Martin Amis: Wishful thinking on the end of the Mullahs

A very optimistic view of events in Iran. 

Martin Amis: The end of Iran's ayatollahs?
In 1979, the return to Iran of an exiled cleric marked the start of the Islamic Republic. The death in June of Neda Soltan may herald the long-overdue fall of this moribund regime

 

Martin Amis
The Guardian, Friday 17 July 2009 
 

The writer Jason Elliot called his recent and resonant Iranian travelogue Mirrors of the Unseen; and I am aware of the usual dangers associated with writing about the future. But what we seem to be witnessing in Iran is the first spasm of the death agony of the Islamic Republic. In this process, which will be very long and very ugly, Mir Hossein Mousavi is likely to play a lesser role than Neda Agha Soltan, whose transformation (from youth, hope, and beauty, in a matter of seconds, to muddy death) unforgettably crystallised the core Iranian idea – the Shia tragedy and passion – of martyrdom in the face of barbaric injustice. Neda Soltan personified something else, too: the modern.

 

Elliot's title should again be borne in mind as we consider the June Events, which are open to two interpretations. Quite possibly, things are more or less as they appear: the results of a fraudulent election were presented to the people with indecent haste and laughable incompetence (with, in other words, implicit contempt for democracy); civil unrest was then followed by the application of state violence. Now consider. If, after the usual interval, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had soberly announced a 51% win for President Ahmadinejad, then Iran, and the world, might well have bowed its head and moved on. Just as possibly (the Islamic Republic being what it is), the landslide was rigged, and ostentatiously vaunted, to bring on the terror and the crackdown.

 

In 1997, the regime felt confident enough to sanction the surprise victory of President Muhammad Khatami, who won by the same landslide margin of 69% in a joyous election that no one disputed. Khatami, a cleric, had nonetheless far stronger liberal credentials than the technocrat Mousavi (who, during the Iran-Iraq war, was well to the right of Khamenei). Lovingly hailed as "Ayatollah Gorbachev", Khatami was soon talking about the "thoughtful dialogue" he hoped to open with America. It seemed possible that international isolation, which so parches and de-oxygenates the Iranian air, was about to be eased.

 

Everyone understood that this process would take time. In June 2001, Khatami was re-elected with a majority of 78%. Seven months later came George W Bush's "axis of evil" speech (one of the most destructive in American history), and the Tehran Spring was at an end. In truth, Bush was heaven-sent for the Iranian right; he blindly enhanced its regional power (with the adventurist, indeed experimental, war with Iraq), while remaining adequately "arrogant" (the most detested of all attributes in the Shia-Iranian sensorium). Now, the mullahs are aware that Barack Obama is far cannier than that. Had Mousavi won, Obama would have rewarded Iran, and in a way palpable to all Iranians. Such a "linkage" – liberalisation equals benefits – would have fatal consequences for the mullahs. The earth has already stirred beneath them, with the pro-western, anti-Syrian, anti-Iranian election in Lebanon. This, together with certain historical forces, explains the current confusion and hysteria of the armed clerisy.

 

For the mullahs now know that they are afloat on an ocean of illegitimacy. The great hawsers of the revolution of 1978-79 are all either snapped or fraying. Of the four foundational narratives, three are myths: the "Islamic Revolution" was not an Islamic revolution; the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88), which destroyed a generation, was not the "Imposed War", as it is still called; and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, was not a great man (Khomeini, as every inquisitive Iranian has long understood, was a world-historical monster). Perhaps most importantly of all, for now, the fourth narrative, or thread (anti-Americanism – "Westoxication", in the old battle cry), has been severed by the person of Obama. The Islamic Republic is also doomed by modernity (in the form of instant communications) and by demographic destiny. Persia, one of the oldest nations on earth, is getting younger and younger.

 

"In the history of the Iranian plateau," writes Sandra Mackey, in her stylish and magisterial classic, The Iranians: Persia, Islam, and the Soul of a Nation, "the sun has risen and set on nearly a million days." But before we come to the Iranian soul, and the million days, let us examine the Three Lies about the Islamic Republic.

 

The 1979 revolution wasn't an Islamic revolution until it was over. In its origins, it was a full-spectrum mass movement, an avalanche of demonstrations and riots, and strikes so relentless that they blacked out the Peacock's palace; the military, moreover, was sustaining a thousand defections per day. The June Events of 2009 constitute a mere whisper of demurral when set against the deafening crescendo of 1978. The noise was not made for clerical rule; the noise was made because a decadent monarchy had lost the farr – the inherent aura of kingship.

 

It is instructive to compare the Iranian revolution with the two Russian revolutions of 1917: the February revolution, a popular revolt, and the October revolution, a Leninist coup (with an impotent Provisional Government in the interim). Trotsky said that the Bolsheviks found power lying in the street and "picked it up like a feather". And then, of course, the really warm work began – against the Whites, against the Greens (the peasantry), against the trade unions, against the church, and so on, until every alternative centre of power (and opinion) was eradicated, down to and including any gathering of three.

