-ayatollah Iran, the fall of the prototype Islamic Republic will be a huge setback to the world's jihadi. ... It was Ayatollah Khomeini who successfully grafted a mid-20th-century European-style fascist movement on to Islam and made the religion an explicitly political vehicle for anti-Westernism. It was the ayatollah who first bestowed on the US the title of 'Great Satan.' And it was the ayatollah who insisted that this new Islamic revolution had to be taken directly to the West -- to the embassy hostages, to Salman Rushdie, and, ultimately, to America itself."

As Sol Stern illustrates on every page of his brilliant new book, Breaking Free, the teachers unions that run the public schools operate on the principle that people who finish in last place should set the standard for everyone else. Teachers unions don't simply protect against failure, they virtually embrace it. Everything in the teachers' contract is designed so that the worst teachers suffer the least amount of harm...

Finally settling down to raise his children on the Upper West Side in the 1980s, he was dedicated to the egalitarianism of the public schools....

At one point Mr. Stern encountered what he thought was a homeless derelict wandering the schoolyard. The man turned out to be a tenured teacher permanently shunted to playground duty. When the disheveled educator occassionally appeared in the classroom, the children complained of his body odor and made up songs about him.Yet union rules made it impossible to get rid of him. [July 8, 2003]

As the July 9 general strike in Iran approaches, the United States should do everything within its power to ensure that the popular revolt against Iran's theocracy succeeds in overthrowing the regime.

Iran presents a much greater danger to the United States' security than did Iraq or Afghanistan.

Iran--as acknowledged even by the terrorist appeasers at the State Department--is the most active sponsor of terrorism in the world, supporting terrorist organizations like Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad. Moreover, Iran--alongside Saudi Arabia--is the main source of Islamic fundamentalism in the world today, and thus the principal ideological enemy of the United States and the free world.

Iran is openly developing a nuclear weapons program, and has gone as far as threatening to use its soon-to-be-produced nuclear weapons against Israel, America's only true friend in the region. If Iran's mad mullahs are willing to strike Israel, the "Small Satan," they would not hesitate to strike their arch-enemy, America, the "Great Satan."

President Bush was right when he said eighteen months ago, in his State of the Union Address, that "time is not on our side." The President told the country and the world that he would not "wait on events, while dangers gather." But dangers have gathered and time is running out. In a speech at West Point a year ago President Bush promised: "The United States will, if necessary, act preemptively."

Let's roll. Before it's too late.

Media Research Center President Brent Bozell today praised MSNBC for firing host Michael Savage for wishing death to a caller into his show over the weekend. But he also pointed out the hypocrisy: The same media turn a blind eye to liberals in the media who spew the very same hateful venom at conservatives. "MSNBC was right to fire Michael Savage. His comments have no place in civilized debate. But neither did comments that have come from liberal icons of television such as Bryant Gumbel, Nina Totenberg and Julianne Malveaux -- all of whom have said hateful things about conservatives, and none of whom has had to answer for it," Bozell said.

The release than goes on to provide some quotes, like this one from the nationally syndicated on PBS show Inside Washington, July 8, 1995:

Host Tina Gulland: "I don't think I have any Jesse Helms defenders here. Nina?"

ABC News/NPR Reporter Nina Totenberg: "Not me, I think he ought to be worried about what's going on in the Good Lord's mind, because if there is retributive justice, he'll get AIDS from a transfusion or one of his grandchildren will get it."

Or this one From To the Contrary on PBS, November 4, 1994:

USA Today Columnist/Pacifica Radio Talk Show Host Julianne Malveaux, on Justice Clarence Thomas: "You know, I hope his wife feeds him lots of eggs and butter and he dies early like many black men do, of heart disease. Well, that's how I feel. He is an absolutely reprehensible person."

I am convinced [Federer] will be around for a long time and I am convinced he will win many more Wimbledons, US Opens and other Grand Slam titles. In a way, he has an old-fashioned technique. He does not just play heavy topspin, he is very versatile. He can serve and volley, he can stay back, he can slice, he can play drop shots. That is a good example for any junior watching. You don't need to serve at 135 mph, you don't need heavy topspin to become a complete player.

We have seen the future - it arrived today.

Federer is the greatest talent in one of the greatest individual sports--he is a combination of Pete Sampras, Stefan Edberg, and John McEnroe. He can do anything humanly possible with a tennis racquet. If any man playing today has a chance win the Grand Slam in one year--that is all four Grand Slam events in one year--it will be Roger Federer.