Europe’s ‘dialogue’ with the mullahs is just camouflage to cover up the trade and appeasement. - Berlin: This Sunday, Iran’s freedom movement has reached a new dimension. At demonstrations throughout the country, the brave people of Iran chanted: “Yazid will be overthrown, this will be the month of blood,” referring to the caliph who killed the founder of Shiite belief, Imam Hossein. Yazid is of course a thinly-veiled code for the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. The Iranian people know that liberty has its price and they are willing to pay it to make a free and democratic Iran possible. The response of the “international community,” though, has been shameful.

Sure, France immediately condemned the violence against peaceful protesters and called for “a political solution.” Italy called “for a dialogue with the opposition.” And the United States and Germany joined with their talk of the Iranian people’s “universal rights” (U.S. National Security Council Spokesman Mike Hammer) and that the world “will observe and not look away,” in the words of German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle.

These words sound hollow to the Iranian people. Over the past 30 years, the West has done nothing except to “look away” whenever Iranians were oppressed, tortured and murdered. What only really counted, particularly for Europeans, was trade. And now six months after the emergence of powerful yet peaceful resistance that is bringing down one of the most brutal dictatorships of our age, the international community still has not been able to put the needs and wishes of the millions of freedom-loving Iranians at the center of its Iran policy. Words of solidarity mean nothing if they are not followed by tough action.

Since the rigged June elections, there can be no more doubt that this regime is as illegitimate is it is oppressive. And yet it was precisely during this period of popular unrest against the mullahs that the free world restarted negotiations with Tehran. This was a stunning betrayal. A betrayal of the freedom-seeking people of Iran and a betrayal of our own universal values. Despite the pictures of millions of Iranians risking their lives for freedom, the international community refuses to acknowledge and support the democratic, peaceful and prosperous alternative to the Islamist rulers. People in the West still think this all about the fraudulent re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and don’t recognize that it is regime change that the Iranian people want.

Over the past six months it has been almost unbearable for me to be so far away from the country that I love and miss so much. It is a deep inspiration to me to witness the courage and love for freedom of my fellow Iranians, two-thirds of whom were born in this undemocratic system. This young Iranian generation has brilliantly educated itself—in spite, not because, of the Islamic Republic, whose schools only teach Islamist ideology.

It is obvious that these young and educated Iranians, literally connected with the world through new information technology, want to overcome tyranny. But these facts have never shaped Europe’s Iran strategy. Instead, Europe insisted on keeping up a “dialogue” with a brutal apparatus of power that does not even respect its own citizens, let alone people in the West. The talk about dialogue was of course only camouflage to cover up the trade and appeasement.

And since this year, even the new U.S. administration has joined this appeasement policy. It’s a failed policy that has already cost so many lives of my fellow Iranians. It has brought the Islamic Republic closer to nuclear weapons, endangering the entire region.

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