Hussein
SENIOR MEMBER
- Joined
- Nov 16, 2009
- Messages
- 4,263
- Reaction score
- 0
- Country
- Location
Former elite officers in Revolutionary Guard reveal increasing tensions in Iran regime
any discussion welcomed
any discussion welcomed
Former elite officers in Revolutionary Guard reveal increasing tensions in Iran regim
- Thread starter Hussein
- Start date
Ganga
FULL MEMBER
- Joined
- May 19, 2010
- Messages
- 777
- Reaction score
- 0
The internal situation in Iran was clear when the world saw the huge protests in Tehran and other iranian cities after the re-election of ahmedanijad.He is kind of a Dictator who crushes internal revolts with force.
He talks big of destroying Israel.i think he should be more concerned about his future .The strength of any country depends on the internal situation.
He talks big of destroying Israel.i think he should be more concerned about his future .The strength of any country depends on the internal situation.
Thomas
PROFESSIONAL
- Joined
- Jul 22, 2009
- Messages
- 2,688
- Reaction score
- 0
One year later, Iran protesters fight on
By Hamid Dabashi, Special to CNN
June 11, 2010 7:44 a.m. EDT
One year later, Iran protesters fight on - CNN.com
Editor's note: Hamid Dabashi is the author of "Iran: A People Interrupted." He is the Hagop Kevorkian professor of Iranian studies and comparative literature at Columbia University in New York.
New York (CNN) -- Zahra Shams is a 21-year-old student of law at Ferdowsi University in Mashhad, Iran. She was arrested on May 6, 2010, and held in solitary confinement. She is not a political activist.
The reason for her arrest: Her sister Fatemeh Shams, a poet, blogger and graduate student at Oxford University, is a solid supporter of the Green Movement in Iran.
Fatemeh Shams became even more vocal since last summer's presidential election, when her husband, Mohammad Reza Jalaipour, also a graduate student at Oxford, was arrested in the airport as the couple was leaving Iran to resume their studies in the U.K. He was jailed for more than two months and subsequently released, but not permitted to leave Iran to join his wife in Oxford to resume his studies.
The authorities in Iran evidently arrested Zahra Shams to force her sister Fatemeh into silence in Oxford. She did not become silent. Last week the authorities released Zahra Shams.
Majid Tavakoli is a 24-year-old student activist from Amir Kabir Technical University in Tehran. He has been repeatedly jailed for long periods of time. Arrested on December 7, 2009, during the student protests over the disputed presidential election of 2009, Tavakoli became the subject of global solidarity when authorities in Iran sought to humiliate him by taking his picture garbed in mandatory women's veils. Almost instantly, countless Iranian men wore veils and published their pictures on the internet in solidarity with Tavakoli.
Similarly, when Tavakoli went on a dry hunger strike to protest his solitary confinement, his mother, too, initiated a hunger strike in solidarity with her son, which many young Iranians from around the globe followed. The authorities yielded and transferred Tavakoli from solitary confinement to a regular ward.
Zahra Shams, an apolitical law student, and Majid Tavakoli, a major political activist and a pain in the neck of the Islamic theocracy in Iran, are two typical examples of the two ends of the spectrum on which young Iranians are challenging the 31-year-old theocracy that has ruled their land.
The hopes and aspirations of these young women and men -- in a nation where young people make up some 70 percent of the total population -- are now branded a "fetneh/menace" by the loud propaganda machinery of the Islamic Republic.
Fortunately for Iran, and fortunately for the world, that old and noisy machinery isn't working. Zahra Shams and Majid Tavakoli, and the generation they represent, are in charge of representing themselves and telling the world what they want.
June 12, 2010, is the first anniversary of the election that sparked the Green Movement in Iran, a nonviolent civil rights uprising that caught the world by surprise. In a region infested with violence --genocidal, homicidal or suicidal -- it is impossible to exaggerate the significance of a massively popular civil rights movement that has begun and continued with the most fundamental democratic question of "Where is my vote?" It is a seminal question that had never been asked on such monumental scale in any other aspiring democracy in the region.
