Revolutionary Fesenjan

Two street music videos from Iran

2012-02-25T12:49:00.001-08:00

Golshifteh Farahani

2012-01-22T12:48:00.000-08:00

My latest piece on Golshifteh Farahani's photos (in Persian).

Covert War on Iran

2012-01-12T22:59:00.000-08:00

Chris Spannos has interviewed Muhammad Sahimi regarding the recent assassination of Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan here.

Descendants

2012-01-07T23:34:00.000-08:00

I watched Descendants tonight. I thought it was a so-so movie. I didn't feel anything particularly special about it except the scene that Matthew King (played by George Clooney) speaks to his comatose wife after learning that she had an affair before her accident. That scene in Descendants (although not nearly as powerful and breathtaking) reminded me of one of my most favorite scenes in which Paul (played by Marlon Brenda) speaks to the dead body of his wife in the movie Last Tango In Paris. I came home from cinema finding myself searching youtube for that scene in Last Tango in Paris.

The launching of "clean intranet" in Iran

2012-01-05T15:39:00.000-08:00

Part of an email I received from a dear friend who lives in Iran, translated by me and revised for clarity:

"If the news is correct, soon we will no longer have internet access here in Iran. We will have to say goodbye for a while... [the recent inaccessibility to internet in Iran] is apparently related to the "test" of the so called national internet or intranet. Yesterday, I read that we [people in Iran] will have only access to a "clean internet" and will no longer have access to the international one, so we might lose our connection to the net all together..."

Some news agencies confirm the launching of the "national internet" or intranet or "clean internet":

"A report by the Roozegar daily has cited telecommunications officials as saying that the reason for the reduction in internet speed was linked to the launch of a "Clean" or "National" internet, which could be as early as two weeks from now." (Link)

I don't know how realistic it is for the Iranian government, or any government for that matter, to be capable of replacing the international internet with a national "clean" one. I also can't confirm whether the recent decrease of internet speed in Iran is related to the installation of "national clean intranet" or is due to other reasons. But People in Iran are experiencing new hardships in checking their emails or using Internet-cafes.

ISNA reports that Tehran Police announced on Tuesday that internet cafes must check their customers’ identity cards before offering them any services. The cafes are also reportedly required to install closed-circuit cameras to record the faces of their customers. (Link)

Yet, the news of such government's domestic acts such as the launching of the "clean intranet" has received little to no attention from the Iranian activists living outside Iran, and they are unable to reflect the voices of their counterparts in Iran. The recent war and sanctions-mongering by US-Europe has understandably preoccupied the expat Iranian activists and disconnected many of them from the matters happening inside Iran. Not all have been preoccupied opposing the warmongering, in fact, some have been absorbed building their hopes in further sanctions and possible humanitarian bombings. However, whether endorsing or opposing the war-sanctions mongering, the activists have been distracted from the domestic happenings inside Iran. People familiar with Iran's politics know how dangerous it can be for Iran's political victims when Iran's activists are forced to neglect the domestic oppression.

The supposedly independent government of Iran (meaning independent from the world powers of the US, Israel and the Western Europe), not only receives help for its censorship from countries in Europe, Israel and elsewhere (e.g., for the launching of the "clean internet" and other similar surveillance tasks) but also gets enormous help from warmongers in preventing the activists from amplifying voices of resistance inside Iran. If a connection and solidarity was formed between the outside, inside and different segments of Iran's political opposition (up to the last demonstration in Iran, almost a year ago), that cooperation has been recently, to some extent, ripped apart by the warmongering imperialist forces. This is not to suggest that all the people in Iran are only concerned with Iran's government domestic policies and regulations as such policies and daily life experiences are interconnected and entangled to world affairs (such as the threats of wars and imposition of more fatal economic sanctions against Iran). I also don't wish to suggest that the outside activists have been ideologically homogeneous and unified in their opposition against war and sanctions. They are not. The point of the matter is that the warmongering has acted as a distracting force in favor of Iran's regime, has further compartmentalized the opposition, and has weakened the progressive voices who simultaneously oppose both domestic and imperialist oppression. In such a state of emergency, the strengthening of the threats of war and further sanctions against Iran, "you are either with us or against us" has once more become a mantra among sections of Iran's political activism sphere. Once more, imperialism seems hard at work aiding Iran's hardline sections of the government to exhaust a home-grown resistance movement.

Arab revolutions of today are reminiscent of Europe's 200 years ago?

2011-12-29T18:10:00.000-08:00

Eric Hobsbawm in this piece implicitly suggests that Arab and North African countries are in the childhood stage of Europe and that people's struggles in those countries remind him of "Europe's year of revolutions almost two centuries earlier."

Social Darwinism in colonial explanations for the supposed "lagging" of the colonized countries is now showing itself in the interpretations of the political struggle of descendents of former colonized subjects.

Eric Hobsbawm completely disregards the fact that the econo-political discontent of people in North Africa and Arab countries of today is in many aspects shared with people living in North American-European capitalist-democracies. This shared discontent includes the shrinkage of privatized public space, the private sphere under even more surveillance by the states, the effect of neo-liberalist economic policies, police brutality, economic disparities, the militarization of the whole world, etc.

For the Egyptian revolutionaries, Eric Hobsbawm, has a message of hope based on "two years after 1848" revolution in Europe:

"For those who once crowded Tahrir Square and are now worried about the fate of their revolution, he [Eric Hobsbawm] has a word of comfort." And here that is: "Two years after 1848, it looked as if it had all failed. In the long run, it hadn't failed. A good deal of liberal advances had been made. So it was an immediate failure but a longer term partial success - though no longer in the form of a revolution."

If the racist government of Iran has proclaimed that the political struggles in African and Arab countries are the repetition of Iran's revolution of 30 years ago only in a different space (the exact revolution that they stole and demolished) the European supremacists find the Arab and African revolutions to be reminiscent of the Europe of two centuries ago. Even their word of hope is based on the assumption that the future of Muslim and Arab countries had already been experienced two centuries ago in Europe.

Eric Hobsbawm: "What unites them [revolutions in Arab and African countries] is a common discontent and common mobilisable forces - a modernising middle class, particularly a young, student middle class, and of course technology which makes it today very much easier to mobilise protests."

Lazy class analyses in which protesters become "modernising middle class" have become common sense to many analysts without any of them offering a deep elaboration. How do you define middle class? How do you detect the social class of the protesters? How do you find a big body of middle class people in poor countries such as Egypt, Iran, Syria, etc. who would "make waves" of political change? What does modernizing middle class mean exactly? What does modernizing mean here? I would have to guess the answer as the BBC piece shallowly leaves it unanswered. Probably according to thinkers like Eric Hobsbawm if North African and Arab countries of today are in the path of Europe of two centuries ago, the agents in those countries that stay on this path are Europeanizing (or Westernizing) middle class forces. According to views similar to Hobsbawm's, the Muslim and Arab countries, if events go correctly, will become some young age of the Europe in their future. Thus, the forces who have the important mission of assimilationism are none other than the modernizing middle class. Not only the class of the protesters but rather the image of the whole world is distorted in these accounts.

Labor protest in Tabriz, Iran

2011-11-26T11:14:00.000-08:00

Workers protest the proposed changes to the labor law in Tabriz, Iran last week.

No one's burden to liberate her

2011-11-20T05:56:00.000-08:00

She doesn't need to be "liberated" by any woman's nude photos. She is a liberator herself. Thus, mainstream media by portraying her as passive, as the burden of another woman's nude photos supposed to liberate her, ignores her agency practiced in daily acts, either with or without veil, wearing veil either for the sake of community values or individual values.

P.S. : My friend, A.M., pointed to me that the woman who publishes nude photos (or other similar acts) also do not need to be "liberated"or righted by the veiled woman as religious right-wingers might assume. I agree. I equally find it problematic when liberal feminists assume that the "modernized and liberated" women bear the burden of liberating or breaking taboos for the veiled women by exposing body or similar acts.

Tahrir Square, Egypt, November 19, 2011

My Father Is Still A Communist

2011-10-07T22:43:00.000-07:00

The movie is the story of the parents of the director, Ahmad Ghossein. It happens in south of Lebanon when it was invaded and occupied by Israel. Ahmad Ghossein's mother (Maream Hamade) records her voice on tapes and sends them to her husband (Rachid Ghossein) who was working in Saudi Arabia (or one of the Gulf countries) to make the ends meet. At the time, to the young Rachid Ghossein, his father was a communist hero fighting the invaders. So he used to imagine heroic stories about his father while in fact his father was working abroad for him and his family to survive the poor economic conditions. In a scene, Maream Hamade is recording her voice describing her child labor to her husband. It goes something like: “I walked to the midwife around midnight and was back home around 3 AM. Our son asked me when I will deliver, I told him I have already delivered. He couldn't believe it so he touched my belly and excitedly said oh yeah your belly is smaller. I asked him to be quiet as the baby was sleeping.” The recordings were the real voice of Ahmad Ghossein's mother that he had found them in the basement of their house.

