Plumbing the depths

International morality

The ‘Green movement’ – the coalition of opposition forces inside and outside Iran – will collectively apologise to the United States for the hostage-taking that took place thirty years ago at the US Embassy in Tehran. Mohsen Makhmalbaf, brilliant film-maker, is articulating this politically savvy and symbolically potent move:

Women play fierce football

“Thirty years ago in the turmoil of the revolutionary zeal an indefensible act of hostage taking was committed that the new generation of Iran are not proud of at all,” he said. “We know very well how that deplorable action hurt the noble American people and how it led to three decades of unnecessary and painful bad relations between our two nations. “Only a small and repressive minority who rule Iran today still insist on keeping Iran on a confrontation course with the US, Britain and the West … [T]hey have now taken the Iranian people as hostage to their destructive policies.”

It remains true that, by flouting the norms of diplomatic behaviour, established over centuries, as they did, the Islamic revolutionaries branded themselves unmistakably as forms of low-life not seen before; and by not allowing any of the hostages to come to harm revealed their true fear of American power.

Do not expose us

Should we laugh or cry? Perhaps laugh. Laughter has a knack of putting things in proportion, of setting things in their right perspective.

Islam is on its march of death on many fronts. A very dangerous front has been recently re-opened at the United Nations (UN) by the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), the largest group of nations within the UN, by introducing a new resolution. The resolution under consideration—Defamation of Religions—aims to enlist the power and prestige of the UN in defence of religion by declaring religions to be immune from the general discourse practiced in non-religious domains. The aim of the resolution is to impose a gag order on people against breathing a word that religionists may find defaming or offensive.

This is our old friend, Islamic defensiveness, trying to obliterate freedom of speech, never an Islamic value, especially where it might itself be the object of criticism. No matter that the entire world is in the throes of a cataclysmic revulsion against Islam, so that it is not too much to describe this paroxysm of disgust as the death of a religion. No matter that the backward, inferior character of Islam as a faith has already been exposed everywhere and by all means. This is a naked political attempt to shore up the ruins.

What needs to sink into the Western peoples’ mind is the realization that, to the Muslims, the idea of freedom and free thinking is largely an alien concept … From birth onward, a Muslim’s brain is packed with the notion that everything in life is predicated on the will of Allah. Allah is in charge of all things and at all times. Allah is very much of a hands-on God. He does the thinking, he does the ordaining, and he decides the outcome for everything large and small. And since Allah is the all-knowing as well as the all-everything, the duty of the faithful is unquestioned obedience in all matters, irrespective of any and all contradictory evidence. All disproving and contradictory evidences about the Islamic precepts are labelled as deceptive machinations of the accursed Satan. Hence, it is the sacred duty of the believer to put his Islamic blinders on and submit wholeheartedly and unhesitatingly to what is preached to him.

Women prepare to drive fast

This is a “fatalistic pathological system,” as has become globally obvious in only eight years:

Islam is loaded with faulty and bizarre beliefs as well as many primitive, discriminatory and shameful practices. So, they need to build a steel fence around their corral of absurdity to protect it from crumbling under the assaults of truth. They have much to hide and fear exposure the most.

The hilarious thing is, proponents of the resolution cannot bring themselves to mention any other religion, presumably as they do not consider any other religion admissible. A sudden coyness sets in. Other religions cannot be mentioned in the same breath as Islam, because they are not true religions. Indeed, it may not even be possible to admit that Islam itself is a religion! So the resolution would defend from criticism and offence perhaps the only ‘religion’ so weak as to be unable to withstand the light of day!

Would Saudi Arabia allow Christians to build a church in that country, or even the Bible be sold in bookstores? Would the Islamic Republic of Iran stop its genocidal agenda against the Baha’is? Would the mullahs desist from imprisoning the Baha’is for months and years, without any formal charges and even without a sham trial for which they are infamous? … It is time for Islam to shed its Burqa. The cat is out of the bag, so to speak. In the age of instantaneous communication and … rising literacy, the task of keeping this stone-age belief called Islam under cover is an impossibility.

Also amusing is that apparently this resolution is wheeled out and pushed into play, and defeated, every year! Not too much to fear, then.

Viewer numbers

I would like to report that the surge in numbers of viewers/voyagers recently (see chart) is down to the quality of the journalism ─ freshness of information, incisiveness of analysis ─ in this blog.

Viewer numbers at this blog to end of Oct-09

Fat chance. It seems that I mentioned Adolf Hitler, complete with familiar photograph, on 22-Sep-09 and that half the world’s deskbound eo-fascists have been storming by ever since. Now that I have mentioned him again, the site may well crash with visitor numbers. Eat your heart out, Carla Bruni!

It would help the cause, though, if these Hitler fans could spell their hero’s name correctly! Most searches seem to be for someone called Hitter. In any case, they should prepare, once here, to learn something of the deep convictions associated with human rights and freedom of conscience.

Plumbing the depths

Women even drudge close to home

It’s not always clear, after all the atrocities reported here during the last five months, how the Iranian regime could sink any lower. We have met with numerous actions of moral imbecility perpetrated in the name of Allah. Nevertheless, the destruction of Bahá’i cemeteries may just about fit the bill.

There is little else than a campaign of hatred involved ─ no attempt at a political pretext, however thin. No wonder members of the opposition are avid to learn more abut this Faith.

There is something unbelievably disgusting about interrupting burials, digging up corpses, bulldozing cemeteries and desecrating religious memorials, removing headstones for building. The recent UN Report on Human Rights goes into some detail here:

Baha’i cemeteries, holy places, and community properties are often seized or desecrated and many important religious sites have been destroyed. In recent years, Baha’is in Iran have faced increasingly harsh treatment, including increasing numbers of arrests and detentions and violent attacks on private homes and personal property. Baha’i property has been confiscated or destroyed and dozens of Baha’is have been harassed, interrogated, detained, imprisoned, or physically attacked. In February 2009, a Baha’i cemetery in Semnan was desecrated, and in January, another Baha’i cemetery was destroyed in Ghaemshahr. Baha’i cemeteries also have been destroyed in Yazd and outside of Najafabad.

Families are told they may not bury their dead in burial gardens legally owned by Bahá’is, but they are not told of any available alternative. No doubt it will soon be illegal to die. Cemeteries have been excavated to a depth of one metre and earth and rubble piled to a height of 10 metres.

From September 6 through September 10, using large trucks and bulldozers, a number of unknown individuals destroyed and excavated the Baha’i Cemetery of Najafabad and Vilashahr [near Isfahan]. The cemetery, which belongs to the Baha’is of Najafabad and Vilashahr, and which is known as Gulestan Javid [“eternal garden”], is situated about 9 miles from Najafabad. This land was given to the Baha’is of Najafabad and Vilashahr in the winter of 1995; it has been attacked 18 times since them. It has been reported that 119 graves are located in this cemetery – 95 are in the first section and 24 more are in the second section.

Bulldozed Baha'i cemetery at Najafabad and Vilashahr

Following this, some burials are being prevented except at the cost of violating basic Baha’i beliefs:

After the destruction in recent days of the Baha’i cemetery of Vilashahr and Najafabad, agents of the Ministry of Intelligence are preventing the burial of a deceased Baha’i in that same cemetery. Azizu’llah Subhi Najafabadi, born 1924, was a resident of Najafabad. He passed away on Tuesday, September 15, 2009, in Namazi Hospital due to old age. Since then, the family’s effort to receive the body has been unsuccessful. The family’s appealed to authorities in the local police station, the security office and the local branch of the Ministry of Intelligence, the law enforcement agency, the municipality, and the mayor’s office in Najafabad. But they have only met with the same consistent response: “His remains will be given to you only if you do not bury him in the [recently destroyed] Baha’i cemetery of Vilashahr-Najafabad, and inter him instead in the Baha’i cemetery of Isfahan.” According to Baha’i teachings, Baha’is are not permitted to bury their dead far from the place of passing. It is for this reason that the family is exerting efforts to bury their dead in the aforesaid cemetery, near the place of his passing. Currently, because of the destruction of the Baha’i cemetery of Vilashahr and Najafabad, the Baha’is of these towns have no place for the burial of their dead. Reports receive from the field indicate that authorities are putting considerable pressures on Baha’i residents in this region aiming to prevent them from adhering to their religious precepts.

