Iran and Europe: we have some politicians who act like the beatniks from 'The Simpsons'

On December 29, 1996, the popular animated series "The Simpsons" premiered its 161st episode, already during its eighth season.

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That episode showed the story of Ned Flanders, the Simpson family's neighbor. As an adult, he was a polite and very religious man, but as a child, he was such a handful that his parents had to take him to the doctor. Ned's parents were what in the United States were known as beatniks,' a countercultural and bohemian leftist movement that emerged in the 1950s and evolved into the hippie movement of the 1960s. In one scene of that episode, Ned's parents tell the doctor: "We've tried nothin' and we're all out of ideas!" Behind them, the boy was wrecking the doctor's office without his parents saying a word, much to the doctor's despair.

Today, beatniks have been almost forgotten, but their attitude remains very much present in our society. There are parents who are extremely tolerant of their children, to the point that they become little monsters who believe they can do whatever they want, whenever they want. These parents end up being the first victims of their own spoiling, but friends and neighbors also suffer the consequences. It's something we've all likely experienced in our own lives.

In Europe, we have many politicians who act like beatniks, and not just on the left. We can see it in the behavior of authoritarian regimes like those in Russia, Iran, China, Cuba, and Venezuela—dictatorships that have taken advantage of the excessive tolerance of European politicians toward thugs, but only toward themselves. When it comes to legislating within their own borders, many of our politicians become ruthless with ordinary citizens, exhibiting a legislative diarrhea that ends up imposing rules, often absurd ones, on every aspect of our lives.

The Islamist dictatorship of Iran has enjoyed decades of the beatnik attitude of many European politicians. While the ayatollahs promoted terrorism internationally and used blackmail in their foreign policy, in Europe we allowed broadcasts of Iranian propaganda channels like HispanTV, created so that this terrorist regime could weaken and destabilize our democracies. Europe's attitude towards this regime has been one of outrageous weakness, when not outright complicity, as we saw with the socialist Josep Borrell when he was EU Commissioner for Foreign Affairs.

That beatnik attitude continued after Hamas, a tentacle of the Iranian regime, perpetrated the largest anti-Semitic massacre since the Holocaust with its terrorist attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, an abominable crime in which entire families were burned alive inside their homes, and unarmed civilians—including children—suffered torture, rape, kidnapping, and brutal murders at the hands of psychopaths supported by many radical Islamists. A horrific attack that some European politicians refused to condemn (among them two who are now ministers in Spain) and that some even justified, as did the current Spanish communist minister Sira Rego.

When the United States and Israel decided to decapitate Iran's Islamist dictatorship, they did not do so without justification or prior provocation. The Iranian terrorist regime has been financing and supporting the murder of US and Israeli citizens for decades through the terrorist networks it supports. The aforementioned Hamas massacre is one example. Another clear example was the October 23, 1983 attack on the US embassy in Beirut, in which 305 people were killed, including 241 US military personnel (220 of whom were Marines). It was a crime claimed by Islamic Jihad, the brand used at the time by Hezbollah, a terrorist group supported and financed by Iran.

If Iran has committed such horrific crimes for years, it has been largely because many European politicians always had some excuse not to act, to let the United States and Israel deal with these terrorists on their own, without lifting a finger. Often, the complaints of some European politicians have only been heard, as has happened now, to criticize those who decided to confront the problem, offering as an alternative the beatnik solution of these European politicians for everything: do nothing, let the problem fester, and then pass it on to others to deal with.

It's high time Europe changed its mindset, because this way we are feeding monsters that threaten to destroy peace and security if we don't give in to their blackmail. Many young people died in the last century to prevent Europe from living under the rule of a monster like Hitler, but now some seem to have decided that freedom doesn't need defending, or that it's better to give in to a bully to obtain a false peace based on coercion. It seems we haven't learned anything from history.

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Image: Cittiverse.