 

On 16 January 1979, Muhammad Reza Shah flew out of Tehran – to exile in Cairo. On 1 February, Ayatollah Khomeini flew into Tehran – from exile in Paris (where one of his more regrettable neighbours, I feel obliged to mention, was Brigitte Bardot). Thus the political revolution was over; now the cultural revolution began. The Provisional Government was successively eroded by the komitehs (mosque-based militias, later the Basij), by the Revolutionary Guards (later the Pasdaran, or the Iranian army), and by the revolutionary tribunals (which dealt out rough justice to survivors of the old regime, and various other undesirables). On 4 November, a group of pious students spontaneously infiltrated the US embassy and seized the 53 hostages. Khomeini manipulated this V-sign directed at the Great Satan to such effect that in the imminent referendum on the new constitution "99.5%" of a turnout of 17 million gave their blessing to Islamic autocracy.

 

But there was still that "0.5" to deal with. And Khomeini faced vigorous opposition from almost every quarter – most formidably from the Mujahedin-e Khalq. Established a decade and a half earlier, in opposition to the Shah, the Mujahedin (Marxist, left-Islamic, and committed to women's rights) had half a million adherents and could field a guerrilla army of 100,000 experienced fighters. When Khomeini excluded them from the new political order as "un-Islamic", they turned to terror. In 1981, if you recall, the Mujahedin were blowing up mullahs by the dozen (74 in a single strike in Tehran); and they went on to assassinate more than a thousand government officials in the latter months of that year. What followed was terroristic civil strife. By September, Khomeini's Revolutionary Guards were executing 50 people a day for "waging war against God" (the same crime, and the same punishment, now being invoked by the clerics of 2009). Fired by a zeal both revolutionary and religious, the mullahs bloodily prevailed.

 

Revolutions, almost by definition, are fiercely anti-clerical. As late as 1922, to take the fiercest possible example, Lenin executed 4,500 priests and monks, plus 3,500 nuns. Contrarian Iran, however, swam upstream. By December 1982, Khomeini had more or less secured the monopoly of violence, and the Iranian people found themselves living under the world's only revolutionary theocracy. The Islamic Republic was Islamic, now, but it was no longer a republic. Iranians have since enjoyed only a shadow of popular sovereignty; and by 1982, besides, they had something else to think about – the meatgrinding confrontation with Iraq.

 

The Iran-Iraq war can rightly be thought of as the Imposed War, but only if we understand that the war was imposed by Khomeini. It tests the historical imagination to get a sense of the horrified dismay engendered, throughout the region, by the advent of the meshuga ayatollah. Stalin, after a while, was content with "socialism in one country". Khomeini, proclaimedly, wanted Shia theocracy in every country on earth. Throughout the course of the Iran-Iraq war, Khomeini put himself about elsewhere, with bombings, assassination attempts, and armed subversion, in Bahrain, Kuwait, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia. In Mecca, the hajj became the scene of annual agitation; in 1987, a clash between Iranian militiamen and Saudi riot police left more than 400 dead.

 

And Iraq? In 1979 Saddam Hussein reached out a trembling hand of friendship to the new Iran, and was clearly hoping for the continuation of the detente he had established with the Shah. Iran responded by resuming support for the separatist Kurds (suspended since 1975) and for the Shia underground; there were assassination attempts on the deputy premier and the minister of information, and the successful murder of at least 20 prominent officials in April 1980 alone. Khomeini, meanwhile, withdrew his ambassador from Baghdad; in September, Iran shelled the border cities of Khanaqin and Mandali.

 

In The Iran-Iraq War, 1980-1988, Efraim Karsh lists in his chronology eight Iraqi offers of ceasefires, the first on 5 October 1980, 12 days after the war began, the last on 13 July 1988, five weeks before it ended. Khomeini's war aim was the theocratisation, or de-Satanisation, of Iraq; thus the war became a (failed) test of Islam, and devolved, in Mackey's words, into "a daily enactment of Shia themes of sacrifice, dispossession, and mourning". So: 12-year-olds were attacking Iraqi machine gun emplacements on bicycles, and 750,000 Iranians filled the multi-acre cemeteries, and perhaps twice that number were left crippled in body or mind. Eleven months later, Khomeini himself joined the fallen in the land of the dead.

 

What remains, then, you might wonder, as you deplane at Tehran's Imam Khomeini International Airport, and enter a city where no cab-driver will stop for a cleric – what remains of the legacy bequeathed by the Father of the Revolution, or alternatively by "that fucking asshole", as he is reflexively called, in English, by the youth of the cities of Iran? Khomeini's notion of the Velayat-e Faqih, or rule by the vice-regent of God (ie, the top mullah, ie, Khomeini), was so unhistorical that many of its angriest opponents came from the clergy. Political participation, in Shia theology, is seen as a contaminant. And with good reason: that power corrupts is not a metaphor; and absolute power, combined with absolute self-righteousness, defined the insane nightmare of Khomeini's rule.

