Iranian response to Obama’s olive branch.

BEIRUT — Roxana Saberi, a 31-year-old Iranian-American journalist, was convicted of spying and sentenced to eight years in prison on Saturday by Iran’s Revolutionary Court.

Ms. Saberi, a former American beauty queen, has been in detention in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison since Jan. 31. She was charged with espionage earlier this month and tried this week behind closed doors.

Yes, yes, the Obama administration is “deeply disappointed” and all that jazz, but what do they intend to actually do about it? Nothing. Just like they have no response to Iran’s continued arms proliferation in defiance of their diplospeak and dialogue and engagement and “reset button,” ad infinitum, ad nauseam.

And while debatably true that the Bush administration (or Clinton, or Bush, or Reagan, and certainly Carter) would likewise have no response one must ponder who is the most arrogant of them all — I say the most arrogant are those pollyanna types who thought just replacing Bush with an Apologist in Chief would somehow lead to a different Iran (or North Korea, or South American tinpot dictator, etc.). Instead we’re viewed as weak.

As the Wall Street Journal opined earlier this week, “Goodwill begets an espionage trial.”

We do no favors coddling the world’s autocracies and anti-Democracy militants. Here’s Reuel Marc Gerecht:

Following in the footsteps of the Bush administration, Mr. Obama wants to avoid labeling our enemy in religious terms. References to “Islamic terrorism,” “Islamic radicalism,” or “Islamic extremism” aren’t in his speeches. “Jihad,” too, has been banished from the official lexicon.

But if one visits the religious bookstores near Istanbul’s Covered Bazaar, or mosque libraries of Turkish immigrants in Rotterdam, Brussels or Frankfurt, one can still find a cornucopia of radical Islamist literature. Go into the bookstores of Arab and Pakistani immigrant communities in Europe, or into the literary markets of the Arab world and the Indian subcontinent, and you’ll find an even richer collection of militant Islamism.

Al Qaeda is certainly not a mainstream Muslim group — if it were, we would have had far more terrorist attacks since 9/11. But the ideology that produced al Qaeda isn’t a rivulet in contemporary Muslim thought. It is a wide and deep river. The Obama administration does both Muslims and non-Muslims an enormous disservice by pretending otherwise.