The recordings are all the daily realities of Maream's life under occupation and invasion while living alone and being responsible for her children. Through the expressions of longing for her husband and the "wasted time under occupation" we get to hear the story. The tapes were not recorded for the audiences of a future movie, in fact, they were the love letters of Maryam to her husband. Yet, the recordings are put together as a fiction for the audiences of the movie. One would find oneself getting arrested in the fictional narration and dreamy images of the movie while the realness of the voice and story would force you back on the ground.

In the middle of Israel’s bombs, death and destruction, Maream Hamade records the most affectionate messages to her husband. Right when the south of Lebanon is occupied and one would think that the meaning of the borders and nationalities must have been intensified, Maream often asks her husband in the records to come back home and that she is going to tear up his passport so that he never leaves again.

The title of the movie “My Father Is Still A Communist” is also neatly picked as the father turned out to be laboring in Gulf countries and not a hero communist fighter, nonetheless he continues to stay a hero in Ahmad Ghosseini’s mind.

The songs in the movie are by the Egyptian singer Abdul-Halim Hafez, one of the best Arabic singers.

Roseanne Barr Speaks to Wall Street Protesters

2011-09-27T07:41:00.001-07:00

Let's listen to Palestinian young people regarding the statehood

2011-09-23T21:34:00.000-07:00

Video from here.

Kurdish people of Qandil are attacked, killed and displaced

2011-08-29T08:29:00.000-07:00

The governments of Turkey and Iran started a joint campaign of killing and displacing the Kurds of Qandil under the "justification" of attacking the Kurdish P.K.K. and Pjak forces there. The US government has claimed that the government of Turkey has the right to defend itself from the P.K.K. terrorists. A familiar affair, as we have heard such "justifications" from Israel's government and "the right of imperialist governments to defend themselves" repetitively.

In response to the atrocities of Iran's and Turkey's governments, the world (most of the progressives, radicals, conservatives and liberals alike) have been standing by silently and showing absolutely zero concern toward the pain of the invaded Kurdish people. The Kurdish opposition groups are mostly Marxists with much more promising progressive potential than most of the other oppositional groups in the region. Yet, they receive little to no attention from the world's progressives. All parts of the political spectrum are mind-blowingly susceptible to mass media's hype and fashion. Thus those parts of the events that are unprofitable to the corporate media tend to get no attention even from those who consider themselves skeptical of mainstream media.

On the other hand, the flag-loving activists who attached the flag of Turkey to Palestine's on May 2010 (in response to the massacre of peace activists at the Gaza Freedom Flotilla) and became delusional about the Turkish government's phony support of Palestinians, have shown no interest in explaining how the government of Turkey is killing and oppressing Kurdish people somewhat similar to Israel's government does against Palestinians. The lack of such explanations maybe stems from the fact that it's not fashionable to express concerns over the suffering of Kurds or it would make it harder to celebrate and romanticize the rise of new governments, similar to the Turkish government, in the region. Similar to the Turkish government means friendly toward the US and Israel government policies with expressions of phony support for Palestinians, and some minor cosmetic surgery.

The security forces of Turkey's government attacked the Kurdish protesters who were moving to Qandil (as human shields) to protect the people there from the attacks. One of the protesters, Yildirim Han, was severely injured and he consequently died in the hospital.

The letter below is written by Leyla Zana. It was originally published here first.

Leyla Zana:

"While the world is going through a very fast process of change and transformation and the Middle East is witnessing new developments, our people who are deprived of the fairness of the history still continue their struggle for “existence” at the cost of their lives.

When it comes to the Kurds and their political status, the world opinion keeps remaining silent and condoning the right and boundary violations, bombings on villages, houses and people, regardless of women, men and children, cross-border operations and the ongoing aerial operations. This situation is greeted with great astonishment by our people and considered difficult to understand.

The constant attack position of these powers and their intention to destroy all the values of Kurds do not comply with the character of the 21st century and the principles of fairness in the world.

The latest aerial attacks on Qandil, which have killed a civilian family in the region, are defended by Deputy Prime Minister of Turkey which is currently trying to set an example of a “model country” to the Middle East and conducting negotiations to be a member of the EU. In a statement to a national newspaper, the Turkish Deputy Prime Minister, saying that “the operations are legitimate and true”, didn’t abstain from defending the attacks which target civilians. (Bülent Arınç/Cihan News Agency/22.08.2011)

I would like to express my regret that the Prime Minister of the Republic of Turkey is increasing the policy of violence against Kurds as the Western world is holding up him as an example to the Middle East. I am greatly worried that we may face a modern dictatorship while the dictatorial regimes in the Middle East are falling down. The state’s attitude which forces the whole society to think the same with itself and the closure cases against the worldwide multilingual Roj TV need to be accepted as a sign in this regard.

In brief, the military, political, diplomatic attacks launched against the Kurds and most importantly, the boundless attacks on our civilian people are in front of the eyes of the world public opinion. It is possible to foresee how the destruction of an oppressed people’s children will deepen the deadlock.

All efforts of the Kurdish side are intended for finding a democratic and political solution to this problem. Although Mr. Ocalan has many times silenced the weapons since 1993 and created opportunities for obtaining the rights of the Kurdish people on a democratic ground as well as convincing his public that the problem can be solved in this way,www.ekurd.netthe state has negated all these processes with a negative attitude and turned a blind eye to these opportunities. Resisting extraordinarily about defining the problem, the state has at every turn considered and applied violence as the single method of solving the Kurdish problem.

Mr. President,
In the testimony of the whole world’s humanity, the geography which has been in a conflict environment for two hundred years is now expecting peace and quiet.
Kurdistan's geography should not be a second Paletsine and the Sri Lanka simulation shouldn’t even be associated with the situation in Turkey. Otherwise, a social chaos and an ethnic war among the peoples will be unavoidable, which will no doubt drag the world peace and humanity into more disaster.

I expect and wish that you will meet the requirements of your both conscience and position.''

Leyla Zana: Who in 1995 won the European Parliament's Sakharov human rights award, and several other Kurds were elected to parliament in 1991, but lost their seats in 1994 after their party was outlawed for links with the PKK. In March 2003, Zana and her co-defendants were allowed a retrial after their original conviction was condemned as unfair by the European Court of Human Rights in 2001. Zana and three colleagues spent 10 years behind bars for speaking Kurdish in the Turkish Parliament and for collaborating with the rebels. She was the first Kurdish woman to be elected to Turkey's parliament. They were released in June 2004."

By Mana Neyestani, for Ali Farzat

2011-08-28T19:10:00.000-07:00

By Mana Neyestani. (Source)
Title: "For Ali Farzat, the Syrian Cartoonist"

People of Oroumieh and Tabriz (in Iran) protested today

2011-08-28T00:22:00.000-07:00

Dried lake Oroumieh, Source: AP Photo/Vahid Salemi

People in Tabriz and Oroumieh demonstrated today (August 27th) in protest to the drying of the lake Oroumieh, shrunken by 60% and estimated to disappear all together in about 5 years. Tabriz is on the east side of the lake Oroumieh and Oroumieh is located on its west side.

The long popular lake, home to migrating flamingos, pelicans and gulls, has shrunken by 60 percent and could disappear entirely in just a few years, experts say - drained by drought, misguided irrigation policies, development and the damming of rivers that feed it. (link)

Tens of protesters are arrested and many have been injured as the security forces have used tear gas, plastic bullets, batons, etc. The people's demonstration against this environmental disaster has different components, one of which is related to the economic consequences of the drying of the lake. One of these economic consequences is the unemployment of farmers whose livelihood is directly dependent on the lake Oroumieh. Note that many farmers, even those whose products are highly demanded in Iran like rice farmers, have become unemployed and devastated by the wild product import policies of Ahmadinejad's administration. Thus the drying of the lake Oroumieh compounds other neoliberal and anti-worker policies of the state:

The receding water has also weakened hotel business and tourism activities in the area, and planned hotel projects remain idle since investors are reluctant to continue. Beyond tourism, the salt-saturated lake threatens agriculture nearby in northwest Iran, as storms sometimes carry the salt far afield. Many farmers worry about the future of their lands, which for centuries have been famous for apples, grapes, walnuts, almonds, onions, potatoes, as well as aromatic herbal drinks, candies and tasty sweet pastes. "The salty winds not only will affect surrounding areas but also can damage farming in remote areas," ... (link)

The other aspect of the protest against the drying of the lake Oroumieh is the more obvious one which is standing against the brutal destruction of the people's public space demonstrated by the lake Oroumieh solidifying into salt (shrunken by 60% and its remaining has 78% increase in its salt per litter). I encountered a comment by a political activist from Oroumieh on Facebook in which he said "the lake Oroumieh is covered with white garve-clothes [salt] and all we are left to do is either to inconsequentially mourn on top of its grave or take real action (like the protesters did today) and stop all this murdering of our people and our surroundings".

Some commentators claim the protest for an environmental cause to be apolitical and only turned to a political act after the government oppressed it and arrested and injured the protesters. I disagree with considering today's protests apolitical, because of the following: Firstly, poor environmental policies are often political as they are applied by the state's officials and policies. Secondly, in this case the destruction of the nature comes with the economic loss and further impoverishment of different groups of working class people. Thirdly, all this is happening in a region that its people find the state in animosity with their mother tongue (Turkish, Kurdish, etc.) and with their religion (in some cases). Fourthly, any gathering of the people (let alone in protest to state's policies) is considered as a threat to a government that makes sure to keep the people as atomized as possible.