 

His moral imbecilities provide a rich field. I will confine myself to two examples. After President Carter's "fiasco in the desert", the failed Entebbe raid of April 1980, Khomeini announced that God had personally thrown sand into the helicopters' engines, to protect the nation of Islam. To hear this kind of talk from an eight-year-old is one thing; to hear it from a bellicose head of state, on public radio, is another. The second example comes from Mackey (the time is 1981):

 

A film run on government-controlled television showed a mother denouncing her son as a Marxist. The son, sobbing and grabbing for his mother's hand, desperately tries to convince her that he has given up Marxist politics. The mother rejects his pleas saying, "You must repent in front of God and you will be executed." The picture fades to Ayatollah Khomeini telling the people of Iran, "I want to see more mothers turning in their children with such courage without shedding a tear. This is what Islam is."

 

Well, it may or may not be what Islam is. But it is not what Iranians are.

 

* * *

 

Iran is one of the most venerable civilisations on earth: it makes China look like an adolescent, and America look like a stripling. And its 2,500-year history is sliced almost exactly in two by the rise of Islam. Accordingly, the Iranian heart is bipolar, divided between Xerxes and Muhammad, between Persepolis and Qom, between the imperially sensuous (with its luxury and poetry) and the unsmilingly pious. You will, I think, acknowledge that dividedness when I tell you that the author of this quietly beautiful quatrain –

 

I am a supplicant for a goblet of wine

 

From the hand of a sweetheart.

 

In whom can I confide this secret of mine,

 

Where can I take this sorrow?

 

– is the Ayatollah Khomeini.

 

Not Ferdowsi, not Rumi, not Hafez, not Omar Khayyam: Khomeini. It is perhaps the most beguiling single feature of Iranian life that its people go on pilgrimages, not only to the shrines of their martyrs and imams, but also to the shrines of their poets. The Iranian-Persian soul resembles the goddess Proserpina in Ted Hughes's masterly Tales from Ovid –

 

Proserpina, who divides her year

 

Between her husband in hell, among spectres,

 

And her mother on earth, among flowers.

 

Her nature, too, is divided. One moment

 

Gloomy as hell's king, but the next

 

Bright as the sun's mass, bursting from clouds.

 

In 1935, Iranians found themselves living in a different country – not Persia but Iran, the specifically pre-Islamic "land of the Arians". This was the work of Reza Shah (the army strongman who seized the throne in 1925). Reza Shah was a modernist and seculariser – Iran's Ataturk or Nasser. He was also a friend of Nazi Germany (and was deposed by the Allies in 1941). In 1976, Iranians found themselves living in a different millennium, not 1355 (dated from the time of the Prophet) but 2535 (dated from the time of Cyrus the Great). This was the work of Reza Shah's son. Installed by the coup of 1953 (the west's very grave historical crime, whose disastrous consequences are still with us), Muhammad Reza Shah was a "miserable wretch", as Khomeini rightly called him; but he was quite closely attuned to Iran's divided self. Reza Shah beat women who wore the veil; Khomeini beat women who didn't; Muhammad Reza Shah beat neither.

 

After 1979, Iran was subjected to militant and breakneck re-Islamisation. The Zoroastrian era was declared to be jahiliyyah, a benighted slum of ignorance and idolatry, and a dire embarrassment to all good Muslims. In the mid-1990s, for example, the historian Jahangir Tafazoli was put to death simply because he was the best-known specialist on ancient Iran. We would call this "killing the messenger", and we would call the entire tendency "delusional denial". The 30-year suppression of the mixed Iranian soul – which says yes to freedom and tolerance, yes to love and life and art, yes to Islam, and yes to modernity – provided the energy and courage of the June Events, and entrained the hideous murder of Neda Soltan.

 

* * *

 

So now we have another four years of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who will be more purple-gummed with insecurity than ever, and another four years of troubled dreams about the Iranian bomb. I find that the one thing Ahmadinejad mandates, with full legitimacy, is a tone of ridicule – because it is impossible to write solemnly about the man who, among other absurdities, clinched the 2005 election by the simple feat of not having a Jacuzzi. And you needn't reread that sentence: the "Jacuzzi moment", or the no-Jacuzzi moment, when the candidate revealed that yes, he had no Jacuzzi, was widely credited with securing his majority. This was enough, apparently, to make him shine out in the smog of pelf and hypocrisy that passes for the Islamic Republic.

 

The American politician whom Ahmadinejad most closely resembles – in one vital respect – is Ronald Reagan. General similarities, I agree, are hard to spot. Ahmadinejad doesn't live on a ranch with a former starlet. Reagan didn't have a degree in traffic control. Ahmadinejad doesn't use Grecian 2000 (as his rapidly greying hair triumphantly attests). Reagan, as a young man, wasn't involved in the murder of political adversaries. And so on. But what they have in common is this: both figures are denizens of that stormlit plain where end-time theology meets nuclear weapons.

 

Now we can return, for a while, to dissimilarities. Ahmadinejad is not checked and balanced by democratic institutions. Reagan did not actually spend public money on civic preparations for the Second Coming, and was not the product of a culture saturated in ecstatic fantasies of morbid torment. Ahmadinejad does not have a temperament in which "simple-minded idealism" (in Eric Hobsbawm's formulation) might lead him to recognise "the sinister absurdity" of the arms race. And Reagan was not answerable to some millenarian vicar in the holy city of, say, Baltimore. Finally, whereas Reagan wielded enough firepower to kill everyone on earth several times over, Ahmadinejad does not yet have his Button.