With the ring of that simple but resounding question, "Where is my vote?" millions of Iranians have forced the hand of the Islamic Republic, exposing its naked brutality. If the world were to listen and watch carefully, it would see that the ancient Greek theory of democracy; the French Revolution's cry for liberty, equality and fraternity; the American revolt against despotism and tyranny; and ultimately the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s are today all resonating in the Iranian cry for freedom.
For daring to doubt the veracity of the official results of last year's presidential election, innocent citizens have been subject to systematic and unbridled violence by the security apparatus of a theocratic regime that seems to be, more than anyone else, cognizant of its own absence of legitimacy. Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, the leading two opposition figures, just canceled their call for a mass silent rally on the first anniversary of the Green Movement for fear of organized state violence against peaceful demonstrators.
The Islamic Republic is of course no exception to the rule of state-sponsored violence against innocent civilians in the region. Against that backdrop, the Green Movement in Iran has opened a new and unprecedented chapter in the political culture of the region that old colonial officers branded "the Middle East." Violent coups, militant rebellions, military invasions and brute insurrectionary uprisings are the staple of the political culture in this region.
In a region where the enduring formation of democratic institutions and of nonviolent transition to democracy has always been thwarted by the rise of one charismatic tyrant or another, from Jamal Abd al-Nasser to Ayatollah Khomeini, the Green Movement boasts no such leader. And it is teaching those who care to watch an entirely new lesson in the art and craft of small steps and careful coalition-building on the long and arduous path to democracy.
By contrast, the West's claim to moral superiority has been undermined by the continued carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan, both still effectively under U.S.-led occupation, and of Israel's wanton disregard for the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. What's a little torture in Kahrizak and Evin over the last year compared to what the United States has done in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and Bagram Airbase in the course of its "war on terror" over the last decade?
The United States has invariably supported undemocratic regimes to safeguard its immediate interests, compromising its longstanding ideals and principles. Today, Iranian demonstrators braving brutal repression in their streets and on their rooftops are truer to the ideals and aspirations of Thomas Jefferson and Martin Luther King Jr. than those in positions of power and authority in the United States.
One can scarce imagine a more urgent issue facing the United States than the possibility of an Islamic Republic achieving nuclear arms. But is President Obama a credible leader to force Iran to stop its nuclear ambition when he continues with the double standard of never bringing Israel or Pakistan, two nuclear power allies of the United States who are not even signatories to the nonproliferation treaty, to the negotiating table?
The Green Movement is providing President Obama with a historic opportunity to show the courage of his imagination and opt for regional and ultimately global disarmament, predicated on a nonviolent principle that community organizers (he must remember that term) in Iran seem to have learned from Martin Luther King more earnestly than he has.
One year later, the Green Movement is unfolding in multiple and varied ways, and nothing will stop it. It may thunder as a cascade or flow quietly on a plateau -- but like any other bountiful river it will not stop until it reaches its destined ocean.
From the gracious patience of Zahra Shams in solitary confinement in a Mashhad prison to the noble anger of Majid Tavakoli counting days to his people's freedom in a cell in Evin prison, the young Iranians are teaching nations the very alphabet of a language of liberation that the world leaders are yet to learn.
By Hamid Dabashi, Special to CNN
June 11, 2010 7:44 a.m. EDT
One year later, Iran protesters fight on - CNN.com
Editor's note: Hamid Dabashi is the author of "Iran: A People Interrupted." He is the Hagop Kevorkian professor of Iranian studies and comparative literature at Columbia University in New York.
New York (CNN) -- Zahra Shams is a 21-year-old student of law at Ferdowsi University in Mashhad, Iran. She was arrested on May 6, 2010, and held in solitary confinement. She is not a political activist.
The reason for her arrest: Her sister Fatemeh Shams, a poet, blogger and graduate student at Oxford University, is a solid supporter of the Green Movement in Iran.