Iran's state, like Israel does against Palestinians, implement check points of its forces in the streets pretending them to be there to keep the society "Islamic" and "moral." But, in fact, such check points are in the streets to remind people that the citizens have no power or claim over the public space and that people are merely the objects to follow the state's ideology and at the service to decorate the public in a way that shows the state's ideology is the natural outcome of people's way of life. The state's daily punishment implemented in the streets (through the religious police, etc.) is for nothing but to force people to "accept" the oppression as part of their daily routine and to internalize the fear of the state for the simplest thing such as makeup for women or the hairstyle for men. Consequently, a demonstration by the people to protest the neglect and destruction of their public space, which is symbolic display of ownership of people's environment and public life, is indeed threatening to Iran's government.

The chants in these videos of today's demonstrations: "let's fill up the lake Oroumieh by our tears," "the lake Oroumieh is dying and the parliament orders its murder," "Azarbaiejan, stand up (or rise up) and shout, and give life to the lake Oroumieh."

IMF has praised the policies of Iran's government

2011-08-26T06:51:00.000-07:00

The point is Iran's government neoliberal policies are praised. (1) The rest such as poor people "thanking Mr. President" is part of the ignorant imaginations of commentators who don't even follow the news related to unemployment, unpaid workers (sometimes, for more than a year) and the rocketing numbers of temporary workers in Iran.

"He's giving back half of the 60 billion dollars in savings directly to the people in monthly deposits. So every Iranian, man woman and child, is eligible to receive the equivalent of 40 dollars a month."

Some of the food and public transportation prices have doubled or tripled. The assumption that $40 per month would sufficiently compensate for the effects of the subsidy removal for the poor is simply naive.

(1): Note especially those leftists who jumped going to Ahmadinejad lecturing them about the inhumanity of capitalism.

The assassination of a doctor who examined rape victims in Iran

2011-08-26T06:13:00.000-07:00

From Guardian: "The son of an Iranian doctor who was killed after examining the rape victims of the country's 2009 unrest has spoken for the first time about the motives behind his father's assassination.

Abdolreza Soudbakhsh, a physician and professor at Tehran University, was shot dead by men on a motorcycle as he left his office last September. At the time of his assassination, Iranian officials denied his murder had anything to do with the cases of alleged rape in Kahrizak, a detention centre that Iran used to imprison many of the opposition activists caught up in the protests following the country's disputed presidential elections." (You can read the rest here)

From the heart of the gloomy night

2011-08-20T19:18:00.000-07:00

The lyrics of this pre-1979 revolutionary song are by Saeed Soltanpour, I think. Saeed Soltanpour, a Marxist revolutionary poet, playwright and play director, was a teacher in Tehran and started his political activism 17 years prior to the 1979 revolution, while one of the leaders of the teachers' movement. A little more than two years after the revolution he was arrested on the night of his wedding, in fact even before his wedding ended. He was tortured for 66 days after his arrest and then killed. It's for millions of people like Soltanpour that when ignorant commentators (+, +) call the 1979 revolution Khomeini's movement or the Islamists' Revolution you don't know whether to laugh or cry. This song was sent to me by my friend who leads an underground life in Iran, yet keeps asking friends to stay hopeful.

My translation of the lyrics:

From the heart of the gloomy night,

the flower of morning will blossom

with a smile on her lips

the flower of sun

will emerge on top of the tall mountain

the winter, undoubtedly, will pass

the messenger of spring

with thousands of red roses

will surely come

in the pathway of the gloomy night

toward the gateway of light

the young flower of Mina (1)

has sprayed blood

on the wall of time

Tulips (2) have also put on the hearts

a dark sorrow

although it's still night

with the dark harp as a pendulum hung on this roof

The sky is drowned in stars

The sky is still drowned in stars

clusters of stars, like flowers, flowers

The cluster of red stars

with the strong pulses

The furnace of sun, finally, will burst

(1): It refers to Mina Rafei, a marxist student activist, who was killed by Savak two years prior to the 1979 revolution.

(2): Tulips stand for martyrs.

The anniversary of 1953 coup

2011-08-20T16:20:00.000-07:00

The anti- 1953 coup demonstrations (Source)

Yesterday was the anniversary of 1953 coup. The article below by Ervand Abrahamian from his book Khomeinism was first published on Tehran Bureau. In this article, Abrahamian explains comprehensively the role of the clergy and the stance of Tudeh with respect to 1953 coup.

Here in this video Khomeini expresses his animosity toward Mosadegh and implicitly justifies the British-American 1953 coup as Khomeini considers Mosadegh and his secularism a threat to Islam. Khomeini made his pro-1953 coup stance clear after the coup against Banisadr (1981), the first post-1979 revolution president, while universities were closed for cultural revolution (1980-1983), Iraq already attacked Iran and the bloody war was started (1980-1988), many political groups' activities were illegalized and their members silenced.

Ervand Abrahamian: "On the eve of May Day 1983, Iranian television sprung a surprise on its viewers. It paraded veteran Tudeh leaders confessing to a host of major crimes, including that of advocating an "alien ideology." Public confessions in themselves were nothing new. Ever since 1981 a diverse array of political dissidents -- Maoists, Mosaddeqists, former Khomeinists, royalists, and Mojahedin activists -- had admitted to hatching "sinister conspiracies" and establishing "treasonable ties with foreign powers." Nor was the content of the Tudeh confessions entirely novel, for the Left had long been accused of "conspiring" to destroy the nation, disseminating "alien" concepts, and, most frequently of all, "spying" for the Soviet Union.

The surprise in these 1983 confessions, which continued intermittently for over ten months, was the prominence given to history. History featured in the recantations made by the three most important Tudeh figures: Nuraldin Kianuri, the seventy-one-year-old first secretary of the party; Ehsan Tabari, the organization's main theoretician since the mid-1940s; and Mahmud Behazin, a well-known author and fellow-traveler since the early 1940s. Behazin kicked off the first show with a lesson on the Islamic clergy's true understanding of the past, Marxism's misinterpretation of the course of history, and secular radicals' betrayal of the people of Iran through their "alien" ideology.

The three Tudeh leaders followed similar scripts. They began by greeting "Imam Khomeini, the Great Leader of the Revolution and Founder of the Islamic Republic." They stressed that their brief confinement in prison had provided them with the opportunity to study the past. Kianuri concluded his second long recantation by stressing that the Left needed to examine in great detail Iran's history and society. Tabari exclaimed that he had realized that his whole life's work was "spurious" as soon as the prison authorities introduced him to Islamic authors, notably Ayatollah Motahhari. Tabari explained that his own publications were useless because they had relied on foreign sources (Europeans, Zionists, Freemasons, and Soviet Marxists) and on Kasravi and Sangalaji, whose errors he recognized in prison as soon as he read Imam Khomeini's Kashf al-Asrar. A less important Tudeh leader, before being executed, limited his defense to thanking his jailers for turning the prison into a "university."

The Tudeh leaders all declared they wished to reveal their mistakes so that the younger generation would learn from them. Tabari, for instance, warned the youth that Marxism would inevitably cut them off from their own people, history, and culture. The Tudeh leaders praised the clergy for having heroically led the people throughout history, Behazin claiming that the clergy had enjoyed close links with the oppressed for over one thousand years. Kianuri stated that Marxism had no chance against the clergy since the latter were armed not only with "militant Islam" but also with age-old popular support. Moreover, they all argued that their "foreign ideology" had led them to "depend" on the Soviets, hatch conspiracies, misunderstand their own society, worship the intelligentsia, and disrespect the country's religious culture. In his first television appearance, Kianuri traced the source of "all our mistakes to our foreign ideology." In his later appearances, he no longer spoke of "mistakes" but of "illnesses," "sins," and "high treason."

Even more significant, the Tudeh leaders each cited the same four decisive points in history in which the Left had supposedly betrayed Iran: the Constitutional Revolution, especially the government's forceful disarming of Sattar Khan's fighters in 1910; the Jangali (Jungle) Resistance of 1915-21, ending with the death of its leader, Mirza Kuchek Khan, in the wooded mountains of Gilan; the rise of Reza Shah in 1921-25, particularly the opposition to his coronation mustered by Ayatollah Modarres; and Mosaddeq's 1951-53 administration, terminating with his overthrow in the notorious August 19 coup.

Since the 1983 television confessions, these four crises have featured prominently in government propaganda: in newspapers, radio broadcasts, Friday sermons, school textbooks, and even intellectual journals. Government officials sometimes cite these Tudeh recantations to prove their case. The Islamic Republic has certainly not treated history as bunk. Indeed, it has gone to considerable trouble -- with somewhat unconventional means -- to obtain the "historical truth."

1951-53
Mosaddeq's Administration
Mosaddeq, although deceased since 1967, haunts the Islamic Republic. He does so because he embodied many political features the Islamic Republic admires, but few of the social ingredients it considers essential. He had an impeccable anti-Pahlavi record. He opposed the 1925 change of dynasty and, consequently, was cast out of politics for sixteen years; it was rumored that he came close to meeting the same fate as Modarres. During 1941-53, he persistently criticized the new shah's unconstitutional powers. After Mosaddeq's overthrow in the 1953 coup, he was imprisoned, released, and then once again forced into house imprisonment, where he eventually died.