 

Jesus Christ, according to both presidents, is due very shortly, but in Ahmadinejad's vision the Nazarene will merely form a part of the entourage of a much grander personage – the Hidden Imam. Who is the Hidden Imam? In the year 873, the bloodline of the Prophet came to an end when Hasan al-Askari (in Shiism, the 11th legitimate imam) died without an heir. At this point, among the believers, a classic circularity took hold. It was assumed that there must be an heir; there was no record of his existence, they reasoned, because extraordinary efforts had been made to conceal it; and extraordinary efforts had been made because this little boy was an extraordinary imam – the Mahdi, in fact, or the Lord of Time.

 

In Shia eschatology the Mahdi will return during a period of great tribulation (during, say, a nuclear war), will deliver the faithful from injustice and oppression, and will then supervise the Day of Judgment. Not only Ahmadinejad but members of his cabinet have been giving the Hidden Imam "about four years" – well within the president's second term. And where has the Hidden Imam dwelt since the ninth century? In "occultation", wherever that may be. The Hidden Imam is at least intelligibly called the Lord of Time: he is 1,100 years old.

 

Rule number one: no theocracy can ever deploy nuclear arms. And Iran, we respectfully suggest, is not yet ready for the force that drives the sun. We all know what Ahmadinejad thinks of Israel (and we remember his Islamists' conference, or his goons' rodeo, in Tehran, on the historicity of the Holocaust). Yet this is what Ali Rafsanjani thinks of Israel – Rafsanjani, the old, much-jailed revolutionary chancer, a pragmatist and reformer, hugely worldly, hugely venal: "The use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything", whereas a counterstrike on Iran will merely "harm" the Islamic world; "it is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality". Indeed, given the Shia commitment to martyrdom, mutual assured destruction, as one Israeli official put it, "is not a deterrent. It's an incentive."

 

Nuclear weapons, it seems, were sent down here to furnish mankind with a succession of excruciating dilemmas. Until recently the mullahs' quest for the H-bomb seemed partly containable: the nuclear powers could give face to Tehran, and begin to scale back their arsenals towards the zero option. But now those powers include North Korea (already the land of the living dead); and the Islamic Republic, in any case, no longer seems appeasable. Equipped with weapons of fission or fusion, the supreme leader may delegate first use to Hezbollah, or to the Call of Islam, or to the Legion of the Pure. Or he may himself become the first suicide bomber to be gauged in megatons.

 

* * *

 

Meanwhile, the memory of the June Events, and of Neda Soltan, will do its work, and add weight to the mass of unendurable humiliations meted out to the Iranian people. Meanwhile, too, the senescent regime (I again warily predict) will reach beyond crackdownism for the supposedly unifying effects of war. Not a war against someone its own size, or someone bigger. Tiny Bahrain, which is 60% Shia, looks about right.

 

As for apocalyptic Islamism, in all its forms, I cannot improve on the great Norman Cohn. This is from the 1995 foreword to Warrant for Genocide (1967), where the subject is the Tsarist fabrication The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and what Jewry calls the Shoa, or the Wind of Death:

 

"There exists a subterranean world where pathological fantasies disguised as ideas are churned out by crooks and half-educated fanatics [notably the lower clergy] for the benefit of the ignorant and superstitious. There are times when this underworld emerges from the depths and suddenly fascinates, captures and dominates multitudes of usually sane and responsible people, who thereupon take leave of sanity and responsibility. And it occasionally happens that this underworld becomes a political power and changes the course of history."

 

•Martin Amis's novel The Pregnant Widow will be published by Cape next February

Iranian girl prisoners systematically raped before execution

The Iranian practice of raping girl prisoners before execution has been reported previously, but perhaps never with such clear documentation. "Progressives" who support this regime should keep it in mind. It is unlikely that there will be any investigation by the UN or a human rights group. 

 

Ami Isseroff   

 

'I wed Iranian girls before execution'

Jul. 19, 2009
SABINA AMIDI, Special to The Jerusalem Post , THE JERUSALEM POST

In a shocking and unprecedented interview, directly exposing the inhumanity of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's religious regime in Iran, a serving member of the paramilitary Basiji militia has told this reporter of his role in suppressing opposition street protests in recent weeks.

He has also detailed aspects of his earlier service in the force, including his enforced participation in the rape of young Iranian girls prior to their execution.

The interview took place by telephone, and on condition of anonymity. It was arranged by a reliable source whose identity can also not be revealed.

Founded by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979 as a "people's militia," the volunteer Basiji force is subordinate to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and intensely loyal to Khomeini's successor, Khamenei.

The Basiji member, who is married with children, spoke soon after his release by the Iranian authorities from detention. He had been held for the "crime" of having set free two Iranian teenagers - a 13-year-old boy and a 15-year-old girl - who had been arrested during the disturbances that have followed the disputed June presidential elections.

