Subsequently, Mir Housein Mousavi, the main opponent of Ahmadinejad and many members of the reformist opposition – known as the Green Movement – were put effectively under house arrest curbing their ability to reach the public in Iran. Moving the scenes of its brutality from the streets to jails and interrogation rooms, the regime dropped out of headlines thereby reducing the pressure on the Iranian authorities to answer for their brutal treatment of the opposition.

In the meantime, using its full control over the media, the Iranian government began to promote an alternative account of the 2009 election, an account which has not been without impact on the western left. It goes like this: the Iranian upper and upper middle classes, fooled by the western supporters of the reformists, had assumed that they had majority while, in fact, in small towns and villages widespread support for Ahmadinejad gave him his 63% victory in the elections. Frustrated with their own miscalculations the defeated reformists resorted to street violence and therefore the government had no choice but to use harsher measures to calm things down. This scenario has many big holes including the fact that, even if Ahmadinejad had the support of the rural areas, the Iranian population is about 65% urban and in fact the large cities are more than able to give any candidate a victory. Furthermore, hundreds of video clips document the peacefulness of the early protest marches in large cities as well as small towns. They also document the unprovoked violence of the security forces against the marchers.

All of this has become relevant again since less than a month ago when an audio file of a speech by a chief intelligence officer and interrogator from the top ranks of the Revolutionary Guards came to light describing the behind-the-scenes of Ahmadinejad’s 1989 victory. The speech was leaked to the opposition websites and spread fast despite the heavy censorship imposed in Iran. Besides the fascinating details revealed in it, there are other things that make the document important including the fact that no one (not even the government) has disputed its authenticity. It is, in fact, very likely that the speech was leaked intentionally by the government itself. These facts lead to important questions. Who is the speaker? What does the tape reveal? What is the reformist opposition doing about it? And, why would the Iranian government leak a document that confirms its complicity in a fraudulent election– if indeed the leak has been intentional.

First a quick update on the current conditions in Iran. The country still has the highest number of jailed reporters in the world and only the official news and views are reported on the national media. Expressing political opposition in a blog can lead to five years in jail where the prisoners go on frequent hunger strikes to protest torture, unsanitary living conditions, and insult. Female prisoners will receive reduced sentences if they confess to illicit sexual relations with prominent members of the reform movement. Families of the prisoners who resist making confessions are threatened with more arrests. And despite Mr. Ahmadinejad’s claim quoted in the New Yorker’s recent piece “After the crackdown,” his critics are not free to speak their minds. A standard charge for jailed journalists is “insulting (read criticizing) the president.” To get a sense of the problem, imagine you are an Iranian blogger citing Mr. Ahmadinejad’s claim in his New Yorker interview in your blog asking “If it is ok to criticize our president, why are some journalists in jail for “insulting” him?” You will likely receive a brief phone call from a security agent within days. He will tell you to introduce yourself to one of the intelligence headquarters (or even directly to the main office of Evin prison). If you are smart, you will do so immediately and quietly….

http://www.counterpunch.org/keshavarz09072010.html

BTW, why is “taking the exact opposite line” from the MSM necessarily “pathetic”? In my experience it’s a good rule of thumb. The corollary is that anytime you find yourself on the same side of a debate as the Zionists or/and Imperialists, you need to reconsider your analysis. at the very least.

A question: where do you find these “Iranians” you say “come online”? And how are you able to be certain they are actually Iranians, and not agents of the Izreali dirty trix dept? Or the NED/CIA/DOD/State Dept?

I’m just curious where you get all your funny ideas, where you spend your time when you aren’t hasbarating here on DV:)

What defects there may be in Iranian institutions is no business of any “American”. We can properly oppose actions by governments installed, propped up or otherwise supported by our government, but we need to learn to keep our Pukka Sahib noses out of other country’s internal affairs, especially those with a history of colonial oppression and repression at the hands of the CIA, Western petroleum interests or international Zionism
Any reforms in Iran’s institutions and policies which may or may not be desirable are up to the Iranians. Attempts to meddle by even the best-intentioned Americans are more likely to backfire than to produce any positive results.

