Is today Tehran’s Tiananmen Square?

People being thrown off of bridges, being slain in the streets. Beating old men in the streets. “Would you help us, could you help us?”

None of this is easy to watch, but we mustn’t not look.

CNN – a chilling, heartbreaking phone call from a woman in Tehran. “they are killing students with axes, put axes through the hearts…this is horrific, this is genocide, this is…a massacre, this is Hitler, and you people should stop it…nobody takes action; it’s time to act.”

ABC correspondant Lara Setrakian twitters:

they are beating people severely. helicopters all over the city finding protesters & telling guards so they go attack

and

[from source], hearing from Iran: people are hoarding the injured in their homes because they’re afraid of going to hospitals

Jim Sciutto of ABC: more witness ‘police arresting anyone wearing green & black’ and ‘police beating more severely..using all sorts of weapons..shooting into air’

People are being shot as they chant “God is Great” from rooftops.

The women of Iran are in the streets, throwing stones at guards with guns. The women have been in the forefront of this movement from the start.

Bush predicted they would, in 2008:

There’s no doubt in my mind that the women will be leading freedom movements in Iran and elsewhere, and the role of the United States is to provide moral support and other support without undermining their cause.

It’s happening. Pray for the people in Iran who are dying to be free. Blood spilled in pursuit of freedom brings home just how valuable it is.

Robert Kaplan on How Iraq matters to Iran:

It was hoped that Iran would undergo its own upheaval were Iraq to change…it is happening. And not only is Iran in the throes of democratic upheaval, but Egypt and Saudi Arabia have both been quietly reforming apace.

PJTV Tehran goes from bad to much-worse

I will update continually:

Threatswatch: Unimaginable Horror in Tehran – this is graphic and brutal:

An Iranian blogger (whose URL I will not publish) live blogging from Baharestan Square in central Tehran today captures but brief glimpses of the unimaginable horror that took place today. Bus loads of protesters were stopped and unloaded from their buses by “black-clad police” and literally herded. When the massing was sufficient, as the barely controllably distraught Tehran caller to CNN described first hand, hundreds of the regime’s Basij thugs poured out of an adjoining mosque and commenced a massacre with axes, clubs, guns and gas.

From the live blogger’s eyewitness account:

>More than 10.000 Bassij Milittias get position in Central Tehran, including Baharestan Sq.
>Army Helycopters flying over Baharestan and Vali Asr Sq.
>The streets, squares and around BAHARESTAN (Approx. South-eastern of Tehran) is swarming with military forces, civilian forces, the security motorists
>The croud have moved to the south of baharestan, the situation is bad, the shooting has started
>In Baharestan Sq. in the Police shooting, A girl is shot and the police is not allowing to let them help
>In Baharestan we saw militia with axe choping people like meat – blood everywhere – like butcher

This is the Iranian regime, wading into its own unarmed people and axing them to death, bludgeoning women (seen as the greatest threat to the regime) and throwing them to their deaths from pedestrian bridges. The same Iranian regime whose embassy officials are invited to American embassies around the world to celebrate on July 4th, of all things, a successful revolution.

You’ll want to read it all 4:10PM

Gateway Pundit: More shootings in the street! Graphic updates – looks very bad. 3:49 PM

A Letter from Iran:

We are confronting religious intolerance and fantaicism of its worst kind in this land. Past thirty years tens of thousands have been lost, raped, and jailed for standing tall against this current. Its vibrations of hatred, war, and aggression have reached your home anywhere in the globe. There is no doubt that we are a global family being interrelated to one another closer than we know. This, we have experienced the hard way past few years.

I am writing to beg for your attention and assistance in any way possible. An innocent, peaceful, historic momentum, unprecedented in recent history, has come alive in our world that is being brutally put down with violence, lies, and dirty politics for power and riches. You, no matter where you are, have been inflicted by the evil nature of this current going round in our globe.
…
We as a nation are pleading desperately to the world that we MUST not recognize this regime legitimate. We need to use all our strength and unity to pressure it to leave the office before our voice is shut down.

“Blood everywhere!”

“Gov’t continues to move aggressively to crack down…”

The doctor who saw Neda die

Streaming video recorded and compelling

“Death to the Dictator!”

The Butcher pursues the protesters

Iran Soccer team members banned after wearing pro-opposition wristbands

Spengler: Why this is an especially dangerous moment

Did Obama Administration Negotiate with Terrorists? Let us hope not? That’s another old policy he should leave in place.

Many on twitter wonder: “Now can we all storm the WH with e-mails demanding they disinvite the Iranians from the 4th of July BBQs?” Allahpundit: “Has the lefty CW already shifted to deciding the Iran invite was a bad idea, or are we waiting for an official announcement from O first?”

Obama is “seriously considering rescinding invite”. Always a step behind, this guy. I wonder if the fact that none of those invites were accepted plays into his serious considerations.

Ed Morrissey suggests Obama’s answer yesterday affected their own thinking, today. Read his comments.

Mark Steyn:

Reading Jonah’s piece today today, it seems to me the President’s problem is that he chose as a matter of policy to legitimize the Iranian regime at the very moment they chose to delegitimize themselves – first, by stealing the election to an unprecedented degree and, then, by killing people who objected to them doing so.

That’s awfully bad timing, and one sympathizes, as one would if Nixon had gone to China a week before Tiananmen Square. But the fact is it’s happened and adjusting to that reality makes more sense than banking on being able to re-legitimize Khamenei and Ahmadinejad.

One of the things Bush had to learn in office was that you have to move with the times; it took him too long to learn it in Iraq. Hopefully Obama will figure it out more quickly in Iran. He’s been way too pally, up to now.

Sundries Shack: it’s not a debate, Mr. President, it’s a slaughter

Campaign Spot: Teargas in the street.

Threatswatch: twitter-quoting an Iran source he trusts, Steve asks CNN, BBC & Huffpo to please pixilate the faces of protesters as “they are being identified and arrested”

Graphic: You’re Warned (Source) More here.

Neda’s family: forced to leave their home by Iranian Authorities

Melanie Phillips: Iran Crisis moves closer to home

9 year old girl shot by militia