"There have been many other police and members of the security forces arrested because they have shown leniency toward the protesters out on the streets, or released them from custody without consulting our superiors," he said.

He pinned the blame for much of the most ruthless violence employed by the Iranian security apparatus against opposition protesters on what he called "imported security forces" - recruits, as young as 14 and 15, he said, who have been brought from small villages into the bigger cities where the protests have been centered.

"Fourteen and 15-year old boys are given so much power, which I am sorry to say they have abused," he said. "These kids do anything they please - forcing people to empty out their wallets, taking whatever they want from stores without paying, and touching young women inappropriately. The girls are so frightened that they remain quiet and let them do what they want."

These youngsters, and other "plainclothes vigilantes," were committing most of the crimes in the names of the regime, he said.

Asked about his own role in the brutal crackdowns on the protesters, whether he had been beaten demonstrators and whether he regretted his actions, he answered evasively.

"I did not attack any of the rioters - and even if I had, it is my duty to follow orders," he began. "I don't have any regrets," he went on, "except for when I worked as a prison guard during my adolescence."

Explaining how he had come to join the volunteer Basiji forces, he said his mother had taken him to them.

When he was 16, "my mother took me to a Basiji station and begged them to take me under their wing because I had no one and nothing foreseeable in my future. My father was martyred during the war in Iraq and she did not want me to get hooked on drugs and become a street thug. I had no choice," he said.

He said he had been a highly regarded member of the force, and had so "impressed my superiors" that, at 18, "I was given the 'honor' to temporarily marry young girls before they were sentenced to death."

In the Islamic Republic it is illegal to execute a young woman, regardless of her crime, if she is a virgin, he explained. Therefore a "wedding" ceremony is conducted the night before the execution: The young girl is forced to have sexual intercourse with a prison guard - essentially raped by her "husband."

"I regret that, even though the marriages were legal," he said.

Why the regret, if the marriages were "legal?"

"Because," he went on, "I could tell that the girls were more afraid of their 'wedding' night than of the execution that awaited them in the morning. And they would always fight back, so we would have to put sleeping pills in their food. By morning the girls would have an empty expression; it seemed like they were ready or wanted to die.

"I remember hearing them cry and scream after [the rape] was over," he said. "I will never forget how this one girl clawed at her own face and neck with her finger nails afterwards. She had deep scratches all over her."

Returning to the events of the last few weeks, and his decision to set free the two teenage detainees, he said he "honestly" did not know why he had released them, a decision that led to his own arrest, "but I think it was because they were so young. They looked like children and I knew what would happen to them if they weren't released."

He said that while a man is deemed "responsible for his own actions at 13, for a woman it is 9," and that it was freeing the 15-year-old girl that "really got me in trouble.

"I was not mistreated or really interrogated while being detained," he said. "I was put in a tiny room and left alone. It was hard being isolated, so I spent most of my time praying and thinking about my wife and kids."

 

Anti-Islamism crusader Salahuddin Shoaib Choudhury gets yet another day in court

The Bangladesh "justice" system has dragged out out the "case" against Salahuddin Shoaib Choudhury for 5 years. There is no case in fact that could be tried in a civilized country. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have been deaf to appeals on his behalf, possibly because he is pro-Israel. Salah's saga began when he was arrested for the crime of trying to travel to Israel, a minor offence. But sedition charges were added to make it a capital offence.

Ami Isseroff

Reporter faces death for pro-Israel view

Jul. 19, 2009
Haviv Rettig Gur , THE JERUSALEM POST

Since 2003, Bangladeshi journalist and peace activist Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury has been investigated by Bangladeshi authorities on charges of sedition, treason and insulting religious belief.

Choudhury, 44, has spent years opposing Muslim extremism through his writings, especially the Weekly Blitz which he started in 2003. He has called for interfaith dialogue and for normalizing relations between Muslim countries and Israel.

On Wednesday, Choudhury returns to court. He is accused of insulting Islam and harming the state's reputation abroad, charges which, when couched as "sedition," carry a possible death penalty.

"According to my lawyers in Bangladesh, the government is determined to conclude the trial as soon as possible," he wrote in a public letter over the weekend. "No one knows what will be the verdict. But, of course, seeing the past track record, we cannot hold any hope for a good [result] because the court is not applying its judicial mind, but trying to appease the Islamists."

Choudhury's newspaper offices were bombed on July 6, 2006, after he expressed public sympathy for the Ahmadiyya sect of Islam.

On October 5, he was attacked in his office by a mob that included prominent members of the then-ruling Bangladesh Nationalist Party, which historically has aligned itself with Islamist parties in the country, who accused him of being an Israeli agent. He was badly beaten.

Choudhury was the subject of US House Resolution 64 of March 13, 2007, which objected to continued "harassment and intimidation" and his incarceration in 2004 for 17 months without legal recourse, during which he was placed in solitary confinement and "suffered harsh interrogation techniques and received no treatment for a debilitating case of glaucoma," according to the resolution.

The House resolution called for the Bangladeshi government to "immediately drop all pending charges against Bangladeshi journalist Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury… and take steps to protect Mr. Choudhury."