Grassroots Arabs, Iranians, Afghans and Pakistanis are all victims of US/UK/NATO and Isreali racist imperialism and militarism.

People who announce their support for Iranian traitors who have tried and continue to try to act as Quislings, as a pro-US, Pro-Izzy Fifth Column deserve our utmost contempt… to say the least. They are the enemy. \

It’s very interesting, the MO these crypto-hasbarats use: mouth some “progressive” cliches, then parrot Hillary Clinton’s crocodile tears: “Oh, we’re just Feminists concerned about Women’s Rights”; “we’re Libertarians concerned about Religious Freedom”.

Utter hypocrisy. Crocka shit.

I do support the independence of the kurds, and condemn the brutal, criminal oppression of them by iranian, turkish, and iraqi governments. I also support Iranians who don’t willingly swallow the oppressive government in that country.

The fact is that this woman MURDERED HER HUSBAND with the help of her LOVER; therefore she was on trial for this murder. This propaganda against Iran is ILLEGAL. You imagine Iran stage a propaganda campaign against a murderer in the USA. Wouldn’t they object to it and call it, interference in the state function? How dare these war criminals that have killed millions of people not to mention rapes of many men and women stage propaganda campaign BASED ON LIES? How many men and women have been executed in the United States, many of whom innocent? Did we get any condemnation from these wh*res including Mia Farrow and the Iranian stooges? Mia Farrow is part of the US and Israel Foreign policy. She was active with other reactionaries, Black and White, against Al Bashir, the Sudanese President, where ICC brought charges against him and called the situation in Darfur ‘genocide’ where according to every single unbiased informed person is nothing but HOAX. This charge was formed by Jewish organizations such as ‘Save Darfur’ and ‘holocaust’ museum with the help of the Iranian Zionist enablers like Payam Akhavan for regime change in Sudan in order to partition the country which is a Zionist plan for many years. The south of Sudan is going to be partition soon due to Zionist campaign of lies and deception where staged by the fifth column like Charles JACOBS. People should expose all these Zionist stooges if they want a better world because the war criminals cannot function in isolation and needs political whores like Iranian opposition groups and individuals like Mia Farrow and Payam Akhavan to function and carry out their vicious plan against humanity.

I thought at first that they were blitzreading and that`s why everything i said was contradictory, senseless, etc. So, i complained. Now they read my posts more slowly, but nonsense is nonsense no matter how fast or slow one reads my posts.
Don, by why self-torture by reading nonsense?

Yes, yes, Don and i fear mightily islam because in know Don is not lunatic. I am not that sure about me; at times i am a basket case, but never misses an opportunity to rundown cults; which worsens sit`n for him. But he never learns.
Don, even my smallhead shakes MIGHTILY—means as a `jew`wld– her head in disgust as what comes out of my filthy mouth.
She`s still annoyed with me because she`s still waiting for her first cunnilingus bob promised her moooons ago.

Don, is it not a great feeling when one doesn`t please a single muslim, christian, fascist, or moodnik! Try it! U might lahk it! Oh boy, am i gonna sleep bad tonight. tnx

She adds to the hype and hysteria about the Iranian lady but never mentions the 2 million imprisoned in the US (am I right that the majority are non white?) and the fact that lives are taken by the state by lethal injection or electrocution which I find abhorrent. We abolished the death penalty in the UK in 1965.

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0760750.html#axzz0ySYtU251

Number of Persons Executed by Jurisdiction, 1930–2008
This table includes two sets of data about executions in the United States. The first shows the number of executions from 1930 to 1972, when the death penalty was abolished. The second data set displays the number of executions in each U.S. state since the ban on the death penalty was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1976.