This sort of thing is so contrary to basic human customs and civilised practices that it once again elicits that most common reaction to Shi’a mentality ─ acute disgust. More dispassionately, it provokes the recurrent observation that these people are obsessed with death.

 

Everyone in Iran goes to prison

The violence of despair

Even the most miserable of prisoners, damned without hope of any kind, can turn the tables for a while:

Gohardasht Prison

A group of prisoners took control of Ward 1 of Gohardasht prison in the city of Karaj, west of Tehran, on Sunday during a riot against appalling prison conditions and the harsh treatments by the authorities. The prisoners clashed with members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) disarming two of the guards, Mohsen Khalesi and Marjani, before taking control of the Ward. Other prison guards and torturers fled the premises. Angry prisoners managed to get hold of the keys to solitary cells and release[ed] all the inmates. The riot continued until 21:00 local time, [after which] the prison’s special guards … took back the control of the Ward … The Ward 1 that houses solitary confinements is known as “dog house” because of harsh conditions and barbaric tortures deployed there. The prisoners are subjected to humiliation, insults and various physical tortures such as hunger and rape and are facing gradual death in the appalling living conditions. Every year a dozen of them commit suicide.

Bomb plots

Still worried about Af/Pak? According to David Blair, writing in the Telegraph,

Tehran’s nuclear ambitions have overtaken Afghanistan as the biggest security problem.

Breaking the Ramadan fast in Mashhad 06

That’s bigger then all the currently highly irritating wars. Negotiations continue ─ after a fashion. The Gang of Six make a proposal. Iran accepts (it has just been caught with its pants down; Russia is miffed). Rejoicings. Then Iran gives a different version of what had been agreed. Despondency. Then Iran has to respond by a deadline. Iran secures an extension of the deadline. Yawn. Then it makes counter-proposals instead. These are said to be unacceptable to the Gang of Six.

In one of those anonymous but sublime diplomatic jokes,

“It’s like playing chess with a monkey,” said one diplomat close to the talks. “You get them to checkmate, and then they swallow the king.”

Is this what is known in the trade as ‘refreshing candour’?

Daily, there is news of bombs going off. So try plotting them on a map. Baghdad, Islamabad, Kabul. Occasionally also Mosul, Sistan, Lahore, Kashmir, Rawalpindi. Get the idea? Lots of orange flashes in an Islamic Crescent. What an explosive religion.

In Iran, everyone goes to jail

Hossein Rassam

It is said that you are nobody in Iran if you haven’t been to jail. Nevertheless I feel sorry for Hossein Rassam, chief local research analyst for the political section of the British embassy. First he was arrested because the Little Satan must have sparked off the June/July protests. Then he was released on bail. Now he has been sentenced to four years.

For what exactly? For spying? For bringing God into disrepute? For wearing a multicoloured pullover? For spreading malicious tales about prison violence? No, for working for the British.

First Miliband spoke out. Now the whole European Union has spoken with one voice:

The European Union presidency [what Presidency?] … reiterates that any action against one EU country, a citizen or member of embassy staff, is considered an action against the entire EU, and will be treated accordingly.”

That’s the stuff. Make them tremble in their sandals. Threaten them with a return of Jenghiz Khan.

Border frictions

Women play cricket ... well, sort of

On 18^th October, a suicide bomber managed to kill six senior Revolutionary Guard commanders in Pisheen, in the Sistan-Baluchistan province in south-eastern Iran. The Iranians have all sorts of trouble with their minorities who live along the borders who consider themselves Kurds, Arabs, Turks, Afghans or Baluchis respectively, depending on where they live. This lot are Sunni Moslems, which makes matters worse. They prefer Caliphs to Imams. There is a local resistance (“terrorist”) movement, the Jundallah, who may or may not have been responsible.

Anyway, a total of 42 people was killed. The Iranian government was quick to blame the United States, Britain and Pakistan. Somehow one gets the feeling that these people want to be taken seriously … but are going the wrong way about it.

A week later, an apparently secret mission involving Iranian soldiers, including Revolutionary Guards, in two vehicles was intercepted by Pakistani forces inside Pakistan’s territory, fired on and its cover blown. Eleven soldiers were taken into custody. The Iranians have been downplaying the incident.

This is a sideshow for Pakistan, however. Having for years made glowering faces and shaken nuclear fists at their Hindu superstate neighbour (because this is easiest for nationalist Islamic sentiment), the Pakistani government is now facing virtual national extinction from the northerly threat of Islamic extremism (Al-Qaida, Kashmiri militants, Taliban, Afghan insurrectionists), all done on its own territory and in the name of Islam. They are responding with uninhibited and successful ferocity, but already bombs are going off daily in the national capital and outside their military headquarters.

Bold student

During a visit of the Wise Donkey to Tehran students on 28^th October,

a student from Sharif University, named by some websites as Mahmud Vahidnia, criticized the Iranian leader, state broadcast media, the postelection crackdown, and the closure of the reformist press — for a whole 20 minutes. The student reportedly told Khamenei that he had never seen criticism of Khamenei in the Iranian press. He said those surrounding Khamenei have turned him into “an idol.” He then went on to accuse state media of biased reporting and giving a false picture of postelection events. He added that since the supreme leader appoints the head of state broadcast media, he is responsible for its content and biased coverage.

Women sleep rough

According to his own website, Khamenei

reacted by saying that he welcomes criticism and knows that there is a lot of it.

Since you can go to jail in Iran for a lot less than this, we hope to hear that Mahmud is alive, well ─ and free.

Human rights at the UN

Demonstrators and Nobellists alike have long called for attention to switch from the nuclear issue to that of human rights. And it is true that with a more human government in Tehran the West would take a very different view of the risks involved in a peaceful nuclear programme. But little has happened until now.

“Today [i.e. 29-Oct-09], at the United Nations General Assembly, Canada will table the toughest resolution on the human rights situation in Iran,” Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon said in the House of Commons just ahead of the UN filing. “For the first time, under this government, we are calling on the investigators to focus on Iran’s appalling human rights record.” The United States and five other big powers have long led the international focus on Iran’s suspected bid to develop a nuclear bomb. But Canada has emerged as a catalyst for UN scrutiny of Iran’s human rights record since the 2003 torture and murder of Canadian-Iranian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi while she was in Iranian custody.

Women wait for the right train

So even gentle, agreeable Canada can be goaded into action. Good for them ─ and may the memory of Zahra burn brightly!

 

Long live Kafka!

Detente or detonate?

Oh dear, it’s no longer exactly clear what was agreed on October 1^st. Consequently the initial gush of optimism that the Islamic Republic of Iran might be entering a phase of co-operation is beginning to disperse.

Women do serious motorcross

“Time is on our side,” a senior Iranian official said.

Indeed it is. But haven’t we been here before? Or, as the lady said, it’s déjà vu all over again.

New rally

The harder-than-thou cockroaches, as usual, are anxious to do everyone a favour. For instance,

On Friday, a hard-line cleric sought to head off an attempt to reinvigorate the anti-government movement by warning against a planned opposition rally on Nov. 4 that would coincide with annual state-sponsored demonstrations against the United States.

So that’s a date for oppositionists’ diaries then.

The cleric, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, also had an unusual warning for the security forces, telling them any soft treatment of those activists already in detention would be considered treason. “Nobody gives a flower to his murderer,” he said in a Friday prayer sermon.

Ah, but they do, Mr Jannati.

Martyr Neda

Breaking the Ramadan fast in Mashhad 03

Bizarrely, Neda Sultan is being considered for status as an official martyr by the state-run Martyr Foundation:

“The pictures seem to show that Neda Agha-Soltan’s death was the result of a plot by opponents and the enemy,” ILNA news agency quoted Masoud Zaribafan, head of the state-run foundation, as saying.