It noted that the "US Commission on International Religious Freedom visited with Mr. Choudhury on their trip to Bangladesh in February and March 2006... and identified Mr. Choudhury as one of those voices that should not be silenced."

Choudhury's case has been taken up by human rights groups and activists including Canadian human rights expert and MP Irwin Cotler, Dr. Richard L. Benkin - like Choudhury, an advisory board member of the Islam-Israel Fellowship - the Committee to Protect Journalists, the American Jewish Committee and Reporters Without Borders.

This article can also be read at

Iran: The protest that won't die - What does it mean?

Despite government bans on demonstrations, Iranians continue to protest what they claim is a fraudulent election result that returned Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as "President." Increasingly, it is becoming a battle between rival Ayatollahs, religious leaders who are the real powers behind the Iranian government. It is not clear if Rafsanjani, who is leading the protests, is a Hojetoleslam as he is titled here, or an Ayatollah (see here) , the higher designation for a religious authority.

 

Rafsanjani is sometimes mistaken for a moderate. The following quote from Rafsanjani will give a better appreciation of his views and of the nature of the internal split in Iran, which should not be misunderstood as a battle between forces of light and darkness:

 

Europe resolved a great problem – the problem of the Zionist danger. The Zionists, who constituted a strong political party in Europe, caused much disorder there. Since they had a lot of property and controlled an empire of propaganda, they made the European governments helpless. What Hitler and the German Nazis did to the Jews of Europe at that time was partly due to these circumstances with the Jews. They wanted to expel the Zionists from Europe because they always were a pain in the neck for the governments there. This is how this calamity fell upon the Muslims, especially the Palestinians, and you all know this history, more or less.[...]The first goal was to save Europe from the evil of Zionism, and in this, they have been relatively successful. (Source)

Ami Isseroff

---

 

July 18, 2009
Rafsanjani defies Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as protesters turn out in force
pro-government militiamen firing tear gas at the opposition demonstrators

 

Tens of thousands of Iranians flooded the streets of Tehran yesterday to hear the country's most influential powerbroker pronounce the Islamic Republic in crisis and as he called for the release of those arrested in recent pro-democracy demonstrations.

 

In a devastating attack on the regime, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a leading cleric and former President, told a crowd at Tehran University that the Government had lost the people's trust. Referring to the handling of last month's disputed election, which President Ahmadinejad claims to have won, he said that the custodians of the Islamic Revolution had undermined its basic principles.

 

Hojatoleslam Rafsanjani condemned the brutal suppression of protests and called for the release of those detained during the post-election crackdown. The crowd acclaimed his address by chanting: "Death to the dictator" and "Leaders, give us arms".

 

Police and pro-government Basij militiamen responded by firing teargas and using truncheons to break up the crowd, the largest street gathering in weeks. Mehdi Karoubi, one of the presidential candidates who claims that his votes were stolen last month, was assaulted by plainclothes militia.

 

At least 15 people were arrested, including the leading women's rights campaigner and lawyer Shadi Sadr, who was beaten and dragged into a car in front of a crowd of her friends. "Shadi called me from an unknown location and said she was arrested by plainclothes officials who forcefully got her into a car," her husband, Hossein Nilchian, said.

 

Hojatoleslam Rafsanjani's sermon at the university, the cradle of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, came as a crucial opportunity to galvanise the embattled opposition, who believe that the election was stolen from the moderate challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi.

 

Mr Mousavi's attendance at yesterday's sermon was his first official public appearance in weeks. He has been under virtual house arrest, his communications monitored, closest aides arrested and news outlets closed.

 

Hojatoleslam Rafsanjani, a key Mousavi sponsor, who heads the clerical council with the authority to remove the Supreme Leader, has spent the past few weeks canvassing the religious establishment in Qom to make such a move against him.

 

Only a month ago at the same venue, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, declared that the election debate was over and warned of consequences for those who questioned the victory of Mr Ahmadinejad, the conservative incumbent. Many within the clerical establishment saw his backing of one candidate as a betrayal of his position.

 

Hojatoleslam Rafsanjani couched his sermon yesterday with calls for unity but his challenge to the regime was unmistakable. "Today is a bitter day," he said. "I hope with this sermon we can pass through this period of hardships that can be called a crisis."

 

He warned Iran's leaders not to ignore the will of the people — a key tenet of the revolution. "If the Islamic and Republican aspects of the revolution are not preserved, it means we have forgotten the principles of the revolution," he said. "Our key issue is to return the trust which the people had and now to some extent is broken."

 

Reminding worshippers of his close relationship with the late Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, he condemned the use of iron-fisted security forces to crush protests. "We knew what Imam Khomeini wanted. He didn't want the use of terror or arms," he said. Iran puts the official death toll at 20, although human rights activists believe that hundreds may have been killed during the protests.

 

Hojatoleslam Rafsanjani drew thunderous applause as, blinking back tears, he demanded the release of demonstrators. "It is not necessary that in this situation people be jailed. Let them join their families. We should not allow enemies to rebuke and ridicule us because of detentions. We should tolerate each other," he said.

