Category Archives: Iran

Skeptical About ‘The message From The Streets Of Tehran’

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Nazenin Ansati and Jonathan Paris claim that “many in the [Iranian] Green Movement [...] would like to see the international community exert pressure on the regime through a progressive set of smart, vigorous and targeted sanctions and more forceful advocacy of human rights” (“The message from the streets of Tehran“, IHT, Nov 7).

But haven’t “targeted sanctions” against the Iranian regime and a seemingly perennial “advocacy of human rights” been in place for decades? And what would any Iranian internal opposition movement ever gain from associating itself with foreign Powers, given the anti-Western-Governments paranoia widespread among the ruling classes, and the evidence of History suggesting that foreign intervention in Iran has invariably been for the worst?

Half Of The World Meets, European and American Newsmedia Not Interested

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Government representatives of more than 3.3 billion people have recently met in Yekaterinburg, Russia, for the first BRIC (Brazil-Russia-India-China) summit (16 June) and the ninth Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO)’s Heads of State summit (15 June).

One for all major Western anglophone news channels, you’d think? Think again.

The only reason I have learned about it is because Iranian President Ahmadinejad attended the SCO summit in the middle of the election crisis. And the only reason why I remembered to mention it is an article in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, mysteriously available on the web only in Russian.

What is this sorry episode but another example of how the “free world” is victim of its own propaganda, that depicts a subservient, hapless globe whilst in reality there are powerful people seriously discussing how to contain the USA?

Enough With Anti-Iran Propaganda!

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In the UK, and in Italy, and I am sure in the USA as well for what I can read on the International Herald Tribune, we are being bombarded by anti-Iran propaganda. There is no attempt at explaining, let alone understanding the complexities of the present situation, and one side is depicted as “good”, the other as “bad”.

Italian daily “Corriere della Sera”‘s home page a couple of days ago was literally drooling at the rumors of a “lake of blood” in front of the Majlis, the Iranian Parliament. Why? Because that would finally seal the concept of a violent, evil regime. Trouble is, there is an unfortunate number of dead but it has nothing to do with what you would expect from a violent crackdown by armed thugs and police firing live round on the crowd.

President Ahmadinejad’s fight against corruption is never mentioned, just as only few will have noticed that the opposition’s eminence grise is Ayatollah Rafsanjani, former President himself and whose sons appears to have “magically” become the richest people in Iran during that tenure.

What is requested by the opposition is never explained either. What has apparatchik Mousavi got to do with people asking to be freed from the long hands of the Moral Police, is left to the reader’s imagination. Supreme Leader Khamenei is belittled for having himself allied with Ahmadinejad and the Veterans of the Revolution.

What do we read instead in Western newspapers, but absurdist analyses showing very little respect for Muslimhood, let alone the Islamic Republic of Iran? (I’ll put a link about that soon…)

In this atmosphere it is clear that too many powerful, and truly evil forces, in Iran, in the USA, in the UK, in the Arab world and in Israel have a heavy interest in keeping Iran as a trouble spot and impeding a geostrategically completely natural alliance with the United States itself.

There isn’t much a person, or even a group of people can do. But denouncing the propaganda is one possibility.