Of course, everybody knows that Neda was killed by an agent of the rogue state itself. He is now a penitent fellow, especially as his name, address and photograph have been circulated. Let us hope that future martyrs include some eminent figures in the regime itself and that their martyrdom is imminent.

More imminent, I fear, is the sacrifice of the lives of further imprisoned protesters. Watch out for news that more drug traffickers have been hanged.

How to destroy WMD

Women multi-task in offices

A death wish has long appeared to be a prime motivation among the ruling cockroaches of Iran. But they are not alone. Worldwide, a great groan of longing has arisen in unison from the very many righteous folks who long to see the end of this extra terrestrial regime and the restoration of some sort of normality.

Technologically, these discussions usually boil down to the question of bunker busters. Naturally, US military thinking has not stood still.

The United States department of defence has confirmed that it is rushing into production the world’s largest ever bomb, one designed specifically to destroy underground targets. The Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) weighs just short of fifteen tonnes, more than 80% of which is made up of a massively hardened ferro-cobalt alloy casing. When dropped from high altitude, the bomb will drive through earth and concrete before two-and-a-half tonnes of explosive are detonated to destroy the target.

Breaking the Ramadan fast in Mashhad 04

Equally sobering is the view that Young Barack’s détente has reassured the mullahs that they are not under immediate military threat. Well and good, one might think. This can only lead to a constructive exchange of remarks as the heavy breathing subsides. Not a bit of it. With a smile of grim satisfaction, the regime has turned unchecked to terrorising and destroying its own population.

It seems the common analysis that the regime’s hysteria is a response to threat is mistaken. The threat is a response to the hysteria. The calculation is neatly summed up by the Wall Street Journal here:

To pursue engagement, President Obama needs his Iranian interlocutors to be durable leaders, not frauds on the brink. Iranian dissidents challenging the regime’s legitimacy are thus being treated as obstacles to statecraft.

Women perform intriguing open-air exercises

Two more good quotes:

As Iran expert and human-rights advocate Mariam Memarsadeghi told us, the Obama team sees the democratic movement “as a wrench [spanner] in the works of nuclear negotiations.”

And:

[S]ays Iranian democracy activist Roya Boroumand, “Ask yourself why Iranians who protest in the street write things in English. They’re not just practicing language skills.”

More on the Qom Bomb

One effect of the revelation of the second processing plant has become clear since then. It is diplomatic:

Mr Obama’s dramatic revelation last month that Iran had built a second enrichment facility in secret at Qom has resulted in the Russians rethinking their pro-Iran stance. In return for supporting Iran’s position at the UN, Moscow expected at the very least to be kept fully informed of nuclear developments, so the Russians were deeply embarrassed by the exposure of the Qom facility. As a result, they have taken a far more robust approach to the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, which has increased Tehran’s international isolation and amplified the pressure on Mr Ahmadinejad to respond positively to the IAEA’s offer.

Breaking the Ramadan fast in Mashad 05

Raped into uniformity

There are reports of gang-rape being ‘officially’ carried out by “by four members of the Hefazat-e Etelaat-e Sepah Pasdaran, the intelligence service of the Revolutionary Guards” against two Arab women of Ahwaz. Ahwaz is the westerly oil-bearing region on the Gulf with a largely ethnically Arab population. Iran struggles with all its separate component identities. The women, one of whom had been raped before in 2006, were guilty of ‘cultural activities.’ Seems a bit steep. Eat Arab sweets or do an Arab dance, and you get raped by hairy Iranian fanatics?

But the way this is reported is illustrative of the bizarre social attitudes towards women which can be freely exploited by those who share them:

The women are aged 25 and 26 years old and were raped at a Revolutionary Guards prison in Charshir district of Ahwaz City on 1 September. They had been arrested in an ongoing campaign by the regime against Arab cultural and political activists … The rapes were filmed by the intelligence services to blackmail the women’s families into silence and to humiliate them in order to break them psychologically … In Iran, victims of rape, including children and pregnant women, are executed for adultery and ‘crimes against chastity’. But even if the women are not charged with adultery for being raped, their relatives fear being socially ostracised for the dishonour and shame that comes with extra-marital sex. In this way, families can be silenced and sometimes they carry out ‘honour killings’ if the wider community finds out.

 

Women restore Qajar ceilings

At least the films can be used as damning evidence against the criminal imbeciles who committed these inexplicable acts. But wait a minute? Can people seriously think that, if you rape a child, that child is guilty of a crime against chastity? What depths of moral imbecility does this imply and is Islam solely responsible for the moral retardation of people such as these, evidently whole communities, and plausibly Sunni as well as Shi’a?

I remember a friend of mine, a diplomat in Yemen, explaining the moral reasoning to be found locally. If you passed down the street and a tile slid off a roof onto your head, injuring you, that was your fault – for walking by at that moment. (Perhaps you could be sued for causing damage to that person’s roof.)

I can understand the visceral recoil from the sullying of a woman (or man) involved, based on some primal grasp of the sacredness of life, guarded by chastity ─ but more than this seems to be going on here, a widespread ignorance of the elements of personal responsibility. I do not claim to understand such disorder at the base of human life. Perhaps some brave person would be kind enough to undertake my education?

Long live Kafka

Now a daughter of a prominent splutterer of the regime ─ President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s chief advisor on media and the arts, Mahdi Kalhor ─ has herself made a film which describes imprisonment and torture:

[Narges Kalhor’s] production, inspired by Franz Kafka’s short story, The Penal Colony, is a veiled critique of totalitarianism, which was screened when she appeared at the Nuremberg Human Rights Festival earlier this month … Ms Kalhor, who also works for an advertising agency in Tehran, went to the Nuremberg Film Festival for the screening of her film The Rake, in which a Turkish bath is recreated to represent the torture chamber depicted in The Penal Colony. She had not expected anyone at home to find out about her appearance, but news of her visit then found its way on to the internet in Iran, creating a furore in its lively blogosphere.

Narges Kalhor, film maker

This did for her.

“On the last day of the film festival a friend called me from Iran and warned me that if I came back, I could well be detained at the airport in Tehran,” she said, in an interview near the drab asylum centre near Nuremberg that is now her home.” I don’t want to be put in prison and raped, or interrogated and tortured … This is a subject I have been thinking about all my 25 years of life. I am not a young girl any more.”

 

The good, the comical and the ugly

Death in the afternoon

As I sit here in France, watching the sun go down over the noyers, it all seems a little surreal. Most surreal of all is that Pravda (but no one else) should be telling us that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Wise and Gracious Donkey, is dead. Long live the rahbar, the supreme authority for all prison rapes!

Breaking the Ramadan fast in Mashad 01

Wait a minute here, can this be true? Not that one idiot or another, equally idiotic, won’t succeed him, but his death at this time will surely cause factional ripples, so partisan had this particular Supreme Leader become. People even seem to have stopped arguing over the Velayat-e-Faqih (Guardianship of the Islamic Jurists), the Khomeinist doctrine that there should be a Supreme Ruler, because the Chaplinesque antics of the underqualified Ali Khamenei had rendered theological dispute superfluous.

In some societies the bad people lock up the good people. When Stalin died, the zeks in the prison camps rattled their tin bowls with delight, crowing, ‘The cannibal is dead!’ If you live in a society where the good people lock up the bad, just be glad. And if there should be a similar charivari in Tehran, with dancing in the streets, you will read it here first.

Trial of Karroubi?

Although unconfirmed, there are plans afoot to try Mehdi Karroubi for refusing to withdraw his ‘claims’ that male and female protestors have been raped in Iranian jails. Since the whole world knows a great deal of detail about these cases, which this blog has always emphasised, and no impartial and informed observer has doubted their authenticity, it is to be wondered what possible evidence could remain for authorities to ignore?

Women are keen on park exercise

In which case, no indictment could succeed that stated Karroubi presented false information. It must therefore be, on the contrary, that he will be tried for telling the truth.

Let them wear what they like

Even in a jolly country like Kuwait, a hubbub of opinions and tubby women, there is still apparently an “Islamist movement” with a grip on parliament. (Yes, there is a parliament, which likes to criticise its ministers and gets dissolved from time to time by the ruling family.) Women MPs are supposed to wear the hijab when they attend the sharia-ruled precincts. Fortunately two of them are objecting and trying to have the stone age code reversed.