The Kurds are Israel’s pawn in the region, therefore, are protected from the zionist propaganda and its stooges, the Iranian ‘opposition’ groups abroad for time being.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-452288/The-moment-teenage-girl-stoned-death-loving-wrong-boy.html

Amani Maged writes:

Sakina Mohamedi Ashtyani, a woman in her 40s and mother of two, had an extramarital affair with a man, and together with her lover, killed her husband. She confessed to the crime, but later recanted after receiving 90 lashes, insisting that she confessed under torture. Whether or not Sakina is a criminal, the fact that she was sentenced to death by stoning remains an internal issue for Iran, if not an issue of religion since Islamic jurisprudence rules that a married adulteress and adulterer should be stoned to death for their sin. One way or another, the case remains the concern of Iran’s judiciary.

But the West has morphed this trial into an issue of human rights. Demonstrators in the West took to the streets denouncing Iran’s position and demanding that Sakina be released. French women’s movements raced to announce their support for her, while France’s First Lady Carla Sarkozy took a personal interest and declared that France will not abandon Sakina in her time of need. Madame Sarkozy went as far as saying that she refuses to recognise the legal arguments against Sakina.

On the banks of the Seine, crowds of artists, intellectuals, politicians, both government supporters and the opposition, joined supporters of the Iranian opposition to show their solidarity with Iranians opposed to their government’s policies. Human rights organisations were prominent at the event.

But it appears that Sakina is not the real reason for all this commotion. It is really just a manifestation of the ongoing Iranian opposition movement abroad, as demonstrated by the large number of public figures who signed a petition initiated by French writer Henri Bernard Lévy in opposition to Tehran’s domestic policies. The petition rejected what it calls Iran’s use of terror and oppression to stifle the revolutionary uprising sparked by the government’s refusal of new elections after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won in 2009.

Signatories to the petition include former French presidents Jacques Chirac, Valery Giscard d’Estaing, First Lady Carla Bruni, Ségolène Royal, Isabelle Adjani, Mia Farrow and others who disagree with Iran’s policies of capital punishment, and what they call indiscriminate killing of citizens for expressing their opinion with the aim of terrorising the population. Those who signed the petition also demanded that the verdict against Sakina be overturned “to recognise her innocence”.
All these efforts by the West on behalf of Sakina and human rights come at a time when thousands of women in Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan are killed and raped without any such loud protest from Western leaders and human rights groups. The amount of attention Sakina is receiving is reminiscent of the Algerian runner Hassiba Boulmerka. The West feared for her safety during the massacres in Algeria, and the world-class runner was all they focussed on while hundreds of women like her were being killed without a peep of protest. But it seems Boulmerka’s legs were more important than those of hundreds of other Algerian women.

The West is championing Sakina, who confessed to infidelity, yet it turned a blind eye to the 460 women who were killed during the Al-Aqsa uprising, not to mention the 42 girls and women killed in Basra last year at the hands of armed militia, the death of 15 women in Baghdad Al-Karkh, and the targeting of civilians in arbitrary bombings which do not discriminate between man, woman or child. All this is somehow less important.

There were no demonstrations in Paris along the banks of the Seine, and public figures did not gather to protest the incarceration of 90 female detainees in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, before they were released or relocated to other prisons after a scandal at the prison. While the West holds Boulmerka’s legs and Sakina’s infidelity in high regard, 87 per cent of women in Afghanistan have faced violence; half of those have been raped in a country which has been occupied since 2001. Eighty of these women tried to burn themselves alive in 2008 to escape the shame, and some succeeded. None of these tragic victims merit Western tears as much as does Sakina.
France, which is working hard to uphold Sakina’s human rights, is at the same time preparing to deport 700 Roma and hundreds of other refugees to Romania and Bulgaria, and has even been censured by the UN. Yet President Nicolas Sarkozy ignores this criticism and insists that France was “responsible” for Sakina.

THE WEST IS AT ITS LOWEST POINT IN THE HISTORY OF HUMANITY.
No one trust the Iranian ‘opposition’ groups abroad, zionist sell out.

