[quote]Campus Movement
Toward terror-free university investment.
By Candace de Russy
We who appreciate the beneficence of free markets are wary of efforts to curtail independent investment activities, including divestment drives. But as Hillel Halkin observes of boycotts in general, they are justified when “aimed at the right targets.” “When Nazi universities in the 1930s fired all their Jewish staff,” for instance, “a boycott of them would have been entirely appropriate.”
Likewise, in face of the most immediate danger now facing the United States: an increasingly bellicose and reckless Iranian regime. Here, too, a divestment policy directed against publicly traded companies engaging in dealings with Iran is entirely appropriate, and the idea is rapidly gaining traction in the public arena.
For example, Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D., N.J.), taking aim at pension systems, said: “It is unconscionable . . . to permit investment . . . in companies that provide revenues, advanced equipment and technology to countries that threaten our vital security interests.” And presidential candidate Mitt Romney has called on private sector and state officials to divest from Iran and to “cut off the resources [it] uses to fuel terror.”
Peter Huessy, president of GeoStrategic Analysis, a defense and national-security consulting business, puts a finer point on it: “Tolerating investment in fanatic states like Iran intent on killing us is nothing less than a policy of suicide.”
ACTS OF WAR
The Iranian government is channeling hundreds of millions of dollars per year to help non-Iranian terrorist organizations, notably Hezbollah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. As Sen. Joseph Lieberman details in an account of the regime’s “increasingly brazen behavior,” our military declared that Iran is training, arming, and funding its proxies in Iraq in the amount of $3 million a month and Iranians are implicated in the deaths of at least 170 American soldiers. It has incarcerated four American civilians, including the esteemed 67-year-old scholar, Haleh Esfandiari, on trumped-up charges. It has abducted a popular trade unionist as well as kidnapped, tortured, and liquidated many other Iranian civilians, and seized 15 British sailors at sea. Its Revolutionary Guard has been discovered delivering weapons to the Taliban and explosives to both Shiite and Sunni terrorists in Iraq, and Iran is also reported to be harboring top-level al Qaeda leaders — and this, as Joshua Muravchik notes, in spite of Shiite–Sunni enmity. “All of these surprising actions,” he writes, “are for the sake of bleeding the U.S.”
Facing such a threat, we should be using every resource at our disposal — including our investment dollars — to force the Iranian powers-that-be to cease and desist. Failing to act would be the historical analogue of standing idly by while Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland. A systematic divestment drive is a critical and proven tool in asserting pressure, as demonstrated by a similar drive that played a vital role in the fall of South Africa’s apartheid regime.
NOW’S THE TIME
Kenneth R. Timmerman, author of Countdown to Crisis: the Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran, explains that the divestment campaign “will complicate Iran’s quest for the investment capital and technology it needs to keep its oil industry afloat,” rendering the regime quite vulnerable. For even though Iran has an abundance of oil, it is not refining enough gasoline for domestic use. Its susceptibility on this score was borne out by the riots from this summer’s gas rationing, coupled with an inflation rate of more than 22 percent and an unemployment rate that may be running as high as 30 percent.
Given these weaknesses, it is plausible, as a recent survey of the Iranian people by Terror Free Tomorrow suggests, that a stringent global boycott would increase the potential for revolt against Ahmadinejad, or, at least provide an impetus for internal change in the state.
The moment is thus right for the U.S. and the international community to pressure Iran, in particular by targeting Iran’s banks and the companies controlled by its military-industrial complex. Already this year the U.S. Treasury has blacklisted and applied asset freezes against at least 15 Iranian entities. The objective of such sanctions is to force the regime to abandon, or at least slow the rate of, its crazed aggression, or to effect a regime change. One seasoned Middle East expert, Dennis Ross, believes that this policy could be critical in changing Iran’s policy on nuclear weapons.
U.S. investors, including public bodies such as universities, must now do their part in winning the War on Terror and deprive terror-sponsoring nations of their financial life’s blood. Above all, it is imperative to cast the spotlight on those publicly traded companies doing business with this odious terror-sponsoring regime. “Divest Iran” is a movement whose time has come.
Spearheading this campaign is the Center for Security Policy (CSP), which has identified more than 400 companies that furnish equipment, technology, and revenue streams to four terrorist-sponsoring governments (i.e., Iran, North Korea, Syria, and Sudan). CSP even highlights a “Dirty Dozen” of these companies to illustrate how their behavior indirectly aids and abets terrorism.
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with more at the following link…
article.nationalreview.com/?q=MT … 2U=&w=MQ==
My question here is where all the usual concerned parties are? I would have expected at the very least Juba and others of that ilk to come forward as “professional protesters” to demand action in this area, and yet silence? How disappointing…