Breaking the Ramadan fast in Mashhad 02

Not a minority opinion

Obama got singed by his previous, ultra-paranoid pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who thought that AIDS was invented by the CIA to keep black people in their place. He was genial enough on occasion, though, to marry Mr and Mrs Obama and show Christian faith and leadership.

Now the President has other messages to think about, notably that

extremist manifestations, such as the actions of suicide bombers and crazed gunmen, don’t arise out of thin air … They are part of a religious tradition that from its very birth has used the edge of the sword as a means to convert or conquer those with different religious convictions.

Mr Obama denies that the Rev Carey Cash is his new chaplain, but he’ll have to listen to him at Camp David, where the President has opted to attend the tiny Evergreen Chapel, far from the prying Cyclops eye of the media. The Rev Cash also

Women cox female crews

baptised more than 50 men during the Iraq invasion in 2003 … and believed a “wall of angels” protected his men as they fought their way from Kuwait to Baghdad.

Inevitably, any manifestation of faith is equated in our secular society with schizophrenia (“hearing voices”, of course). More interesting, perhaps, is this indication of anti-Islamism as a commonplace, unashamed opinion.

So let us hear nothing of Islamophobia, an entirely bogus term invented to ride with the jargon of political correctness, itself an expression of modern squeamishness.

Telling it like it is

The United Nations has produced a 19-page report criticising human rights abuses in Iran. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has been reticent, to say the least, until now. But yesterday he

Man attacked in own home 01

expressed strong criticism of Iran’s human rights record, voicing concern about the use of excessive force after Iran’s presidential election, the harassment of women’s rights activists, the ongoing execution of juveniles, and the continued persecution of minorities … a pattern of concern arises with respect to the protection of minorities, including the Baha’i community, the Arab minority in Khuzestan, the Nematollahi Sufi Muslim community, the Kurdish community, the Sunni community, the Baluchi community, and the Azeri-Turk community.

Naturally he needs to sound encouraging. So he concludes

I encourage the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran to address the concerns highlighted in the report and to continue to revise national laws, particularly the new penal code and juvenile justice laws, to ensure compliance with international human rights standards and prevent discriminatory practices against women, ethnic and religious minorities, and other minority groups.

The report is available here.

The careers of butchers

Some very grim pictures are circulating of a particular privileged torturer/executioner, present at numerous rallies and occasionally photographed. Perhaps he too has not long to live. But in the meantime he is able to act in flagrant and flagitious ways (see the photographs on this page).

Man attacked in own home 02

It is a feature of revolutions that they throw up criminal and psychopathic types like this, sometimes from the depths of prisons. Charles Crawford, retired diplomat, in his blog, instances the very detailed and at last undisputed account of the Katyn massacres in July 1940 of Polish officers by the Red Army and the extraordinary rôle played therein by a certain Vasili Blokhin, who personally conducted the execution of 7,000 of the prisoners. He was therefore

ostensibly the most prolific official executioner in recorded world history.

The Iranian revolution is no exception. Like all revolutions a backward, reactionary and elitist show, it has already thrust into garish prominence a number of executioners and torturers, Basiji and Sepah, who have been photographed and identified. Their time has come. Justice will follow.

 

This revolution sings a green tune

Extraordinary rendition

The Iranians are saying that the US abducted one of their nuclear scientists while he was, presumably, on pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia. The Saudis don’t seem to be answering Foreign Minister Mottaki’s letters. Oh dear. Are such things possible in 2009?

Dove-face of nationality

Shahram Amir is the missing boffin. Mr Amiri and “three other Iranians in recent years” are mentioned. I thought it was only the North Koreans who were liable to kidnap visiting Japanese and hold them for decades.

Rape? What rape?

Now we have the official version ─ again:

Iranian police chief Esmail Ahmadi Moghaddam told the Iranian Student News Agency (ISNA) Wednesday that it has been proven that no one was raped at the now closed government detention center of Kahrizak. He did admit, however, that “some offenses were committed” at Kahrizak, but refused to go into detail.

So that’s alright then. Apart from one statement of the obvious:

Reza Moini of Paris-based Reporters Without Borders insists that the Iranian police chief’s denial of rape allegations Wednesday, “have no legal value” because he denied the same allegations even before any investigation took place.

Women do kick-boxing

Well, needless to say, we are dealing here with a priori reasoning, reasoning from axioms that are incontestable, such as no allegations against the moral purity of the Islamic Republic are admissible. What a pity, then, for the Republic that the allegations are a dead certainty ─ wholly established, comprehensively documented, universally publicised. You can even read this story in Myanmar and Tajikistan.

Any colour you like, so long as it’s not green

It is said that football matches in Iran are broadcast now in black and white, so as to filter out the many eruptions of green in the crowd. Green balloons, green velvet headscarves, green shawls, green gloves ─ you name it. These now appear as a sort of streaky yellow or plain grey.

Women sing in choirs

Grey is the colour of my true love’s beard, as he gleefully watches green footballs streaking around, the colour of desert vomit. It seems the dictatorship does care, after all, about what we see and think, about how it appears. Suppress dissent, suppress the appearance of dissent.

Forlorn cause!

Backwardness, backwardness, backwardness

This blog has never been able to distinguish between different varieties of backward-looking morality as expressed in Saudi Arabia, the Taliban, Hamas, jihadist groups in Indonesia or Iranian jails. Here they are at it again:

The Hamas government has banned motorcycle riders from carrying women on the back seat — the latest in the militants’ virtue campaign in Gaza. The ban … seeks “to preserve … the stability of Palestinian society’s customs and traditions” … Its other efforts have included breaking up mixed couples on the beach and obliging female lawyers to wear headscarves in court.

Women play football

Surely, it all comes down to the same thing – the ineluctable poverty, intellectual deprivation and inhumanity of Islamic societies, rooted in Islam itself. Surely they need to get themselves a decent religion. Can anyone point me to an Islamic society that is peaceful, democratic … or even happy?

Backwardness, backwardness, backwardness.

Long live the Shah

It is being reported that one Mohammad Reza Ali Zamani, “who belongs to the Association of Monarchists,” has been sentenced to death by hanging for taking part in the June demonstrations. He made various confessions at his trial, was not allowed a lawyer (who is?), and according to a biased source,

Iran’s Mehr news agen

Women run in athletics teams

cy reported, during the trial, that Zamani was an active member of a “terrorist” monarchist group, and had fought against the country’s Islamic regime … Iranian monarchists have long attracted the ire of the government, which has accused them of responsibility for a number of bloody mosque bombings in recent years.

Of course if Zamani has really thrown bombs and taken innocent lives for the sake of the Shah, then Green support will be muted. But such is the lack of credibility of the Iranian legal system in these, its final days, one is entitled to treat all this with the greatest scepticism.

As a matter of interest,

A number of prominent Iranian clerics have ruled that the Revolutionary Court’s trials of opposition activists “have no legal value,” since “involuntary confessions made by defendants are void according to Shi’ite jurisprudence.”

Left hand, right hand? Sounds like chaos to me.

What has Yahoo been up to?

There is a rumour – more than a rumour – that

Women play American football

Yahoo collaborated with the Iranian regime during the election protests, providing to the authorities the names and emails of some 200,000 Iranian Yahoo users. This is according to a post on the Iranian Students Solidarity (Farsi) blog. My sources indicate the information comes from a group of resisters who have infiltrated the administration and are leaking out important information.

This ailing ex-giant will suffer a massive reaction if this is proved to be true (there is some doubt at present). A boycott would deliver it into the hands of its enemies. But maybe Google and Microsoft started the rumour themselves!

Yahoo representatives were asked to provide Iranian authorities with the names (data) on all Iranian Internet account holders in exchange for removing the block/filter on the Yahoo website … the Yahoo representative agreed to provide such a list within a matter of hours. Upon the receipt of such a list, which included approximately 200,000 emails, by the Iranian authorities, the regime immediately unblocked access to the Yahoo.com website. The list went back as far as five years and included active and inactive accounts and blogs.