Mosaddeq had an equally impeccable anti-imperialist record. He denounced the 1919 Anglo-Persian Agreement and the 1921 coup. He opposed economic capitulations in any shape or form as well as military alliances with the Great Powers. He led the 1944-45 opposition to the granting of an oil concession to the Soviet Union, and, of course, he launched the 1951 campaign to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. In fact, he was one of the world's very first nonaligned leaders. What is more, he challenged the British and the shah with public support. He appealed directly to the masses, often bypassing Parliament, which he denounced at one point as a "den of thieves." A prominent royalist deputy exclaimed in exasperation: Is our premier a statesman or a mob leader? What type of premier says "I will speak to the people" every time he faces a political problem? I always considered this man to be unsuitable for high office. But I never imagined, even in my worst nightmares, that a seventy-year-old would turn into a rabble-rouser. A man who surrounds Parliament with thugs is nothing less than a public menace.

Mosaddeq was no cleric nor was he willing to use religion against his opponents. On the contrary, he was a secular humanist and a typical offspring of the French Enlightenment. His thesis, written for a law degree at Lausanne, argued in favor of fully secularizing the legal system in Iran. His speeches used imagery from Iranian history and the Constitutional Revolution, not from Shii Islam. His closest advisers were young secular nationalists, some of whom -- especially those from the Iran party -- could be described as militantly anticlerical. His administration contained no clerics and few technocrats with clerical connections. He was reluctant to appoint Mahdi Bazargan as minister of education, suspecting that Bazargan would bring too much religion into the schools. What is more, a small group of religious fanatics known as the Fedayan-e Islam tried to assassinate Mosaddeq and wounded Hosayn Fatemi, his foreign minister.

Unable to exorcise Mosaddeq's ghost, the Islamic Republic has tried to contain it. High school textbooks allocate twelve pages to Kuchek Khan, four pages to Modarres, another four to Shaykh Nuri, and less than two to Mosaddeq -- about the same as given to Navab Safavi, the Fedayan-e Islam leader. Meanwhile, the mass media elevate Ayatollah [Abul Qasem] Kashani as the real leader of the oil nationalization campaign, depicting Mosaddeq as merely the ayatollah's hanger-on. Even more significant, the regime portrays the 1951-53 period as yet another example of leftist betrayal, arguing that the nationalist movement failed because it was stabbed in the back by the Tudeh.

This last theme plays well in nationalist circles precisely because it repeats the arguments the National Front has used ever since the 1953 coup. According to the National Front, Mosaddeq would have survived if the Tudeh had given him greater support, would have been able to counter the West if the Soviets had offered assistance, and would have been able to resist the coup if the Tudeh had been willing to mobilize its clandestine military network. These arguments, now Mosaddeqist catechisms, contain only half-truths. It is true that the Tudeh did not support the National Front initially, but by 1953 it had moved close to Mosaddeq. The Tudeh participated in pro-Mosaddeq demonstrations, helped scotch an attempted royalist coup, and called for the establishment of a republic. It was the only large organization to support Mosaddeq's highly controversial referendum of July 1953 proposing to dissolve Parliament. By then, ten of the original twenty founding members of the National Front had defected to the royalist camp. Khomeini, like many other clerics, opposed the 1953 referendum on the avowed grounds that it violated the fundamental laws of the 1906 constitution.

It is true that the Soviets did not go out of their way to help Mosaddeq, but this was as much due to the latter as the former. Mosaddeq's whole strategy was designed to obtain American support against the British. At the height of the Cold War he knew perfectly well that if he moved closer to the Soviets, he would automatically alienate the Americans. Even after the coup, he kept up the pretense that he had been overthrown not by the Americans but by the British.

It is also true that the Tudeh did not mobilize its military network to stop the coup, but again this had much to do with Mosaddeq's own decisions. On August 14, Kianuri, who was then the head of the Tudeh military network, informed Mosaddeq that a coup was in the making and provided him with a list of conspirators. Mosaddeq took no notice, saying that he had appointed most of these senior officers. On August 16, the same officers seized three cabinet ministers who were most in favor of an alliance with the Tudeh. On August 18, Mosaddeq, at the urging of the American ambassador, ordered the martial law authorities to clear the streets of all demonstrators. About six hundred Tudeh supporters were arrested. Finally, on August 19, when the coup was in progress, Kianuri phoned Mosaddeq to offer help, but Mosaddeq declined the offer on the grounds that "he did not want bloodshed" and that "events were now beyond his control." It is also significant that on the eve of the coup one of the main National Front papers pronounced the royalist danger to be dead and warned that the main threat now came from the Tudeh.

If Mosaddeq fell because of a "stab in the back," the stab came not so much from the Left as from the religious Right. From the very beginning, the clerical establishment had arrayed itself against the National Front. Ayatollah Behbehani, the senior cleric in Tehran and the grandson of the famous constitutional leader, had openly sided with the shah. The substantial influx of CIA money into the Tehran bazaar on the eve of the 1953 coup became known as "Behbehani dollars." Even more important, Ayatollah Borujerdi -- a staunch royalist and the leading marja-e taqlid from 1944 until his death in 1961 -- had tried to stem Mosaddeq's popularity by issuing an edict forbidding the clergy from participating in politics. He epitomized the conservative clergy, who claimed to be apolitical but in fact bolstered the royalist regime. Ruhani, Khomeini's main biographer, tries to explain Borujerdi's behavior by claiming that the "imperialists" had planted "agents" around him to isolate him from society.
Ayatollah Kashani was one of the few prominent clerics to ignore Borujerdi's ban and support Mosaddeq. The Islamic Republic makes much of Kashani's forthright rejection of the ban but takes care not to mention who issued the edict nor that Borujerdi was Khomeini's main mentor for nearly two decades. Even though Kashani publicly supported Mosaddeq, their relations were problematic from the very beginning. As early as November 1951, the British Embassy reported that Kashani was so disgruntled with Mosaddeq that he had put out "feelers" in many directions, including the royal court and the U.S. Embassy. "The Americans," reported the British Embassy, "have told us in the strictest confidence that he [ Kashani] has been in touch with them. His main thesis is the danger of communism and the need for immediate American aid." Similarly, in May 1952 the head of the British intelligence service in Tehran reported that a prominent royalist had boasted to him that the "shah's astute policies" had detached Kashani from Mosaddeq. He added, "I did not dispute this but would put on record that the detaching of Kashani was due to quite other factors, and that these factors were created and directed by the brothers Rashidian." (The Rashidian brothers were the main conduit of British intelligence service money into Iran.)

Kashani's opposition to Mosaddeq came into the open by mid-1953 once the latter issued a referendum to dissolve Parliament, drafted an electoral bill enfranchising women, tended to favor state enterprises over the bazaar, refused to ban alcohol, and declined amnesty to assassins from the Fedayan-e Islam. More mundane matters, such as the awarding of government contracts, also played a role. According to British intelligence, Kashani's two sons had set up a lucrative business buying and selling import licenses for prohibited goods using their father's threats. At this time Kashani also suddenly discovered that Mosaddeq's thesis, written thirty-five years earlier, had been anti-Islamic.

By mid-1953, Kashani was urging the bazaars to support General Zahedi, the nominal leader of the prospective coup. He also praised the shah for being "young," "kindhearted," and highly "popular." Kashani's closest supporters in Parliament, especially Shams Qanatabadi, Mozaffar Baqai, and Hosayn Makki (Modarres's biographer), denounced Mosaddeq as a dictator worse than Hitler and a Socialist more extreme than Stalin. They also accused Mosaddeq of being anti-Islamic on the grounds that he endangered private property. Hojjat al-Islam Mohammad Falsafi, a preacher who later became prominent in the Islamic Republic, actively participated in the coup by telling street audiences that Mosaddeq was intentionally paving the way for communism. The Fedayan-e Islam announced that they would cleanse Iran of such undesirable elements as Mosaddeq.

On the shah's triumphant return home on August 22, the Fedayan-e Islam newspaper hailed the coup as a "holy uprising," demanding Mosaddeq's execution and praising the shah as the world's Muslim hero. Not surprisingly, Navab Safavi, their leader, was promptly released from prison and permitted to go on a world tour. Meanwhile, Kashani told a foreign correspondent that Mosaddeq had fallen because he had forgotten that the shah enjoyed extensive popular support. A month later, he went even further and declared that Mosaddeq deserved to be executed because he had committed the ultimate offense: rebelling against the shah, "betraying" the country, and repeatedly violating the sacred law. Presumably this was Kashani's way of continuing the "crusade against imperialism and the Pahlavis."
Years later, when the Islamic Republic had been established, Falsafi praised Ayatollah Kashani as the real crusader against imperialism and the genuine precursor of Imam Khomeini. He also denounced Mosaddeq as a rabid secularist out to uproot religion from Iran. Similarly, Hasan Ayat -- who began his political career in Baqai's entourage and ended life as the most vocal lay proponent of theocracy -- argued that Mosaddeq, despite his image, was really an "agent" of Anglo-American imperialism. The evidence, according to him, was "overwhelming." Mosaddeq was an aristocrat who had joined the Freemasons in his youth, studied in Europe, and held numerous cabinet posts in the 1920s, which would have been impossible, so Ayat claimed, without British intrigue.