 

Outside the prayer hall protesters carrying green banners — the colour of Mr Mousavi's election campaign — called on President Ahmadinejad to resign. Some evoked the slain martyrs of the protest movement, chanting:

 

"Sohrab is not dead, it is the Government that is finished" and "We are all one voice, we are all Neda".

 

The regime had banned public rallies, which had largely died out since security forces launched the crackdown on the streets last month, making Friday prayers one of the few opportunities left to gather.

For Switzerland, there are no terror organizations

 

The Jerusalem Post
Jul 17, 2009 2:46 | Updated Jul 17, 2009 10:31
For Switzerland, there are no terror organizations
By HERB KEINON

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1246443834783&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

Switzerland continues to dismay Israel, as its Foreign Minister
Micheline Calmy-Rey told Swiss RSR Radio on Wednesday that while she
recognizes there are terrorists, Switzerland does not have a list of
terrorist organizations because it believes that while a person can be
called a terrorist, an organization cannot.

During the interview, Calmy-Rey admitted that officials from her
ministry met in June with a Hamas delegation - led by former Hamas
foreign minister Mahmoud al-Zahar - when he was at an international
conference in Geneva.

The Swiss officials had joined a meeting the Hamas delegation held with
former US diplomat Thomas Pickering, a former ambassador to the UN and
undersecretary of state. Pickering is today the co-chairman of the
non-profit International Crisis Group.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said "the Swiss government, by
ignoring the murderous and extremist character of Hamas, is again making
the wrong choice, sending the wrong signal, and missing an opportunity
to side with the moderates in the Middle East."

Palmor said "again" because in April, Israel recalled its ambassador to
Bern for consultations after Swiss President Hans-Rudolf Merz met with
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Pointing to the year-long spat the Swiss are having with Libya over the
arrest - and later release - in Switzerland of Muammar Gaddafi's son and
daughter-in-law, Palmor said Gaddafi last week called for breaking up
Switzerland, which he described as a "global mafia."

"How would the Swiss feel if we invited Gaddafi here now to discuss the
matter?" Palmor said.

The Swiss Embassy in Tel Aviv said the Swiss Foreign Ministry had no
comment on the issue.

Palmor said that while Israel would not this time recall its envoy in
Bern, Ilan Elgar, for consultations, the ambassador would make Israel's
dissatisfaction known to the Swiss government.

Switzerland is not a member of the EU. The EU, like the US, does
consider Hamas a terrorist organization and has refused any contact with
it until Hamas recognizes Israel, forswears terrorism and accepts
previous Israeli-Palestinian agreements.

Although there are some voices inside the EU - primarily from Sweden and
Belgium - that would like to ease these conditions so a dialogue could
be maintained with Hamas, Palmor said there was no real concern in
Jerusalem at this time that the EU would change its position on the matter.

The US has also not changed its position on Hamas, with The Washington
Post on Wednesday quoting US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as
saying that before Hamas can participate in peace talks, "we have made
it clear, both publicly and privately, through all kinds of
pronouncements, that we would expect Hamas to recognize Israel, renounce
violence and agree to abide by prior agreements."

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Iranian election debacle

The main premise of the article is questionable. It states:

 

On 12 June, the Islamic of Republic of Iran officially died. Even if hardliners in and outside the government thought that they could get away with the usurpation of the election without causing a major popular upheaval, it was evident that governance after "election-day" will largely have to rest on authoritarian rule.

As if Iranian had a democratic government before that time! At any rate, it shows that even the rubes who never read, "Reading Lolita in Tehran," never heard of the murdered Bahai or the hanged homosexuals, and thought that Iran was a democracy, are now beginning to understand the nature of this regime.

 

Iran: "How to lose friends and alienate your own people"
Written by Bernd Kaussler on July 10, 2009 – 4:04 pm

On 12 June, the Islamic of Republic of Iran officially died. Even if hardliners in and outside the government thought that they could get away with the usurpation of the election without causing a major popular upheaval, it was evident that governance after "election-day" will largely have to rest on authoritarian rule. In fact, for those who have always advocated an almost totalitarian interpretation of the velayat-e faqih, this was the very motivation of rigging the election in the first place.

 

As far as government propaganda was concerned, the nomenclature has always done a great job in showing the world Iran's veneer of democracy, by highlighting the dynamics of partisan politics, numerous constitutional tenets of popular sovereignty and civil rights and most importantly, regular elections with at least more choices than elsewhere in the Middle East. Since 12 June and the brutal crackdown that followed, this masquerade will no longer work. The Republic is dead! Long live the Islamic State of Iran!

 

In Western capitals, the tealeaves are being read. Those who have always advocated regime change and rejected engagement with Iran seem vindicated and charges of "appeasement" gain momentum in Washington and elsewhere. Israel's call for arms is the crudest manifestation of this mindset.

 

Given the level of state-sponsored violence and waves of arrests, Iran's long quest for democracy for now has been strangled by a hardliner elite. Many stakeholders of democracy and human rights have been killed, arrested or intimidated.

 

Is this it for Iran?

