LANTOS THEN AND NOW: In 2003 Tom Lantos received he Friend of Israel Award at
Stand for Israel and declared during his speech:

And I would like to just say a word or two about the two topics Tom spoke about; the war in Iraq and the struggle of Israel to defeat this mindless, hate-filled, bloody suicide avalanche that has engulfed it in the last couple of years.

Our President sees, as Tom does, and as I do, that the struggle is in fact a struggle between good and evil. Now some intellectual sophisticates might take issue with such a simple dichotomy. But if we are honest with ourselves, we recognize that much of the 20th century, and this very young 21st century, is in fact a struggle between good and evil. People who call for evenhandedness, I wonder would they have called for evenhandedness between Hitler and Churchill? The people who are calling for evenhandedness, would they have called for evenhandedness between Stalin and his henchmen, and the victims who perished in the Gulags?

There is no evenhandedness in Tom DeLay or myself. We come down foursquare on the side of the forces of civilization, of decency, of humanity...I hope that as the years go by and I grow up, I will be able to produce the kinds of results in these climactic struggles between freedom, democracy, respect for human rights, respect for the rule of law, that is America’s battle. It is long overdue that this battle be extended to the Middle East.

Now Tom Lantos has changed his tune. On Tuesday, Lantos said he was eager to talk with Iran and "would be ready to get on a plane tomorrow morning, because however objectionable, unfair and inaccurate many of (Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's) statements are, it is important that we have a dialogue with him"

Today, in the context of the UN re-electing Iran as a vice chairman of the UN Disarmament Commission, Anne Bayefsky writes today about the new Tom Lantos:

Congressman Lantos and his close friend former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan have long been drinking from the same well. The “reformed” Human Rights Council was Annan’s creation. Lantos is the leading advocate of the United States joining the Human Rights Council — where presumably we could jump up and down while exercising one vote out of 47. Annan, of his own volition, went to Tehran last September and urged the world not to isolate Iran immediately after the Iranian president had ignored a Security Council deadline to suspend its nuclear activities. Lantos confessed to the House Committee at the end of February that he has been begging for a visa to go to Iran for the past ten years and “will be among the first ones to do so once this visa is granted.”

Lantos was pleased with his recent trip, along with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, to Syria. The U.N. shares his view that one of the world’s leading state sponsors of terrorism ought to be a welcome player on the world stage. Following the election on Monday of Iran as vice chairman, the U.N. Disarmament Commission elected Syria as its rapporteur.

The line between U.N. diplomacy and farce has been crossed. The real tragedy is that the defensible border between our freedom-loving rights-respecting world and the cave of our enemies is fading along with it

And Tom Lantos appears ready to UNdo the battle he spoke out in favor of so strongly back in 2003.

Technorati Tag: Tom Lantos and Iran and UN.