Fatemeh Shams became even more vocal since last summer's presidential election, when her husband, Mohammad Reza Jalaipour, also a graduate student at Oxford, was arrested in the airport as the couple was leaving Iran to resume their studies in the U.K. He was jailed for more than two months and subsequently released, but not permitted to leave Iran to join his wife in Oxford to resume his studies.
The authorities in Iran evidently arrested Zahra Shams to force her sister Fatemeh into silence in Oxford. She did not become silent. Last week the authorities released Zahra Shams.
Majid Tavakoli is a 24-year-old student activist from Amir Kabir Technical University in Tehran. He has been repeatedly jailed for long periods of time. Arrested on December 7, 2009, during the student protests over the disputed presidential election of 2009, Tavakoli became the subject of global solidarity when authorities in Iran sought to humiliate him by taking his picture garbed in mandatory women's veils. Almost instantly, countless Iranian men wore veils and published their pictures on the internet in solidarity with Tavakoli.
Similarly, when Tavakoli went on a dry hunger strike to protest his solitary confinement, his mother, too, initiated a hunger strike in solidarity with her son, which many young Iranians from around the globe followed. The authorities yielded and transferred Tavakoli from solitary confinement to a regular ward.
Zahra Shams, an apolitical law student, and Majid Tavakoli, a major political activist and a pain in the neck of the Islamic theocracy in Iran, are two typical examples of the two ends of the spectrum on which young Iranians are challenging the 31-year-old theocracy that has ruled their land.
The hopes and aspirations of these young women and men -- in a nation where young people make up some 70 percent of the total population -- are now branded a "fetneh/menace" by the loud propaganda machinery of the Islamic Republic.
Fortunately for Iran, and fortunately for the world, that old and noisy machinery isn't working. Zahra Shams and Majid Tavakoli, and the generation they represent, are in charge of representing themselves and telling the world what they want.
June 12, 2010, is the first anniversary of the election that sparked the Green Movement in Iran, a nonviolent civil rights uprising that caught the world by surprise. In a region infested with violence --genocidal, homicidal or suicidal -- it is impossible to exaggerate the significance of a massively popular civil rights movement that has begun and continued with the most fundamental democratic question of "Where is my vote?" It is a seminal question that had never been asked on such monumental scale in any other aspiring democracy in the region.
With the ring of that simple but resounding question, "Where is my vote?" millions of Iranians have forced the hand of the Islamic Republic, exposing its naked brutality. If the world were to listen and watch carefully, it would see that the ancient Greek theory of democracy; the French Revolution's cry for liberty, equality and fraternity; the American revolt against despotism and tyranny; and ultimately the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s are today all resonating in the Iranian cry for freedom.
For daring to doubt the veracity of the official results of last year's presidential election, innocent citizens have been subject to systematic and unbridled violence by the security apparatus of a theocratic regime that seems to be, more than anyone else, cognizant of its own absence of legitimacy. Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, the leading two opposition figures, just canceled their call for a mass silent rally on the first anniversary of the Green Movement for fear of organized state violence against peaceful demonstrators.
The Islamic Republic is of course no exception to the rule of state-sponsored violence against innocent civilians in the region. Against that backdrop, the Green Movement in Iran has opened a new and unprecedented chapter in the political culture of the region that old colonial officers branded "the Middle East." Violent coups, militant rebellions, military invasions and brute insurrectionary uprisings are the staple of the political culture in this region.
In a region where the enduring formation of democratic institutions and of nonviolent transition to democracy has always been thwarted by the rise of one charismatic tyrant or another, from Jamal Abd al-Nasser to Ayatollah Khomeini, the Green Movement boasts no such leader. And it is teaching those who care to watch an entirely new lesson in the art and craft of small steps and careful coalition-building on the long and arduous path to democracy.