 

How does the Ahmadinejad-Khamenei alliance intend to rule Iran like this? Judging by its paranoid rhetoric about "foreign plots", which in itself adds insult to injury to millions of Iranians, a siege mentality has already developed at the top - and siege they may well face.

 

What the regime is doing to its own people, the "children of the revolution", is essentially political and economic suicide in the long term. According to the International Monetary Fund, over 150,000 qualified Iranians emigrate from Iran each year, the highest brain in the world. The commitment of ordinary Iranians in science, art, business and academia has been a pillar of the Islamic Republic. For years, scientists, economists and intellectuals have worked endlessly within a restrictive framework beset with crony capitalism and carefully guarded political constraints. Stoicism and an element of fear kept them going. But in the light of recent events, one wonders if this endurance on the part of Iranians can continue?

 

According to the "International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran", over 2000 persons have been detained, including political personalities, journalists, professors, and students. In past cases, following their arrests by government agents or paramilitaries, political prisoners are refused legal representation, held in solitary confinement and intimidated or tortured. Should charges been brought forward against them, detainees are usually been tried by a revolutionary court, which is closed to the public. During the trial the prosecution will not release any evidence substantiating the accusations - overall a truly textbook case in how to violate human rights. By and large, the modus operandi of Iran's judiciary and security machinery is intimidation and violence.

 

So, who are those detained?

 

There is, for example, Bijan Khajehpour, a renowned economist and successful business consultant who was arrested on 27 June and detained in Tehran's infamous Evin prison. Khajehpour's services to Iran's economy have been invaluable, co-founding, Atieh Bahar, the country's first and now most successful strategic consultancy, helping domestic and international investors understand Iran's business environment for years. Khajehpour has also been instrumental in creating a large number of jobs throughout his two decades of work in Iran, and has been highly active in the professional development of promising young Iranians.

 

The decision to imprison him on whatever absurd charges the Iranian authorities have come up with, is as economically expedient as if the US were rounding up CEOs of Boston Consulting Group or McKenzie & Co. Mr Khajehpour's story is like that of many other highly educated Iranians who obtained advanced degrees and professional experience abroad, yet came back to Iran, demonstrating hard work and diligence whilst putting up with nepotism and political restrictions.

 

There are Dr. Kamiar Alaei and his brother Dr. Arash Alaei , two high profile physicians who have been spearheading Iran's campaign against HIV/AIDS for years. Together they set up HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention clinics and initiated a scheme to distribute free needles and condoms in prisons and elsewhere. (Over 42 per cent of prisoners are drug convicts according to the judiciary) Their professional contributions and voluntary commitment to public health in Iran are second to none. In June 2008, both have been arrested on unknown charges. Internationally recognized for their medical services to their country, the Iranian government has long tried to somehow link them to the US government and eventually indicted them for "communicating with an enemy government sentenced to three and six years, respectively, in Evin Prison in Tehran.

 

In Iran, the estimated number of HIV-positive cases could be up to 100,000 according to the WHO with AIDS deaths as high as 6000 in 2007. Intravenous drug use and needle sharing amongst drug addicts account for 62 per cent of transmissions. Getting rid of those who are dedicated to combat this disease beggars belief.

 

And then there is Dr. Ardeshir Amirarjomand, chair of UNESCO's Democracy and Human Rights Program at Shahid Beheshti University and legal adviser to Mir-Hossein Mousavi, who has been arrested almost immediately after the election. Amirarjomand's academic credentials certainly speak for themselves. His legal hermeneutics centered on his demand for the "potential of the Constitution to be released in order safe- guard the rule of law and protect basic human rights" whilst highlighting the Supreme Leader's transgressions with regards to legislation. Practicing what he preaches, Amirarjomand, like many other likeminded academics, helped to foster both a human rights culture and a framework in which the rule of law is increasingly challenging authoritarian tenets.

 

Amongst those journalists and intellectuals detained, there is Mohammad Ghoochani - the editor-in-chief of E'temad-e Melli Newspaper (the party newspaper of Mehdi Karrubi) and formerly editor-in-chief of Shargh Newspaper as well as the popular weekly magazine Shahrvand-e Emrooz (Iran's version of Time Magazine). Both of the latter publications have been shut down now. With journalists, like him, the press in Iran, despite self-censorship and violent crackdowns, unlike anywhere else in the Middle East became a source of ideas, critique and genuine political discourse. Ghoochani was arrested in his home a few days after the elections.

 

They will never forget

 

Prosecutor General Dorri-Najafabadi promised to teach the demonstrators in detention "a lesson they will never forget." He is right, Iranians will never forget. Just as the British-American instigated coup d'état against Iran's Prime Minister in 1953 and the West's support for Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war has marked an entire generation's collective memory, so will 12 June be a watershed event to Iran's youth. Time will tell how the country moves on from here. But there is little doubt that there are few regimes that are as good as loosing friends at home and abroad and at alienating their own people as Iran's nomenclature.

 

Dr Kaussler teaches US Foreign Policy, Middle East Security and Political Islam at James Madison University in Virginia. He is also an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Iranian Studies, University of St Andrews in Scotland.