It is imperative, as we enter the uncharted waters of global intimacy afforded by the internet (the Overmind), that repellent and repressive regimes are eased out by human rights morality, nonviolence and unanimity. Internet Service Providers, dizzy entrepreneurs all, have a special responsibility in this situation. They are in the forefront of political change ─ very much to their own surprise!

Venerating hot air

It is announce

The handshake

d today that Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace prize. The Swedish committee apparently pays more attention to symbols than to substance. Obama’s Cairo speech was well-judged, and has had a constructive effect, but this is all he does: he speechifies (like all politicians). Verbal gestures extend in the air like curlicues.

Is the world a safer place since he became President, only nine months ago? Not noticeably. Has it become a more warlike place? Quite possibly, but we do not consider awarding him a Nobel Prize for War. So far, he has not earned himself the Peace Prize, unless good intentions, symbols and hot air are all the substance that can he hoped for in the cause of peace.

Marxist viridian

I am delighted to acknowledge some fellow-feeling with the Iranian Marxists who are watching what is going on. This one (Babak Kasrayi) is very observant and appears able to interpret the esoteric choreography of this appalling regime. Rat and Co. are reactionaries, of course, rather than the revolutionaries they style themselves, a title he would deny them. Kasrayi is particularly good on disappointment in the ‘leadership’ (Rafsanjani, Mousavi).

Women build tall buildings

I have long suspected that Marxism is rather like all the bad medicines, cigarettes and outdated economics that we export to the Third World, where they enjoy a sort of afterlife. Otherwise it must defy belief that the dogmas of Marxism have any continuing currency in today’s world? What is “US imperialism”? This is something that is taken for granted and need not ─ on the basis of shared prejudice ─ be explained. The American ‘Empire’ is a contested, controversial term, as should surely be acknowledged, yet it is used like a blunt instrument in every paragraph.

Then we have to talk about ‘classes’ (as many still like to do). But people cannot be graded for quality, like eggs – small, medium, large. Even if we strain to accept the existence of a ‘proletariat’ (or ‘working’ class – and who does not work?), then it is sadly apparent that is the middle class that makes revolutions and the working class who, if you are lucky, joins them. In fact, in today’s Iran (and I accept the analysis that this is a revolution that, since June 12, is continuing) we see a broad-based popular movement counted in millions – by far the majority in the country – that sweeps up middle and working classes alike. If “strikes are growing everywhere in Iran”, well and good.

Green nosed Rat

Where we part company is in the understanding that the Green Movement is largely one of mentality, not industrial or street power, of nonviolence, poetry and human rights, of social mores, rejection of Islamic identity, of equal rights for women and a humane spirituality. (The chunterings of Lenin from the early twentieth century are as irrelevant as some sort of Disney routine.) The Greens need to understand, not that

All genuine Communists, Socialists and Marxists in Iran should be working towards building what is missing, a revolutionary party of the working class

but that Israel and the civilised nations are their allies and friends, and they have been brainwashed to believe otherwise.

As for Khamenei, Larijani, the other Khatami, Rafsanjani, Ahmadinejad and all the other little cockroaches ─ something tells me they have not very long to live.

 

Imam, nizam, kaboom

Imam, nizam, kaboom

The mood in Iran now seems to be one of alienation from the whole project of the Islamic Republic. I always said the regime would have been wiser to compromise very quickly after the disputed election, even to the extent of sacrificing Ahmadinejad, because a less fanatical leadership could have led a cobbled-together government into an Islamic future consistent with the previous 30 years.

Ahmadi-Nejad's wife, with glasses, with Vafa Sulaiman, wife of the Lebanese president

There is now a mood of deep distaste with the whole enterprise. Mousavi keeps talking about policies “in the line of the Imam” and the future of “nizam” (Republic). But the population is fed up with clerical rule altogether: to hell with the lot of them. This is forcefully expressed as a desire for a Republic of Iran (no Islamic).

Mrs Ahmadinejad goes shopping in New York

American satire, however welcome, seems to consist largely in the belief that references to current mass media entertainment are very funny. Here, Mr and Mrs Ahmadinejad appear on a talk show. He is a speechless dummy, she a shopaholic chatterbox. I don’t understand any of the references.

The reality is that Mrs Rat is virtually invisible. She is the one in the photo wearing glasses, on the right, with the elegant wife of the Lebanese president (when they had one). Never is more than this seen of her. I do not know her name and nobody else seems to either. People like this consider that to take one’s wife out of her closet and expose her, even garbed in black, to the cameras of strangers is virtually pornographic. During the pre-election TV debates, Ahmadinejad clandestinely waggled a photograph of Mousavi’s wife from the podium. He need not have bothered, since Zahra Rahnavard routinely appeared alongside her husband, a shockingly radical break with Taliban morals.

Mr and Mrs Ahmadinejad, 2-Jun-09

However, Rat has allotted huge numbers of lucrative positions to members of his family, helpfully summarised in a chart here.

The bloody tide subsides

A multitude of observations suggest that the worldwide tide of radical Islamic fervour has been dying down for a year or two. Now it is reported from Egypt that

Sheikh Mohammed Tantawi was reportedly angered during a tour of a Cairo school when he saw a girl wearing a niqab, the full veil worn by some devout Muslim women which covers the entire body except for the eyes. Sheikh Tantawi, regarded by many as Egypt’s Imam and Sunni Islam’s foremost spiritual authority, asked the teenage girl to remove her veil saying: “The niqab is a tradition, it has no connection with religion.”

“May your head be always green, and your lips always laughing, so that lovers’ hearts rejoice in you. Who sees you and does not rejoice, may he remain crestfallen, wretched and always a wanderer!” Jalal al-din Rumi (1207-1273).

Now it is to be banned in Egyptian schools. Emboldened, Sunni clerics elsewhere may follow suit. But if the niqab bites the dust, the hijab lingers on. Does anyone know the difference between a niqab and a burka? (The burka has a fine mesh over the eyes and is still more concealing, if that is possible, than a niqab.) But

Sheikh Tantawi’s edict is likely to prove unpopular among fundamentalist Muslims. One popular Saudi cleric has already argued that the niqab is not conservative enough and has called on devout women to ensure they only reveal one eye in public.

God help us. Meanwhile,

Lebanon’s militant Islamic group Hizbollah has had its reputation for ideological purity tarnished by a growing scandal involving an alleged Bernie Madoff-style Ponzi scheme.

One might rejoice in the discomfiture of one’s enemies, if this did not imply some sort of acceptance of morality on their part. Alas, that would be going too far.

The Henna Commander

The UN lurches

After producing a report on the Gaza conflict of appalling partiality, the UN now

is to include the Holocaust in a new curriculum for schools attended by children in Gaza despite protests by the Palestinian territory’s Hamas rulers.

All the news that’s fit to ban

The life of a newspaper in contemporary Iran might be thought to resemble that of man, at least in a state of civil war as described by Hobbes,

solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.[1]

With journalists in prison, the regime wages ferocious and unceasing war against any accurate reporting whatsoever of news. Iranians are presumably supposed to lap up the bullshit of Keyhan only, on a daily basis. To this end, three more newspapers have been closed. One had hardly supposed that there were any that remained open.

Infirm Obama

Free Iran!

I’m afraid that evidence is mounting as to the weakness of our new leader. He is reported to have faced considerable pressure from Brown and Sarkozy not to delay further the release of news about Iran’s second processing plant at Qom.

Details of the disagreement appeared to explain why Mr Brown and Mr Sarkozy, the French president, took a harder line on Iran than the American leader at the meeting. The Prime Minister said it was time “to draw a line in the sand” on Tehran’s nuclear programme while the Frenchman mocked Mr Obama for the naivety of his “dreams” of eliminating nuclear weapons.

Now, much worse, it is said that federal funding for the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center in Washington has been denied.

But just as the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center was ramping up to investigate abuses of protesters after this summer’s disputed presidential election, the group received word that – for the first time since it was formed – its federal funding request had been denied.