By contrast, the West's claim to moral superiority has been undermined by the continued carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan, both still effectively under U.S.-led occupation, and of Israel's wanton disregard for the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. What's a little torture in Kahrizak and Evin over the last year compared to what the United States has done in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and Bagram Airbase in the course of its "war on terror" over the last decade?
The United States has invariably supported undemocratic regimes to safeguard its immediate interests, compromising its longstanding ideals and principles. Today, Iranian demonstrators braving brutal repression in their streets and on their rooftops are truer to the ideals and aspirations of Thomas Jefferson and Martin Luther King Jr. than those in positions of power and authority in the United States.
One can scarce imagine a more urgent issue facing the United States than the possibility of an Islamic Republic achieving nuclear arms. But is President Obama a credible leader to force Iran to stop its nuclear ambition when he continues with the double standard of never bringing Israel or Pakistan, two nuclear power allies of the United States who are not even signatories to the nonproliferation treaty, to the negotiating table?
The Green Movement is providing President Obama with a historic opportunity to show the courage of his imagination and opt for regional and ultimately global disarmament, predicated on a nonviolent principle that community organizers (he must remember that term) in Iran seem to have learned from Martin Luther King more earnestly than he has.
One year later, the Green Movement is unfolding in multiple and varied ways, and nothing will stop it. It may thunder as a cascade or flow quietly on a plateau -- but like any other bountiful river it will not stop until it reaches its destined ocean.
From the gracious patience of Zahra Shams in solitary confinement in a Mashhad prison to the noble anger of Majid Tavakoli counting days to his people's freedom in a cell in Evin prison, the young Iranians are teaching nations the very alphabet of a language of liberation that the world leaders are yet to learn.
Pasban
FULL MEMBER
- Joined
- Apr 3, 2010
- Messages
- 771
- Reaction score
- 0
Interesting video. Thanks for sharing it. The video is made by defectors though, who have their own interests and motivations, so the most ardent government supporters can always shun or disprove it on the basis of that. The political situation is not very stable but I think the video and other similar reports exaggerate it out of proportion for their viewers to make it seem like that the government is breathing it's last few doses of oxygen, which is untrue. The process of change in Iran, when peaceful, is a slow one but eventually does occur. I hope there is some reform soon though. Moreover one more observance I find is that many seem to assume that a newer nationalistic regime would be very different or less aggressive in it's foreign stance which is least likely.
Last edited:
T-Rex
ELITE MEMBER
- Joined
- Apr 7, 2008
- Messages
- 9,989
- Reaction score
- -11
- Country
- Location
It has revealled what many Holywood movies reveal and that is ignorance and tunnel vision. So I won't be surprised if it raises the hope of the American crusaders.
Pasban
FULL MEMBER
- Joined
- Apr 3, 2010
- Messages
- 771
- Reaction score
- 0
As per the Iranian constitution, Ahmadinejad won't be able to stand for the subsequent elections. The President is elected for a four-year term and may not serve for more than two consecutive terms. Ahmadinejad has three years remaining in office. Also his name is not Nejad (sounds very odd in Persian), it's like calling me ban instead of Pasban or calling you anx instead of oceanx here. You can always use Mehmood though.
Thanks Ban. You have no idea how close "Anx" is to my actual "going name" (anglicized of course) ...
Okay Pasban my good man - you point is taken. Mehmood it is. You see, I was subconsciously rehabilitating him - "Najad" sounds just a tad more "cuddly" ...
So three more years you say.
Okay Pasban my good man - you point is taken. Mehmood it is. You see, I was subconsciously rehabilitating him - "Najad" sounds just a tad more "cuddly" ...
So three more years you say.
Pasban
FULL MEMBER
- Joined
- Apr 3, 2010
- Messages
- 771
- Reaction score
- 0
My only point was that "Nejad" alone sounds very odd in Persian. You know how people named Richard are sometimes nicknamed Dick and more than often it works against them. Anyways, I doubt a newer nationalist President would be too different concerning foreign affairs, perhaps less aggressive in his words, but let's wait and see. By the way, the President of Iran does not have any real independent power over foreign policy (other than voicing it perhaps), that rests in the hands of higher authorities.
