Letter from Dick Downey

Blood on the Tide: We Musn’t Forget

June 6, 1944. The landing craft ramps drop at Omaha Beach. American boys run straight into German machine guns firing down from bunkers on the bluffs. By nightfall, about 2,400 of them are dead, wounded or missing. My father-in-law came ashore the next day. For the rest of his life, he remembered that the tide was still red with their blood. They paid that price to stop Hitler’s dream of a racially “pure” master race. That dream cost some 70 million lives before it was buried in the rubble of Berlin. Evil of that kind does not negotiate. It has to be defeated.

We are at another turning point. For nearly half a century, since the 1979 revolution and the seizure of our embassy, Iran’s rulers have treated the United States as their enemy. Their power comes from geography. About one-fifth of the world’s oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz, and they are using it as a weapon against the world.

Iran’s Jihadist regime is wedded to the concept of an apocalyptic end of the world with the return of the 12th Imam. All efforts must be made to bring all nations under Islamic rule; their people killed, conquered or converted. Sharia Law is the law of the land; mosque and state are one. The regime is a theocracy that believes it is a divinely destined authority and vows to export its revolution beyond its borders.

It is hard to bargain with leaders who believe history is destined to end in their victory. But the regime is not the Iranian people. Surveys suggest that as many as seven in 10 Iranians reject the Islamic Republic. Every time they rise up, they are shot, jailed or hanged.

So ask yourself: Are $7.00 diesel and $5.00 gas worth the risk of Iran getting an atomic bomb to threaten the world?

The men on Omaha Beach do not flinch. Neither should we.

Dick Downey
Otego