Where is my Mummy? - Lost in the tar shales of Friday group prayer

“If there is one time that I expected to get funding, this was it,’’ said Rene Redman, the group’s executive director, who had asked for $2.7 million in funding for the next two years. “I was surprised, because the world was watching human rights violations right there on television.’’

This is seen as a sign that the White House is inclined to be “less confrontational”.

Many see the sudden, unexplained cut-off of funding as a shift by the Obama administration away from high-profile democracy promotion in Iran, which had become a signature issue for President Bush.

A Muslim mayor for Rotterdam

It seems to me quite a constructive move, not to mention a democratic one, that Moroccan-born Ahmed Aboutaleb has been appointed (not elected) Mayor of Rotterdam. Pace Geert Wilders, this is not comparable at all to a Dutchman becoming mayor of Mecca. Unless of course Wilders thinks Holland should be compared to Saudi Arabia. After Theo van Gogh was murdered by an Islamic extremist,

Speaking at an Amsterdam mosque, Aboutaleb sternly told Dutch Muslims that if they did not subscribe to the Netherlands’ values of tolerance and openness, they ought to catch the first plane out.

The Iranian abattoir

It is now reckoned that the number of people killed by the regime since the end of the Iran-Iraq war has surpassed the number killed in that war.  In their passionate quest to chuck nuclear weapons around, the Iranians leadership might be thought better fitted to fur panties and clubs.  But their necrophilia rages unchecked.

Put down your gun

When the supply of corpses, blood fountains and chain-slapping ceremonies dried up in 1988, they turned their attention to Communists, left-wingers, peaceful protesters, Kurds, Baha’is, journalists and even armed revolutionaries on their borders (most of the latter are now in Iraq). Many of these massacres and mass burials have gone unnoticed by the Western press.  Only now, on the crest of the Green Wave, has the extraordinary appetite for death come to public attention.

There are thus two mysteries in contemporary Iran.  First, there is the dynamic of ultra-ism, whereby everybody at the top of society strives to appear more extreme, more hardline than everybody else (the latter therefore designated as ‘moderate’ or ‘reformist’ ─ a considerable exaggeration).  This version of Islam seems to entail the necessity, in order to appear holier-than-thou, of my claiming ever blacker grades of ferocity and hatred.  Secondly, there is the passionate interest in death and dying, killing and being killed, martyrdom and sacrifice.  The commonsense view here seems to be right, that on any account this is morbidity verging on psychoticism.  One hunts in vain for a relevant category.  Religious mania is not like anything else.

Why is there this investment in imbalance? And the apocalyptic embrace of death and atrocity?

---

[1] Leviathan (1651) pt. 1, ch. 13

 

The Qom bomb

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is Jewish

Well, well, well, Apparently the Rat springs from a Jewish family. There is a large Jewish minority in Iran, perhaps the largest such group in the Middle East. Nobody in Iran changes their religion, becomes a naw-kish (one with a new

Rat's family is Jewish

religion), unless they are desperate – to escape persecution. Someone who converts from Islam is a mortad, one who turns his back, who is then under sentence of death. (Islam being rather like a concentration camp: Anyone attempting to escape will be shot.)

Ahmadinejad’s family was called Sabourjian (‘cloth weaver’) until they embraced Islam shortly after little Mahmoud was born, when they changed their family name. Apparently this is known to many Iranians, though it might be more unsettling if all Basiji got to hear about it, but it certainly was not known to me. What does this say about his fanaticism and insecurity?

I hope his blacksmith father was properly proud of his son with the doctorate in traffic management.

The singer not the song

Apparently Colonel Gaddafi, who recently tore up the charter of the United Nations in public, though with less reason to do so than Benjamin Netanyahu, has been having a quiet word with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. “Do you want to govern or do you want the bomb?” he is said to have asked.

This is precisely the right question, because, however messy and undesirable would be the process of de-fanging the military dictatorship in Iran, it would undoubtedly spell the end of the Islamic regime.

It was Gaddafi, remember, who voluntarily renounced nuclear ambitions and opened his doors to IAEA inspectors when Saddam Hussein was dug out of his foxhole and had his hair and beard cut in front of television cameras.

Since this reported conversation in New York, the Iranian regime has sung a sweeter song – marginally – and co-operated in Geneva with a partial internationalisation of its nuclear industry. Indeed Mohammed ElBaradei has flown to Tehran this weekend to discuss a lightning inspection of the newly disclosed Qom facility. Of course, as serial deceivers they have absolutely no leeway for being believed by the 5 + 1 nations, but the brink seems just a tad further off than it did at the beginning of the week.

Thanks to Colonel Gaddafi.

Himalayan beatitude

Dalai Lama signs up to the Green Wave

At the end of September,  Nazanin Afshin-Jam met the Dalai Lama in Vancouver:

I asked His Holiness if he would stand in solidarity with the Iranian people by holding a sign that says “Freedom for Iran” and “Human Rights for Iran”. When the Dalai Lama agreed without hesitation, I hugged and thanked him. I was so elated because I knew what an important symbol it would be for the people inside Iran. I want the Iranian people to know that they have not been forgotten and that the international community stands beside them.

The Qom bomb

Always anxious to be helpful, the Israelis have given Tsar Putin a list of all the Russian scientists believed to be helping Iran develop a nuclear warhead. Knowing the value of both grace and tact, they chose this method of implying that such help was not official and that Putin knew of no such scientists.

It was thus altogether an unembarrassing moment, one afterwards greeted in Western capitals by a concerted purring:

American and British officials argued that the involvement of freelance Russian scientists belonged to the past.

Iran nuclear sites and rocket range (Economist 3-Oct-09)

But its supposed influence over Iran remains highly important to Russia:

So far as Mr Putin is concerned, the Iran crisis presents Moscow with a golden opportunity to assert itself as a global player. “Iran is the only card the Russians have to play on the world stage, so they will hang on to it for as long as possible,” commented a senior Western diplomat. “It is not in Russia’s interests to have this problem resolved any time soon.”

The canter towards offensive nuclear weapons, which Ayatollah Khomeini believed, before his death, could have delivered victory against Saddam Hussein, is turning into a gallop:

The Israelis believe the Iranians have “cold-tested” a nuclear warhead, without fissile material, for its Shahab-3B and Sejjil-2 rockets at Parchin, a top-secret military complex southeast of Tehran.

The graphic here is from today’s Economist.

Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, Sayeed Jalili (whose predecessor accused Mr Ahmadinejad of corruption before departing), is said by diplomats to specialise in ‘monologue’. Con Coughlin comments:

During the six years that Iran has been negotiating with the West over its controversial nuclear programme, it has taken the politics of procrastination to an entirely new level. Keep the talks going, and keep those centrifuges spinning – that has been the dictum that has defined Iran’s approach to the nuclear crisis and, from Iran’s perspective, it continues to pay dividends … They have repeatedly promised to freeze their controversial uranium enrichment activities at Natanz, only to resume enrichment once they realised there was nothing the West could do to stop them.

Imprisoned green bird

Meanwhile, are the Obama people getting real?

More broadly, the US side is uncertain whether meaningful progress can be made with the current Iranian government. “We’re not back explicitly at regime change,” says this official. “But incrementally there is agreement, a [growing] realisation within the administration that this is not a regime that can make the compromises we want them to make.” In fact, the Obama administration has been widely reported in the past week to have stepped up its examination of various sanctions options. US officials in Washington have begun to speak of the president’s outreach efforts in the past tense.

 

The dark crescent

Out of the freezer

It seems that jaw-jaw is snatching Iran back from the brink of war-war. Results of the 1^st October day of talks in Geneva are described here:

After a long diplomatic chill, it agreed to a tight timetable of talks with the same six powers designed to get a far-reaching diplomatic solution in place by the end of the year … Although the details still needs to be hammered out, Javier Solana, the EU’s top foreign policy official, said Iran

Mobile inspiration

had agreed “in principle” to export most of its enriched uranium stockpile to Russia for further enrichment. The uranium would then be sent to France for further processing and then returned to Iran. People familiar with the issue said the process would make it extremely difficult for Iran to use the uranium for bomb-making purposes, setting back its alleged weapons programme … The talks’ tentative success had been largely attributed to President Barack Obama’s new policy of engagement with Iran. That was underlined on Thursday when William J Burns, a US undersecretary of state for political affairs, held a one-to-one meeting with Iran’s top nuclear negotiator that lasted 40 minutes. It was the highest level diplomatic meeting between the two countries in almost three decades.

