Congressman Brad Sherman (D-CA)
Hello. I’m Congressman Brad Sherman from California’s best-named city, Sherman Oaks. Iran is a culture that goes back at least 4,000 years. And it gave the world its first human rights document, the Cyrus Cylinder. So it’s a travesty that Iranians today live under an oppressive undemocratic regime, a regime that murders its own people and uses international aggression to distract its own people from it’s venal corruption. This must end.
I’m the chief democratic sponsor of House Resolution 118, expressing support for the Iranian people’s desire for a democratic, secular, nonnuclear Republic of Iran and condemning violations of human rights and state-sponsored terrorism by the Iranian regime. The resolution highlights the recent arrest of an Iranian diplomat in Belgium for his conspiring to commit murder as part of a plot to bomb the Free Iran Gathering in Paris, 2018, a gathering that I’m pleased to have been able to virtually address. This arrest demonstrates the willingness of the regime to use its diplomats and its embassies to commit acts of terror around the world, particularly against the United States, our citizens and officials, as well as to terrorize Iranians.
I have been dedicated to helping those who are trying to achieve democracy in Iran, whether it’s in meetings with the Prime Minister of Albania to make sure that Iranian exiles there are protected or whether it is to fight against hostage taking by the Iranian regime, particularly when they take American citizens as hostages.
The Iranian regime has also arbitrarily and brutally suppressed ethnic and religious minorities, including the Baha’is, and it has deprived them of their basic human rights solely because of their religious beliefs.
House Resolution 118 supports calls for the United Nations Security Council to work with the United states and our partners and allies to condemn the ongoing human rights violations perpetrated by the Iranian regime and establish a mechanism by which the United Nations Security Council can monitor and hopefully prevent such violations.
We are all familiar with Iran’s support for terrorism. Iran supports the Houthis, Hezbollah and Hamas. And those are just the terrorist organizations that begin with the letter H. Iran was identified by the Obama administration, even prior administrations, then by the Trump administration and now by the Biden administration as a state sponsor of terror, a leading force behind, for example, Assad’s brutal killing of tens of hundreds of thousands of people in Syria. And of course, we cannot forget the Iranian regime’s oppression of its own people.
House Resolution 118 condemns Iran’s state sponsor of terrorism, both at home and abroad and recognizes the rights of the Iranian people to establish a democratic, secular and nonnuclear Republic of Iran. With the introduction of this resolution, Congress sends a strong bipartisan message to Iran and its people, that the United States does not tolerate the ongoing human rights violations perpetrated by the regime.
Thank you very much. I’m Congressman Brad Sherman.