For his part, Khomeini often praised Kashani but rarely mentioned Mosaddeq. On one occasion, Khomeini claimed that unscrupulous secularists had so tarnished Kashani's reputation -- as they had done to Shaykh Nuri earlier -- that after 1953 this "great anti-imperialist fighter" had been too embarrassed to leave home. "People in the streets," Khomeini recounted, "would dress dogs as Ayatollah Kashani. Even fellow clerics lacked the courtesy to stand up when he entered a room." Khomeini ended this speech by stressing the need for a proper understanding of history to undo the damage done by the unscrupulous secularists. But nowhere in this speech nor at any other public occasion did Khomeini explain why he had been conspiculously absent from politics in the turbulent years of 1951-53. Was this due to Borujerdi's ban or because he disliked Mosaddeq's secularism as much as that of the Pahlavis? He took the secret to his mausoleum."

Street performers, Tehran, Iran (July, 2011)

2011-08-14T20:26:00.000-07:00

Reform in Syria?

2011-08-13T17:56:00.000-07:00

This deserves to be the political joke of the year: Iran's state, and its baton-ists, propagandists and apologists are in favor of "reforms" in Syria as opposed to the Isqat-e Nizam (overthrow of the regime) which is demanded by the Syrian protesters. The people in Iran's political-sphere who currently support reform in Syria are the same who supported and justified or even led the coup against the reformists and the shutdown of any possibility of a reform in Iran (or cosmetic surgery, if you may). Their stance is identical to that of Israeli, US and France's government with respect to Tunisian and Egyptian administrations before the downfall of Ben Ali and Mubarak.

Such supporters of the reform in Syria also reduce the whole Syrian people's struggle to a few political figures (Salafites and Muslim Brotherhood figures) and discredit the whole uprising like some analysts do with Iran's revolutions, struggles, etc. The apologists of Iran's state claim to be worried about the rise of fundamentalism in Syria and claim the actualization of a Syrian Revolution can harm the democratization process of the region. It's quite interesting for me to see this reasoning repeating itself in arguments of different parts of political spectrum. More power to Syrian revolutionaries.

If Abdolreza was Joe and Ghanbari was Bill

2011-08-13T11:57:00.000-07:00

Joe Bill is sentenced to death for participating in Britain's riots, and recording some scenes of them on his camera, and sending the videos to the political groups outside of the UK who oppose the British government.

What would happen if the statement above was true? What would be the reactions of different groups of progressive activists? What would be the reaction of the propagandists of Iran's regime?

Now, for real this time, a teacher and university lecturer from one of the poorest areas of Iran, Abdolreza Ghanbari from Pakdasht of Varamin, is sentenced to death. Why? For participating in a demonstration in Iran on December 2009, for recording some videos of the demonstration on his camera and sending it to some opposition groups outside of the country.

Abdolreza Ghanbari was tricked by officials from the intelligence ministry. They pretended to be members of an opposition group and asked him to participate in the December protest and record some videos for them and email them. Ghanbari did so. Immediately, he got arrested and sentenced to death.

Ghanbari with a PhD in Literature and Persian Language was a high school teacher in Varamin when arrested during Ashura protest on December 27, 2009. He was charged, convicted and sentenced to death for video taping the protests and sending them to opposition groups. About a month after his arrest, without access to a lawyer, or knowing his legal rights, Ghanbari was put on trial on January 30, 2010. He was found guilty of all charges and was sentenced to death in the court room of Judge Salavati.

I have written about Abdolreza Ghanbari before here.

Abdolreza Ghanbari receives little attention even among the most radical activists because of his nationality and the particular government which is carrying the death sentence. This is the real failure of political activism that we face today. The same fashion that governs the mass media rules progressives too. The marginalized of the margins are left on their own. That's so vividly demonstrated in the recent riot in Britain too. Many leftist organizations had no connection to the marginalized rioting people whatsoever. However, just think about how the reactions would be different if Abdolreza was Joe and Ghanbari was Bill.

Open The Rafah Crossing Permanently And Unconditionally

2011-08-09T12:51:00.000-07:00

Our demand, therefore, is the permanent and free movement of Palestinians, without distinction or limitation of any kind, through the Rafah Crossing. (Sign here)

The demonization of 1979 revolution

2011-08-07T18:57:00.000-07:00

Look at this condescending piece by the anti-Iranian commentator, Angry Arab, in response to a section of the Green Movement's word of solidarity with the Syrian people. I, like many other Green Movement activists, have many fundamental disagreements with "the Coordination Council for the Green Path of Hope." But I appreciate their writing words of solidarity with Syrian people instead of making a Kabab party with the president of Syria, Bashar Asad, like people in Lebanon did with Ahmaidnejad, disappointing their sisters and brothers in Iran, and no one including Angry Arab uttered a word of objection.

Angry Arab: "Wait: I thought that Mousavi wants a return to the "purity" of the Khumayni (sic) revolution. I don't think that the Khuymani (sic) model is what the Syrian people want."

Khomeini's revolution and Khomeini's model?

It was not Khomeini's revolution, it was a massive people's revolution in which people from all different political beliefs (such as different groups of Marxists, secular nationalists, national religious, Marxist-Islamists, etc.) participated and made it happen. Which kind of mentality is this that claims the revolutions and the movements of a particular country, that it doesn't like for some reasons, belong to a few persons, even if those persons had been considered as the leaders or the so called leaders? Do leaders represent the movements and revolutions they claim to lead or even genuinely try to lead? Does that mean that Iranian people are just hired movie extras or siahi lashkar (the invisible crowd) as it's said in Persian? Where are the people when it comes to Iran, all the Mr. and Ms. self-described leftists? If Khomeini's regime killed and smashed progressive, Marxist, and Marxist-Islamist activists, leader-oriented views do the same, demonizes the victims of Khomeini through demonizing a revolution and removes them from its offered narrations of history.

Ervand Abrahamian in his book of Khomeinism says:

"May 1, 1979, was a major public festival in Iran. Waves of joyful demonstrators poured into the streets celebrating International Workers' Day as well as "the true spring of freedom after the 2,500-year-old monarchy… in 1979 the Islamic regime, to prove its radical credentials and appropriate the leftist tradition, celebrated May Day with much fanfare and revolutionary rhetoric. Since then the celebrations have continued, but with less and less fanfare, radical promises, and free participation. In fact, the way May Day has been observed can be used to gauge how far Khomeini's populism has been toned down as his regime has established itself and become economically more conservative. In other words, May Day is a revealing lens through which to observe the Thermidor of the Islamic Revolution. By the late 1980s May Day no longer produced street rallies and freewheeling mass meetings but highly controlled and carefully orchestrated indoor shows designed to drum up support for the regime." (Khomeinism, Ervand Abrahamian) *

This is where Mousavi wants to return, or anybody else who believes that the ideals of the 1979 revolution should be remembered and actualized. A return to 1979 revolutionary ideals is not equivalent to a return to Khomeini's tyranny. It only means the latter to people with mentalities that reduce a revolution and its ideals to a person and take revolutionary people to be as important as a piece of gum stuck to their shoes.

Mousavi and Karoubi of June 2009 are not comparable to Mousavi and Karoubi of February 2011 before their arrests with their wives. Mousavi and Karoubi have been moved forward by the people. As former state-men, they do have serious shortcomings (like being faithful to the "true" Islamic Republic instead of being faithful to social justice and peoples' demands, etc.). However, they helped a lot in the formation of the new phase of political activism and struggle in Iran which is by no means reducible to Mousavi or Karoubi's values and world views. For instance, Karoubi's letter to Rafsanjani in which he explained the reported prison rapes used as torture against political prisoners was a courageous invaluable act for the cause of social justice in Iran.

I personally wish that Iranians, Libyans, Syrian, Bahrainis, etc. could organize themselves through small groups of progressives, labor unionists, women's rights activists, students, etc. and didn't need to rely on the so called support of army, opportunist Islamist groups, former state-men, etc. but we know that oppressive regimes in the region have smashed or weakened independent organizations of people. Consequently, one way or another, all these movements or uprisings have a foot into a semi-official shoe. But such a fact can't be abused to dismiss, to discredit, and to ridicule a nation's struggle and sacrifices for justice and equality.

There isn't such a model as Khomeini's model. In fact, what one might naively call Khomeini's model could not have been shaped if the external conditions (such as the invasion of Iran by Iraq, Operation Eagle Claw, or the traumatizing memory of 1953 coup) didn't help Khomeini to gradually Islamize the 1979 revolution and build a tyranny (Hamid Dabashi, "Iran, The Green Movement and the USA"). Thus it's ridiculous and beyond propaganda to claim that a Khomeini model existed and to suggest that Iran's 1979 revolutionaries were aware of it.