The chances of success justifying a pre-emptive strike were always less than compelling, while the consequences of an Iran hardened and united by such an attack, as analysed in an influential paper by the Oxford Research Group in February 06,  continue to suggest an exploitation of its strategic position in relation to oil flows, Shi’ite minorities in the region and the two wars on its borders.

Some of the calculations are set out here.

Pahlavi parley

Meanwhile, the “crown prince of Iran” argues in the Telegraph that the human rights issue is the one to be tied to sanctions, rather than nuclear co-operation. He notes that

in 1986, the United States led a worldwide campaign for human rights and equality in South Africa when it passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, banning US investment in the country … the removal of apartheid laws and the release of political prisoners were necessary preconditions to the lifting of sanctions. Those sanctions worked. The South African people suffered a deep recession in the short term, but to this day, no South African has forgotten the importance of those preconditions and the long-term liberation they brought to them as a people.

Protect the people of Iran

So it could be in Iran:

if the West enforces new sanctions that are intrinsically tied to the national outcry for freedom, they have armed their greatest ally with the powerful weapon of international solidarity in the struggle against the Islamic regime. This uprising can change the entire fabric of stability in the Middle East. So, while the world toils over yellowcake, the people of Iran still believe in their green movement for freedom, hope and human rights.

Keep talking

The Iranian foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, who recently called the fake election “the most glorious presidential elections in the history of the Islamic Republic of Iran”, has apparently been visiting the US, not secretly, but with minimal publicity, the first such visit in 30 years of diplomacy. There seems to be rather a large number of questions Mottaki would rather not answer:

One question the foreign minister would not address was the arrest of an Iran/U.N. mission staffer by the New York City Police Department last Friday. Gholamzadeh Hossein was arrested by the NYPD after attacking a demonstrator who was protesting the visit of Ahmadinejad to the United Nations on Sept. 24. Hossein, who had an initial court appearance on Wednesday, faces a second-degree assault charge with a penalty of up to seven years in prison.

There is the view, that whether we are being strung along again or not, such contacts are bound to be helpful (the communication view of relations with Iran). Not everyone agrees. Predictably,

former U.S./U.N. ambassador John Bolton, who also headed the arms control section at the state department in the administration of George W. Bush, was not impressed by Mottaki’s statements: “Yet again, Iran appears to be well on the way to seducing Western diplomats by vague generalities and promises to meet again. Iran is simply gaining more time to advance its nuclear and ballistic missile programs,” he said.

Glee in the naughty club

Friend to us all Colonel Moammur Gaddafi is in the good books of – yes – Venezuela. These tyrants can smell each other. And they all hate Israel. There must be something wonderfully good about Israel in that case, it infallibly follows.

Rat and Ban - shaking the bloody hand

Indeed, propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding, Israel is a beacon of light in a dark crescent, a welcome contrast to the sentimental idyll, the morbid monotony of Islamic apathy. Can you imagine the Israelis raping their own people in prison?

But why does this raddled dictator look more and more like a cross between Elvis Presley and a shark? The Picture of Dorian Grey at least required the death of its subject before it could show its true ravages.

Hairy as a rat’s paw

It seems the UN is an ‘inter-governmental agency’ and can ‘do nothing’ about how its members behave. So much for any reservations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon might have about shaking the world’s most notorious hand (see photo).

This blog

In a manner totally mysterious to me (I am an ingénu in such matters), this blog is attracting a small but ever-increasing number of hits – viewers – each month (see chart).

User volumes for this blog since the Iran 'election'

What began as a poetry and criticism blog has justified my aesthetic creed of working in a prophetic tradition ─ the impetus of the message ─ in an unexpected way: if you have something to say, people will listen! (I await the day when this transfers to poetry.)

This is my forty-second blog on the Green Freedom movement in Iran.

 

Parallel justice, parallel minds

Obama no Reagan

It is pointed out here that President Obama’s admirable reconciliation policy hit the rocks, a week after his Cairo speech, of the June 12^th Iranian election, to which, like the subsequent protests against it, he has been unable to respond adequately ─ and unable to respond like one distinguished predecessor:

I shoot A(hmadi) N(ejad)

Under increasing pressure to support the protestors openly, President Obama commented that the world was “watching” the Iranian protests, a mild statement of rebuke to Khamenei’s thinly veiled threat to use violence to stop street demonstrations.

The contrast was stark to President Reagan. In 1981, when the Polish government imposed martial law to suppress the Solidarity uprising that had started in Gdansk, Reagan told a press conference, “We view the current situation in Poland in the gravest of terms, particularly the increasing use of force against an unarmed population and the violations of the basic civil rights of the Polish people.”

Reagan is also remembered for directly challenging the former Soviet Union in his speech at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin on June 12, 1987, when he taunted, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

It can hardly still be claimed, as a recent poll suggested, that the election was fair after all and Ahmadinejad’s presidency legitimate, when

[even] the Guardian Council admitted that in 50 Iranian cities the number of votes cast in the presidential election exceeded the number of eligible voters, providing a clear sign the election had been fraudulent, as Mousavi had claimed.

Obama, inevitably seen now, in the hard world in which we live, as a weak president, has been caught between liberal desire for constructive change and horror at whom he must do business with. As one Twitter poster, Jahanazad, asked:

“A question to Obama: Do you really want to sit down at table with a man whose hands are soaked in [people’s] blood?”

More on Couric

Marwa Ali El-Sherbin, husband and son

I commented earlier on the recent CBS interview with the Rat in New York. Mind you, it is probably impossible to interview this specimen in anything like a normal way. One might perhaps quietly gain his confidence, and then lean forward hopefully and say: “We have seen your halo!” But the inevitable confrontation and challenge led, when Neda Soltan was mentioned, to Mahmouti producing photographs of a woman Couric was unable to recognise. More comment is given here:

[T]he woman in that picture, Marwa Ali El-Sherbini, was the victim of a singularly vicious act of a neo-Nazi racist, while Neda Aqa Soltan was one among many other victims of violence at the hands of the security apparatus of the Islamic Republic … The Iranian state-controlled media has been citing the case of Marwa Ali El-Sherbini ever since Neda Aqa Soltan was killed and the world began to pay attention to her murder to show “the hypocrisy of the Western media.”

Marwa

was an Egyptian pharmacist and the mother of a young child. She was killed during a hearing at a court of law in Dresden, Germany, by a man against whom she had testified after being insulted for wearing an Islamic headscarf … Together with others, El-Sherbini founded an association … with the aim to establish an Islamic cultural and education centre in Dresden … At the time of her death El-Sherbini was three months pregnant with her second child.

Eclipse

An upstanding immigrant member of the Dresden community, then, and by no means a merely nominal Moslem. Her husband held a doctoral research position at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics. But she became the object of sustained verbal abuse, in German and Russian, by “Alex W”[1] in a public playground following a quarrel over a children’s swing.

The case had already come to court and Alex W been convicted and fined 780 Euros. Because of the aggravated racism freely exhibited in court, it was the Public Prosecutor who appealed to achieve a more serious conviction. In what was apparently an annoying but essentially trivial incident (parents should not amplify their children’s disputes), things then spiralled out of all control:

No security personnel was present and no security searches of individuals and their possessions were carried out, common in cases without anticipated security concerns and with no persons under arrest present. After El-Sherbini had testified, Alex W. strode across the courtroom and attacked her with a knife with a 18 cm (7 in) long blade, which he had taken into the courtroom in his backpack. El-Sherbini received multiple stab wounds to the upper body and arm (at least 16). During the attack Alex W. was allegedly shouting “You don’t deserve to live!”. While trying to protect his wife, El-Sherbini’s husband, Elwi Ali-Okaz, was stabbed at least 16 times to the head, neck, upper body and arm.

