The reaction, so swift and so energetic, of the members of this same
community, now deservedly recognized as the impregnable citadel of the
Faith of God, and the cradle of the rising institutions of its World
Order, to the sudden onslaught made upon the institutions, the lives and
the livelihood of their oppressed brethren, members of the numerically
leading and the most venerable national Baha'i community, by the
traditional adversaries of a long-persecuted Faith, has been such as to
deepen, to a marked extent, the feelings of genuine admiration and esteem,
so strongly felt throughout the Baha'i world, for the enduring and
magnificent services rendered in the course of more than six decades by
the American believers to the Faith of Baha'u'llah and its embryonic World
Order. The spontaneity with which the rank and file of this community as
well as the body of its elected representatives, have contributed to the
"Save the Persecuted Fund" established for the succor of the victims of
these savage and periodically recurring barbarities; the measure of
publicity accorded them in the American press, as well as over the radio;
the timely and efficacious intervention of men of prominence, in various
walks of life, on behalf of the oppressed and the down-trodden; the
repeated and direct appeals addressed by them to the highest authorities
in Persia, as well as to their representative in the United States; the
immense number of written and cabled appeals, made by the local as well as
the national elected representatives of the community, to the chief
magistrate of Persia, his ministers and parliament; the numerous messages
addressed by the same representatives to the chief executive of the United
States, urging his personal intervention, the pleading of the cause of an
harassed, sorely-tried community in the course of repeated representations
made to the State Department in Washington; the part played in the
presentation of the Baha'i case to the United Nations officials in both
Geneva and New York; the allocation of a sizeable sum for the purpose of
securing the assistance of an expert publicity agent, in order to
reinforce the publicity already being received in the public press--these,
as well as other measures which, by their very nature, must of necessity
remain confidential--proclaim, in no uncertain terms, the dynamic and
decisive nature of the aid accorded, in a hour of trial and emergency, by
the champions of the Faith of Baha'u'llah, raised up in the great republic
of the West, at such a crucial hour in the evolution of His Plan, for both
His Faith and the world at large, to the vast body of the descendants of
the dawn-breakers of the Apostolic Age of that same Faith in the land of
its birth.