Khomeini on May Day, 1979:

"It is not only today that should be considered Workers' Day. Every day should be honored as Workers' Day. For labor is the source of all things, . . . even of Heaven and Hell.
Ayatollah Khomeini, Ettelac at, 2 May 1979"

In fact, Khomeini was not an Islamic fundamentalist, but a third world populist as Abrahamian has extensively explained in the same book, and Iranians didn't uprise to put harsher restrictions and oppression against themselves as orientalist bloggers and writers would suggest. As an example, Khomeini adopted marxism to his arguments to form his populism because of the power of the leftists, the strong anti-economic exploitation and socialist atmosphere that existed during the 1979 revolution and Khomeini, at least before putting a nail into the coffin of the revolution, rhetorically submitted to the social justice demands of the people, not the other way around.

Khomeini a third world populist:

"Khomeinism, despite its religious dimension, in many ways resembles Latin American populism. This is not surprising, because Pahlavi Iran had much in common with Latin America: an informal rather than formal dependence on the West; an upper class that included a comprador bourgeoisie; an anti-imperialist middle class; an urban working class unorganized by the Left; and a recent influx of rural migrants into urban shantytowns. Khomeinism, like Latin American populism, was mainly a middle-class movement that mobilized the masses with radical sounding rhetoric against the external powers and the entrenched power-holding classes, including the comprador bourgeoisie. In attacking the establishment, however, it was careful to respect private property and avoid concrete proposals that would undermine the petty bourgeoisie. These movements had vague aspirations and no precise programs. Their rhetoric was more important than their programs and blueprints. They used the language of class against the ruling elite, but once the old order was swept aside, they stressed the need for communal solidarity and national unity. They turned out to be more interested in changing cultural and educational institutions than in overthrowing the modes of production and distribution. They were Janus-faced: revolutionary against the old regimes and conservative once the new order was set up. The revolutionary aspect accounted for the initial endorsement from the Left. Religious fundamentalism could never have won this type of support." (Ervand Abrahamian, Khomeinism)

A Poster from May Day, 1980, Iran. The written texts on it
congratulate May Day to workers in different Iran's dialects and
languages such as Persian, Azerbaijani, Kurdish, etc.

Water-fun and Iran's regime

2011-08-07T00:30:00.000-07:00

‌By Mana Neyestani.
The caption in black reads: media should not
exaggerate a number of unimportant killings
and rapes. The caption in red: Water-playing?

A number of youths who have played "water gun" in a Tehran's park, called Water and Fire, on Friday July 29th, have been arrested and forced into a TV confession about the event. (1)

Two important issues about this event, for me, are anti-Iranian commentators who rarely mention the ongoing political struggle of Iranian people for social justice have commented, shared or blogged about this event (wouldn't that make a Daee-Jaan-Napoleon out of you?), and some people mistakenly have assumed that this event is the current phase of the ongoing last two year political struggle in Iran.

But why Iran's government is so inflexible and intolerant toward such trivial public social practices and what are the roots of such deep conflicts between people and Iran's government?--- Iran's government is intimidated by the people's public independent gatherings. All possible independent organization of people have been smashed and criminalized, including worker organizations, women's rights meetings, etc. People's public independent non-political gatherings, like the water-fun party, is also not tolerated. The role of religious police in such an atomized society is to remind people that they have no right over the public space in many trivial social daily acts.

The water-fun or fight gathered about 800 youths in a park and the event was organized through a page on Facebook. This was not the first gathering of this group. They already had several gatherings in the past. Such gatherings are also an exhibition of the irrelevancy of government's ideology even among people who have been born during this regime although it's been forced onto them militarily. It's important to note that this is almost a new form of public fun gatherings: unknown people organizing themselves through Internet and gathering 800 people in a park to have fun. Bodies that previously didn't know about each other came together to celebrate a self-created occasion (as opposed to national occasions like Charshanbe-Souri) and no state force could have sent them back home. In a sense the Green Movement and the solidarity that has been created between unknown people from different social classes has affected middle class people's fun gatherings: post-Green Movement middle class people's fun.

This is a government that came to power through an anti-torture, anti-class exploitation, and anti- political repression revolution. None of those demands, including economic justice, were met. Thus to announce that a new government is in power and political orders have changed, the gender segregation (2) and Islamic dress code and behavior were imposed on the society. Such repressive rules turned to the government's cards to use for its inside fights with various groups (including the more liberal groups within the government) and ordinary citizens, accusing them of being counter-revolutionary and treating them as outsiders and consequently marginalizing them. Now it's haunting the government. On the one hand, the social confrontation between the people and the government, like this water-fun gathering, can politicize people and reminds them daily of the different forms of oppression in the system. On the other hand, the government, calling itself Islamic with a supreme leader advertising himself as the leader of Muslims, can't terminate its repression against people's daily "un-Islamic" social practices. Such termination can be helpful in depoliticizing the society and decreasing the resistance and dissatisfaction, but at the same time it can act as a serious existential threat against the government or at least against its sections like supreme leadership, etc. So yes, public water-fun can be considered as an existential threat by Iran's government against itself, or at least important sections of it that hold it together, and is turned to a political act in that sense.

Photo from the Facebook page of the attendees of the water-party.
People innocently playing with water is forbidden but state
forces can use water against defenseless protesters as weapon
Such a comparison made by the attendees shows how political
such simple parties are in current Iran

Water-fun is not the current phase of the political and economic struggle in Iran although it has been politicized and does have political connotations---it shows the irrelevancy of regime's ideology and its vulnerability to something so benign as public fun, and it exhibits the existing daily conflict between state and people, the people's power and so on. However, such conflicts over people's social behavior disapproved by the state have been ongoing for the last three decades and they have always been political because of the nature of Iran's government. The confrontation of the government with people over "un-Islamic" behavior moves people to underground lives. So people have created their own underground space to express their behavior disapproved by the state. That space can also be invaded by religious police but it's still the common space and world in which many people live in Iran. The damage done to the government by the political acts of the last two years is not comparable to the "un-Islamic" social behavior of people during the last almost three decades. All that said, I don't know how to separate people's econo-political anger from the anger caused by the insults people receive in their daily life confrontations with the sate and its religious police and similar forces. I think they all accumulate and help the critical point to reach. Many Iranians are fed up by being forced to conduct a double life, one a criminalized underground (pretending that the state is unaware of it) and one wearing a state made mask (to pretend that the regime's ideology is the natural result of the society's values, etc.). For instance, a common slogan and sign in the 2009 presidential campaigning by the people was "stop lying" which mostly targeted the lies of Ahmadienjad. But as we moved forward to the formation of the Green Movement, you would feel such a huge anti-lying campaign was beyond Ahmadinejad and was deeply related to the pretensions and lies people are forced to go through in their daily lives.

My other reason to not categorize fun gatherings and other social practices disapproved by the state as a political act on their own, although I agree that they have been politicized by the government and can accumulate dissatisfaction, is that if such acts turn to a cause of their own and get separated from the struggle against the econo-political exploitation, it can eventually depoliticize the society and produce a society that lacks the ability to articulate the existing econo-political oppression. For instance, in the context of the widespread current political oppression, some months ago a few activists started believing that Ahmaidnejad's administration can make huge progress with regards to lifting the social repressive laws, because a Spanish female interviewer's scarf slipped from her head during the interview and Ahmadinejad didn't mind that. Such a view would find progress in "a slippery headscarf tolerated by the state" even in the context of labor unionists, lawyers, journalists, students, political and worker activists getting tortured and imprisoned. I am afraid repressive governments would learn the game and announce: we let you play with water, as long as you don't shout "death to the dictator." Fortunately, I think the current regime in Iran doesn't have such a capability at least in its current configuration.

Now the question to ask is this: why have anti-Iranian commentators, who during the last year or so have only talked about the news of "new Egypt expresses some desire to make relationship with Iran's government", all of a sudden paid attention to the water-fun news? I think the reason is that such a story portrays Iranians as leading normal lives (as opposed to direct confrontation with the state) in which their cause is to play with water and different sexes mingling with each other with the only problem that the government doesn't act in a cool way and disturbs the enjoyment of that normal life. Of course this can very well turn to a crucial cause if it's denied but the point of the matter is that in this particular case the ongoing political struggle and resistances are unmentioned and the image of political struggle is distorted in favor of the issues of the water-fun. What does that give?

For instance, Mansour Faraji's, Ahmad Zeyadabi's, and Siavash Eslami's recent stories of resistance and struggle are not covered in such websites, blogs, etc. Why not?

(1) Despite the TV confession show and the arrest of partipants of Tehran's water-fun, just two days ago another similar gathering was organized in Bandar-Abbas. Again, 30 youths were arrested there.

(2) Some Iranian feminists believe that the gender segregation and mandatory hijab helped women to occupy more public space in post-revolution Iran. This can partly explain the reason for the substantial growth of female presence in public life. However, another reason is the participation of women in 1979 revolution. Iran's state could not send back those revolutionary women home, although it took it three years to impose mandatory hijab and some other restrictive laws on women. However, today's universities with 60% female is a result of the mothers of those female students participating in 1979 revolution. However, some cases in Iran, like the female taxi services, female schools preferring female teachers, etc., are a result of gender segration that benefit female laborers and creates jobs for women, of couse in the context of sexist laws and so on.