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2010/1014/re5.htm

you seem to want to change the subject to a question of whether or not “we” (whoever you include in that category, which is not at all clear) should start putting civilizations out onto other planets.

To me that is a nonsense question. And a total waste of time.

Why be so mysterioso? If you have a point you want to make, why not just state it? Subject/predicate, noun/verb: why beat around the bush?

BTW Don: If you want to keep things simple, don’t start rambling about saxophones and drums; it a subject you obviously know nothing about. And I’m sorry, but it can’t be made utterly simple without trivializing it.

Keeping it simple, this “Bozh” keeps repeating Christoffer Hitchens-style Islamophobic cliches, which you can hear on Fox News 24/7. Islamophobia is probably the number one ideological weapon in the ZPC/DOD arsenal.

To parrot this crap and then try to pretend you aren’t part of the War & Occupation machine is so transparent I wouldn’t have guessed even you would be naive enough to fall for it.

BTW, IMO your rambling posts might have been interesting twenty years ago at a City Lights poetry reading, but at this point they’re devoid of significant content. Everybody knows all about that crap or they wouldn’t be hanging out on DV.

We all know things are bad, the point is What are we going to do about it? Yes, we need to keep getting reports of conditions in under-covered places & situations. But Comments are meant to be relevant to the article they’re appended to. You Don are the world heavyweight champ Threadjacker.

If you want to wax poetic about it, why don’t you write an article and submit it for publication?

Mow that and I don’t edge I find it a total waste of time am more on the lines of everything should be made as simple as possible but not simpler.

However, i do expect that iraq would not ever rise again without UEI; i.e., us-euro-isr`s permission or promotion. tnx

“Stoning is not practiced only among Muslims, nor did it begin with Islam. Human rights groups say a young girl was stoned to death in 2007 in Iraqi Kurdistan’s Yazidi community, which practices an ancient Kurdish religion. The Old Testament includes an episode in which Moses arranges for a man who violated the Sabbath to be stoned, and stoning probably took place among Jewish communities in the ancient Near East. Rabbinic law, which was composed starting in the first century A.D., specifies stoning as the penalty for a variety of crimes, with elaborate instructions for how it should be carried out.”

Now, I am surprised why the name “KURDISH” never gets into films made by the Jewish neocons in Hollywood. Is that anything to do with the fact that the terrorist Kurds are Israel’s pawns in the ‘new middle east’ after the zionist let invasion of Iraq?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/weekinreview/22worth.html

According to jesus, ancient hebrew priests have carried ou stoning to death. Mohammed appears to have read it and calls numerous times for death of infidels and women who break any of their menfolk`s directives or commands.

you must provide an evidence immediately on stoning. Who has been stoned to death? You are brainwashed by the humanists, tool of Zionism and imperialism” to control the mind of ignorant people. Present the evidence; otherwise stop this nonsense at once. Have you watched “The Stoning of Soraya M” directed by Cyrus Nowrasteh a boot licker of Jewish neocon, David Horowitz, played by a whore of Zionism, Shohreh Aghdashloo, a Baha’i an ally of zionism, who is at the service of the western propaganda against Muslims where appeared as Saddam first wife in another propaganda film against Muslims, “The house of Saddam”, and received AWARDS for her services? Have you?
This film is based on LIES to demonize Iran. The Zionists are involved in this plot against people of Iran. Shame on them and shame on ignorant people who spread the story of this HOAX ‘stoning’ by the Zionist Jews and their stooges.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stoning_of_Soraya_M.

Nowrasteh has been a featured speaker and columnist for the Liberty Film Festival, a conservative film festival which merged in 2006 with David Horowitz’s Center for the Study of Popular Culture (now the David Horowitz Freedom Center) to form a joint conservative film organization.[11]. He also provided the Liberty Film Festival with an advance copy of The Path to 9/11. In addition, in 2006 the group awarded him “with a special Freedom of Expression Award.”

This process/state of barbarization of the western world has its name: zionazification…