Blake's Divine Humanity - Theatre of Eternal Values

A police officer, who was in the court building testifying in an unrelated case was called to the scene to intervene, but mistook Elwi Ali-Okaz for the attacker and shot him in the lower leg. A criminal investigation against the police officer was ongoing as of 25-Aug-09. Marwa El-Sherbini died on the scene, succumbing to her injuries. Alex W. was arrested on the scene. Elwi Ali-Okaz, critically wounded in the stabbing attack, was in a coma for two days . He subsequently received physical therapy for several weeks in a hospital near Dresden for the stabbing and shooting injuries. Alex W. was held on remand on suspicion of murder of Marwa El-Sherbini and attempted murder of Elwi Ali Okaz. He was formally charged with murder, attempted murder and grievous bodily harm by the public prosecutor’s office on 25-Aug-09. Prosecutors cited hate against non-Europeans and Muslims as the motive, perfidiousness as a qualifying feature for the murder charge, and full criminal responsibility as the result of a psychiatric evaluation. His trial has been tentatively scheduled to begin on 26-Oct-09.

Dissent is a right

Such an act of wicked violence against an innocent citizen is wholly to be condemned. The racist tinge makes matters considerably worse, no matter what the public level of such ‘Islamophobia’ in Germany now is. The lack of at least a metal scanner in the court house seems astonishing, but is perhaps common here as well.

The staunchly anti-racist German government has behaved vastly better than the Iranian government, whom such an exhibition of hatred presumably fills with glee. Kate Couric really should have known about this case, as the Rat has been going on about it, exploiting the case for all it is worth, ever since June when it happened. Logically, the paranoid bigotry of Alex W, a neo-Nazi, should resonate with Ahmadinejad, and if the former had been an Iranian with identical attitudes who furiously attacked a pregnant white female, presumably he would have been overjoyed.

But the case has been widely aired (and condemned) in the Western media, so it is hard to see where the hypocrisy comes in. A criminal incident, quickly and uncontroversially identified as such, does not overturn the German justice system, whereas in Iran the deliberate rape, torture, maiming and murder of peaceful citizens on an industrial scale fully represents the Iranian justice system going about its lawful business. The courts themselves, which deal with no evidence other than ‘confessions’, that is to say no evidence at all, are a joke and a travesty presumably imperceptible to the Shi’ite conscience.

Conversely, the arrest of “seven to ten” policemen at Kahrizak Prison (now closed) on grounds of abuse of inmates is described as an “isolated incident”. Well, which is it to be? Are torture, rape and murder utterly unknown in other Iranian prisons, for instance Evin, or do German courtrooms regularly erupt with racist violence actively planned and instigated by the German government?

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[1] Because of stringent German privacy laws in criminal cases, not further identified.

 

Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these

Ibrahim Sharifi - heroic bravery

Articulate rape victim flees

Further developments in the case of Ibrahim Sharifi, the 24 year old engineer, one of five brothers from a north Tehran family moderately supportive of the regime, are to be found here. I previously acclaimed his courage (see below) for speaking out in the form of a video interview, watched by thousands.

He is now in Turkey.

He said he fled Iran after a stranger stopped him on the street to tell him his family would be killed if he testified before a parliamentary committee that was investigating the torture and rape accusations … Since he was dumped by his captors on the side of a Tehran highway, he said, he has been terrified of being alone. First, he had trouble sleeping, fearing that the guard who raped him in prison would attack him again. Now he is convinced he is being followed by someone who means to kill him. “I was ready to be tortured to death,” he said, his voice trembling. “But not ever to go through what happened to me there.”

Blake - The Angel of the Divine Presence

Unfortunately his account is all too credible.

Human rights groups say that Mr. Sharifi’s account conforms closely with those of other abuse victims. Omid Memarian, a researcher with Human Rights Watch, said he had confirmed the credibility of Mr. Sharifi’s story with people close to Mr. Karroubi. “His narrative is consistent,” Mr. Memarian said. “He has no reason to risk making up a story like that […]”

His is the first public account we have of goings-on in the notorious ─ and now closed ─ Kahrizak prison:

He was on his way back home the afternoon of June 22 when he was grabbed by two men. “I had taken part in every single protest, so I saw this coming,” he said. He said he was handcuffed, blindfolded and, as he later learned, taken to the notorious Kahrizak detention centre in south-western Tehran, where even the government concedes that several detainees were killed. He said he remained handcuffed and blindfolded for four days in a cramped cell with about 30 other prisoners. They were beaten senseless the first day, he said, and periodically after that over the next four days. Urine and blood covered the floor. By the fourth day he was beginning to lose hope of getting out alive. He had trouble closing his mouth and he said he began vomiting blood.

A bubble of green speech

It gets worse:

“I told the guard that he should go ahead and just kill me if he wanted to,” he said, breaking into tears. “Then he called another guard and said ‘Take this bastard and impregnate him.’ ” They took him out of the cell to another room where they pushed him against a wall that had handcuffs and two metal hooks to keep his legs open. The guard pulled down his underwear, he said, and began raping him. “He laughed mockingly as he was doing it and said that I could not even defend myself so how did I think that I could stage a revolution. “They wanted to horrify and intimidate me,” he said, weeping. At that point, Mr. Sharifi said, he passed out. The next thing he remembered was opening his eyes and realizing he was in a hospital with one hand cuffed to his bed. Another young man was screaming hysterically on a bed next to him. He said he heard a doctor tell someone, “Dump him or you’ll have the same problem as the other ones,” meaning that he would die in custody. Two days later, he said, they put him in a car, took him to a highway in Tehran and left him there [beside the road], blindfolded.

Although very ashamed and inhibited about describing the specifically sexual abuses ─ he would weep and shake ─ he eventually told all to Mehdi Karroubi. Bear in mind he had taken himself to a psychiatrist, had tried to report the abuse at a police station, went to see Karroubi, and recorded his testimony on video, uploaded to a Dutch-Iranian filmmaker. He has even made himself available for interview to the world’s media during the Rat’s visit to the United Nations in New York.

I call that brave. He wants to train as a doctor and to get to the USA. Someone should let him in and give him the least his heroism deserves ─ the chance to heal.

Mouse power

Hardness of heart

How many times recently have I had occasion to recall the words of Winston Churchill,

The Middle East is one of the hardest-hearted areas of the world.[1]

It is an area in which the simple, perennial truths of the New Testament have scarcely penetrated.

And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.[2]

Blake - A Divine Image

Those raping, torturing and killing innocent young people in Iran’s prisons do not see other people as potential images of the divine but as beastly corpuscles with inconvenient opinions. They are the poorer for that.

I have reproduced (above) a painting by William Blake, ‘The Angel of the Divine Presence,’ which gives some inkling of the more nourishing perception of human beings, and relations between the sexes, to be derived from Christianity. It may be viewed here also.

Truncated curriculum

The first day after the opening of the universities for the new academic year there have been large demonstrations in Tehran University. So now they are going to close them again. Due to the spread of Swine Flu, of course.

Some of the protests may be viewed here. And, at Sharif, another university, here and here (crowds about 2000-strong are yelling for Montazeri).

Assets

Largest zinc and lead mine in the middle east

The largest zinc and lead mine in Middle East, is in Iran (see photo). It has been given to the Basij for 10% of its real value. In the same week it was announced that the Revolutionary Guards have acquired a >50% controlling interest in Iran Telecom.

These people are corrupt, incompetent and keen on sanctions, from which they benefit. Protestors try in vain to maintain boycotts of Basiji-smuggled brands of, e.g., American cigarettes. But the real problem with, in effect, nationalising everything is that, with 26% inflation and 40% youth unemployment, this will soon bring an already pretty dysfunctional economy to its knees. (Perhaps we should be glad.) Already, for instance, subsidised Chinese-grown rice has brought poverty and hardship to large numbers of Iranian farmers in the north and north-east.

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[1] Quoted in: Anthony Montague Browne: Long Sunset: Memoirs of Winston Churchill’s Last Private Secretary. London: Cassell, 1995, p. 166.

[2] Matthew 25:40, King James Version.