Siavash Eslami

2011-08-06T23:35:00.000-07:00

Siavash Eslami, a teacher and union activist, from Sari has been lashed 37 times:

"Siavash Eslami, a board member of Teachers Union in Sari, received 37 lashes according to a verdict handed down by the Appeals Court. According to a report by Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), Siavash Eslami is a union activist who has been charged with acting against national security through participating in the events after 2009 presidential elections. He was initially sentenced to 74 lashes, but the Appeals Court later reduced this verdict to 37 lashes. Siavash Eslami was flagged on Sunday, July 31, 2011, one day before the month of Ramadan began. It has been reported that Siavash Eslami was fasting when taken to Sari Enforcement Bureau to be flogged. Siavash Eslami has been a teacher for 24 years and holds a master’s degree in political science. He has been teaching Islamic Studies in various high schools in Sari, the capital of Mazandaran Province." (Link)

Ahmad Zeydabadi's return to prison

2011-08-06T18:12:00.000-07:00

"Ahmad Zeidabadi, journalist, political analyst, the secretary general of Tahkim Vahdat (student alumni organization), and member of the board of directors of the Association of Iranian journalists, returned to Rajai Shahr ‘Gohardasht’ prison on Saturday by the orders of the Iranian Judiciary. Ahmad Zeidabadi had been released from prison on a two-day furlough after enduring 780 days behind bars." (link)

Here in this photo, Ahmad Zeydabadi is saying goodbye to his wife, Mahdieh Mohammadi, before returning to prison after a two day furlough.

By Mana Neyestani. The title: For Ahmad Zeydabadi

Mansour Faraji

2011-08-06T18:05:00.000-07:00

Mansour Faraji has been lashed 30 times on 27th of July. Here are the photos of his injured body.

Mansour Faraji had been arrested on September 9, 2007 and had been released on a $100,000 bail after 80 days of detention. According to the Committee of Human Rights Reporters, the political activists of the Iran Democratic Party was sentenced to 2 years of suspended imprisonment for acting against national security and one year of suspended imprisonment served in 5 years and a fine for anti-regime propaganda through publishing statements, founding Iran Democratic Party and membership in the party. He was also sentenced to 30 lashes and fined $300 for leaving the country illegally, using forged documents and owning satellite equipment. (Link)

A critique of "Why no Iranian Spring?"

2011-08-02T21:49:00.000-07:00

This CNN piece that discusses why we do not have an Iranian spring is important to critique. I will do my share here. I have to explain about reformists, a term I am going to use a lot in this post. I will put my explanation in postscript (1)

CNN: "1. Iranians rose up in 2009, In the summer of 2009, millions of Iranians rose up to protest the contested election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. To this day, thousands of protesters and activists remain imprisoned. "

The last day that Iranian protesters were out in the streets of many cities in Iran and conducted a successful demonstration was 25th of Bahman in Iranian calendar or 14th of February, 2011. It's inaccurate to talk about 2009 demonstrations without mentioning their trajectory all the way to February 2011 with the protesters' dominated slogan of "Mubarak, Ben Ali, it's the turn of Seyed Ali (the supreme leader)."

CNN:"2. Fear of revolutions, Iranians experienced the sudden change of revolution 32 years ago. So they approach any sudden change with caution. They do not want another revolution… Iranians have come to this conclusion that radical change might lead to unintended and irreversible consequences,” said Omid Memarian, an Iranian blogger who was arrested in Tehran in 2004 ."

If the case is as the CNN piece suggests, then I was wondering what those protesters who shouted "Mubarak, Ben Ali, it's the turn of Seyed Ali" were doing in the streets on February 2011, just some months ago. I strongly doubt that they were just kidding with the supreme leader, and I think they were looking for a real change.

To put it simply, the ones scared of a revolution are reformist elites and analysts but not the majority of the people in the streets who have heroically endangered their lives and freedom, some of whom are still in prisons. The camp of the protesters and the camp of the reformists faithful to the essence of the regime are two different categories. It's inaccurate and bizarre to put all different groups into one big sack and offer a narration based on the more powerful and elites' agenda.

It's true that Iranians have experienced two costly revolutions during the last century (Constitutional Revolution (1905-1907) and 1979 Revolution), and nevertheless their struggle for their basic rights are still ongoing. But the result is not, as the CNN piece suggests, that they do not want another revolution, the result has been that they are cautious toward groups, individuals and discourses who have a hegemonic power over their uprisings. If during the 1979 Revolution, many different groups for different reasons gathered over a demand of the Shah to leave, now different groups and individuals often get tested to see if they are genuinely in favor of social justice and have the guts and are independent enough to offer a truthful narration of the last 32 years of history. Reformists who have offered a mild critique of the first post-revolution decade have been vastly criticized and mocked by activists, journalists, writers, bloggers, etc. It's fair to claim that the conditions of the following days after a costly change have become for many Iranians more important than merely the change itself. They are not as optimistic and trusting toward opposition groups and institutions as many other nations who have not been traumatized by the unrealized dreams of a recent stolen revolution might be. One of the main factors that has acted as cold water on the movement is in fact the faithfulness of many reformist politicians to the essence of the regime instead of a genuine and meaningful change and justice. (2)

Another point is that Iran's regime is one of the most oppressive regimes in the region. It has the most numbers of the security forces and tools. Some commentators (+, +) consider Iran's oppressive apparatuses as the regime's popular base and because it has one of the biggest oppressive apparatuses in the region, they claim the regime to be one of the most popular ones in the region. It's simply ridiculous. Iran's regime has faced the most opposition and dissatisfaction among all the governments in the region and has known all the way its lack of legitimacy. That's exactly why it has one of the most comprehensive tools to confront people's power and wills. That's also why that Iran's political sphere is one of the least organized and most destroyed in the region. Since the regime has come to power through a revolution, the unrealized demands of that revolution (a stop to imprisonment of political activists and torture, economic justice, etc.) immediately built up a strong basis against the regime. The reformist ideology has tried its best to make people to forget their dreams in the name of pragmatism and instead focus on elections to bring them at office. The reformist ideology is obsessed with what it calls pragmatism and depoliticization of politics and economy. As a result, it took people a while to remember that they can dream beyond elections. The Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions also helped this process. However, reformist analysts have tried to distort the stories of Egypt and Tunisia to stop the dreaming of the people.

CCN:"7. The Supreme Leader, During the protests of 2009, calls for a revolution were noticeably absent. Instead, slogans ranged from “Ahmadi, bye bye!” to “Where’s my Vote?” This subtlety is important to note. Opposition leaders in Iran have called for reforms mostly because they decided from the start that they were not going to get rid of the Iranian Constitution. This, according to Ganji, is problematic and created a paradox for them. Since the opposition wants to make changes within the framework of the constitution, they can’t get rid of the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. So they picked their fight with Ahmadinejad. The opposition hoped that Khamenei would side with them, but when he said questioning the election results was a crime, they became trapped within their own framework."

"Ahmadi, bye bye" was a slogan before the 2009 election and it was not shouted even once after the election. I would like to ask CNN to provide a link to a video of post-election protests in Iran in which people shout "Ahmadi, bye bye," otherwise CNN would owe an apology to Iranian protesters for misrepresenting their cause and struggle. It's a pure fabrication to claim that people's slogans were focused on Ahmadinejad. They were before the election, not after. The post-2009 election slogans had, at least, two phases. In the first phase, they were focused on the election itself such as "where is my vote?," "I asked where my vote is, and they killed my brother" and so on. The second phase, the slogans have mostly targeted Khamenei such as "the one who claims to be just, he lies, he is a murderer," "we didn't sacrifice our comrades' lives to submit and appreciate the murderous supreme leader," "Mubarak, Ben Ali, it's the turn of Seyed Ali (Khamenei)," "down with the dictator" the dictator is a nickname for Khamenei, and not Ahmadinejad. As one can observe, the reformist analysts distort the image to offer their own favorite narration. However, Ganji is partially right, many reformist politicians who are still pro- supreme leader institution in Iran's power structure and know no other way to politically act other than voting ballots, to avoid confronting with the whole establishment, they target Ahmadinejad and try to pretend that he and his circle such as Mashaei have orchestrated the whole electoral coup by themselves and Khamenei and the rest of the establishment are innocent. It's an unforgivable mistake, however, to generalize this deadlock to all the people in the movement or even all the reformists.

5. Religious propaganda, “The Iranian government has a giant propaganda machine that is capable of framing a message and making it dominant for a large portion of the population,” said Memarian in an e-mail to CNN. He believes that the opposition and the West have underestimated the power of Iranian propaganda.

This claim is also unfounded and sounds to me like a big cliche that Western media finds easy to understand about Muslim countries and so likes to hear. Iran's regime has banked more on populism than Islam for legitimacy and propaganda than one would believe. Islam has been abused as a tool for oppression such as harassing people for "unIslamic" behavior and establishing anti-women restrictive laws.The current administration of Ahmadinejad has in fact tried to use a populist nationalism and a unfriendly attitude toward clergy to get support from the people. It hasn't been successful because of the conditions of the administration after June 2009. The ongoing struggle in Iran is not religious vs. secular. In fact many religious people are active in it. Iran's regime has lost its ability to make propaganda. The slogans of anti-imperialism, social justice, pro-poor populism have all lost legitimacy. The legitimacy of Iran's regime came from the claims of politico-economic justice. None of which have been met and recently the anti-worker and neo-liberal policies on top of widespread political repression have disabled Iran's government to make propaganda so they have held on to pure violent oppressive tools. If they could make propaganda, religious or non-religious, they would not have to arrest former reformist politicians (some of whom are pretty religious), student activists (religious or non-religious), and actresses and directors.