Hear hear Pasban. I realize that Iran has a rather intricate, more-balanced-than-given-credit-for power structure despite the labeling habits of Western press.
Look at India - I am not exactly up on Indian politics. But whether it was BJP or Congress, the overall foreign policy thrust would probably remain the same. Heck, even with "Madame Mayawati", the "big picture" would probably not change a great deal.
But with all due respect - Madame or Professor - which one better represents India abroad and at home?
The way I see it - Mehmood and "Binyamin" are both more liabilities than assets to their people ...
Three years you say.
Look at India - I am not exactly up on Indian politics. But whether it was BJP or Congress, the overall foreign policy thrust would probably remain the same. Heck, even with "Madame Mayawati", the "big picture" would probably not change a great deal.
But with all due respect - Madame or Professor - which one better represents India abroad and at home?
The way I see it - Mehmood and "Binyamin" are both more liabilities than assets to their people ...
Three years you say.
Hussein
SENIOR MEMBER
- Joined
- Nov 16, 2009
- Messages
- 4,263
- Reaction score
- 0
- Country
- Location
Thank you.
I don't think that in Turkey some people would have any interest to say this. And one of them is very famous.
I already heard about this before this program.
Programs from the west are not always bad (relating to some comments here, not yours).
I wish a change but as well in the foreign relations : Iran always was great when we understand we have no ennemy. This is a major point for me. When we think the Israeli policy is really bad then we should use our mind and legal support, like be many in UNO to condemn .
Indeed our republic became bloody and is insulting our religion.
As it is clearly well said in the program.
About Ahmadinejad'name you know why
Never understand how people could be so much antisemitic.
They are rare to be so antisemitic in Iran but sadly they exist like any country.
He said he would be another time president in many speech. We'll see if some let him be president again.
You see the fight between him and Larijani. Khamenei sadly didn't understand that wise position is the best for the country...
One of my family is a martyr and is important personnality in the beginning of the bassiji. All our family don't understand what is happening now. We fight for Iran we fight against oppression against Irak... now we help some dictator behavior to remain?
Look how Ahmadinejad was acting towards Hassan Khomeiny
They don't even have the decency to name him Khomeiny !!!!
When a conservative is criticizing Ahmadinejad he gets in trouble about this.
I say you... our country is becoming an insult of ideas of Khomeiny.
Some people are happy to see that much weak
that we give money and contracts for any support of Russia and China
China is really putting us down
They stole for exemple the designs of carpets. ANd what? now we import these carpets which destroys the old art which is the most famous of us in the world???
I see more and more people have problems for buying food
My father in law often helps , as much as he can, the poor people around him. People are upset. People didn't believe in a good future.
Is it the future we want?
H2O3C4Nitrogen
SENIOR MEMBER
- Joined
- Dec 3, 2007
- Messages
- 4,386
- Reaction score
- 0
Iran is a double agent of the zionists , turkey is a close ally of US and Arabs are so scared from Shia bomb that they would litrilly handover anyting to israel to stop Iran from having nukes.
How come theres no voice against Iran copying super cobras and C-130s ...
reminds of the song
What a wonderfull world ..
How come theres no voice against Iran copying super cobras and C-130s ...
reminds of the song
What a wonderfull world ..
Hussein
SENIOR MEMBER
- Joined
- Nov 16, 2009
- Messages
- 4,263
- Reaction score
- 0
- Country
- Location
why so much hatred?Iran is a double agent of the zionists , turkey is a close ally of US and Arabs are so scared from Shia bomb that they would litrilly handover anyting to israel to stop Iran from having nukes.
How come theres no voice against Iran copying super cobras and C-130s ...
reminds of the song
What a wonderfull world ..
we copy all our cds of microsoft Windows and never buy it the right price
it doesn't mean , since Microsoft cannot say anything, that we are helped by america
Similar threads
- Locked