CNN:"3. Western-backed dictators are easier to topple, “Iran was more like 1989 China than 2011 Egypt or Tunisia,” said Farideh Farhi, a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center. “The regime was able to maintain its unified will to defend itself against what it considered to be an existential threat.” She along with Mr. Ganji believe that Iran’s decades of confrontations with the West, particularly the United States, made it difficult for protesters to gain the same amount of leverage and pressure in Iran as they did elsewhere."

This claim comes mostly from a belief that Western powers, after seeing the determination of Egyptian protesters, abruptly changed lanes and some implicitly and some explicitly asked for Mubarak to leave. In fact, such analysts think that the Egyptian Army was responsible for Mubarak's leave and the Army was asked by the US to conduct Mubarak's leave as soon as possible before people topple the whole establishment and a real revolution actualizes. Thus they think a Western puppet can be removed more easily. I can't evaluate this analysis as I don't know enough about Egypt. But the question such analysts have to answer is this: is Iran's government really independent? Independent from whom?

The Iranian regime's political policies have been US-oriented right after the Hostage Crisis. Both domestic and international policies of Iran's government have been US based albeit in an antagonistic one (or occasionally friendly but kept as a secret). If US has been sending money to countries like Egypt, Iranians have suffered from economic sanctions and threats of war and antagonistic relations of their government with the US. One can count the number of passengers who have been killed in airplane crashes during the last 30 years, resulting from the economic sanctions, etc. Iran's government has needed this antagonism and the notion of enemy to obscure its economic failures, corruption, and domestic political oppression. Iran's government is not independent from the US government. It has a negative relation with the US and has used this anti-US card to convince people, like this CNN piece, that it's independent.

On the other hand, Iran's regime hasn't had a friendly relations with the US, but it has managed to submit politically or economically to countries like Russia, China, Germany, France, etc. Iran's bazaar has been left for China to invade completely. Small business owners no longer exist. Farmers are devastated. Workers are unemployed or forced into temporary labor. Iran's government has sacrificed the national politico-economic interests for its political games. Thus it's shallow to assume that Iran's government is "independent". It's baseless to assume that an oil-based country integrated into global economy is independent. I doubt that in the current global economic system we can anymore talk about independence. We can talk about countries who have been fighting to not get exploited in this system but independence doesn't mean much in the current situation.

So, what are the reasons for the streets of Iran being weaker than what it should be?

The ongoing struggle in Iran is less active in the streets as the CNN piece also discusses. The last time a successful demonstration took place was about 5 months ago. Many reformist politicians and analysts who dismiss the street protests and the slogans in the streets (as too radical, in the minority and consequently negligible), still consider the current struggle in Iran stagnant because of the current weakening of the streets. The contradiction is that streets are considered negligible and are not reflected in the official statements and reformist analysis but when streets are not hosting protests of the ordinary people then the movement is considered to be stagnating. This contradiction is a major answer to why streets of Iran have become less frontline to people's struggle for justice. Protesters have made this struggle by their sacrifices and have used their only medium of slogans and signs to articulate their desires and wills but they become irrelevant when it comes to reformist narrations of the movement and official statements and elitists' demands as opposed to people's demands. Protesters' presence in the streets do not continue into the reformists' media and analyses. On top of that, other opposition groups and independent leftists and progressives are very dispersed and do not have enough resources to compete with the reformist narrations of this ongoing struggle. Leftist and progressive activists have acted pretty weakly in making new organizations and groups partly because of the oppression in Iran and also the lack of resources and connections. Reformists were part of the government up to the 2009 election, and their political activities were legal in Iran (although many got imprisoned even before the June 2009 election) and some groups of them enjoyed government resources and had their own media. Thus they are much more connected and organized than any other group. To help the current movement going forward, the first actions that have to be taken, in my opinion, are to shine light on reformist propaganda (like de-propagandizing 1979 revolution, Iran's streets of the last two years, and so on) and to organize progressive and leftist groups who are closer to the streets than reformist elites.

P.S. 1: After the 2009 election, we have different kinds of reformists. To make it simple, reformists are divided to two big groups, those who no longer believe in supreme leadership institution (I call them B for believers) and those who still do believe in it (I call them N for nonbelievers). Among the group of B are those who think the current issues can be solved through apologizing to supreme leader or writing him letters (like Khatami, the former president) and those who think the institution of supreme leadership can be fair, but the current one isn't just. Thus their problem isn't with supreme leadership but with the current institution. However, among this latter group are those who claim that there are no charismatic leaders like Khomeini in the current establishment so supreme leadership is no longer possible. Based on this, we have these groups of reformists:

1)Those who are against the presence of the people in the streets and think a "national reconciliation" (meaning between reformists and supreme leader's camp) is required and the issues can be solved through election and negotiations of the elites. (This group can be categorized as B and they have no problem with the supreme leadership of Khamenei)

2)This group is in favor of street protests as long as the group can control them and keep them under the umbrella of the regime and its constitution. The group supports the street protests but after each one condemns the "radical" slogans and makes sure to announce that the demands of the movement are the absolute enforcement of the regime's constitution. (This group can also be categorized as B. They take issues with the current supreme leader but they are not against the supreme leadership in general as they support the enforcement of the constitution. Some of them actually romanticize Khomeini and the first decade of post-revolution. Some of them, however, believe that the constitution can be reformed and believe no charismatic leader exists in current Iran so we can no longer have a supreme leader).

3) This group supports the street protests and have moved forward with the people. The activists and politicians in favor of Ayatollah Karoubi, like Mojtaba Vahedi, fall into this category. Isa Saharkhiz is also another example. This group has passed over the notion of supreme leadership. They seek real justice and change. When I use the term reformists, I don't mean this group.

The line between group 2 and 3 is somewhat fragile and based on the conditions of the streets, some activists move from group 2 to 3. I have written about this in Persian more comprehensively here.

P.S. 2: We have to consider that a reformist propaganda has been as follows: "Iranian people do not want another revolution, and they prefer for us to negotiate and make the possible changes from above," which is completely bogus and unprincipled. If people wanted the changes to happen from above, they would not endanger their lives to pour into the streets and shout their dreams in forms of slogans, signs, etc. Such slogans were mostly condemned by reformist websites as being too radical.

Reformists have a simple formula for making change in Iran: people vote, bring them to office and then they negotiate with hardcores' institutions of power and start a tug of endless war within power which we all witnessed during the 8 year presidency of Khatami. I have written about this in Persian here.

Before the 2009 election, another chance was given to reformists. Out of fear of Ahmadinejad-Mashaei's populism, his administration's destruction of economy and a possible war against Iran by the US or Israel or both, many activists disappointed at Khatami and disillusioned by the idea of reform, they still organized and worked hard for a reformist candidate, Mousavi or Karoubi, to come to power in order to make the daily life more bearable and create better conditions for political activism. Meanwhile, apparently other camps of the power, supreme leader, IRG, Ahmadienjad-Mashaei, were all gathered to conduct a coup against the reformists to remove them from power. They didn't only make up numbers for the election, they arrested reformist politicians from before the announcement of the election's results. Mousavi has been one of the most pro-social justice politicians in the regime. He's against privatization and deregulations and is pro free social services. However, Ahmadinejad, the king of neo-liberalism in the regime, tried his best to connect Mousavi to Rafsanjani. This was demonstrated in his presidential debate with Mousavi. This propaganda was repeated by many people such as the Press TV propagandist George Galloway and other naive commentators. This gesture of Ahmadinejad's attacking Rafsanjani and connecting him to Mousavi in the debates was an alarm that a considerable section of the regime are in danger, however, no one could be sure how serious it can become.

In response to the planned coup against reformists and the stolen election, many people poured into the streets and shouted slogans in favor of Mousavi and Karoubi and asked for their votes. The regime in response started killing people, tear gassing, batoning, and imprisoning and torturing thousands of defenseless protesters. It took only a few weeks for people to start questioning the legitimacy of the whole establishment and all the slogans which were previously focused on Ahmadinejad were then changed their focus to the supreme leadership. As a famous saying of the regime goes: "the supreme leadership is the foundation of the regime." So people's slogans targeted the whole establishment by targeting the supreme leader. This is where reformist thinkers and politicians censor and stop at this slogan: "where is my vote" and do not bring up other slogans created as the movement progressed.

The street demonstrations which started from June 2009 were officially the end of the reformism in Iran. Reform in Iran was supposed to be voting by the people and endless negotiations by the reformist politicians at the office. Street protests, people taking control over their political lives and choosing their line of struggle through their small media of slogans, citizen videos, signs, blog-posts, etc. instead of waiting for reformists to conduct their useless negotiations was officially the end of the reformism in Iran. Plus the voting ballots have been brutally taken away from reformists so they lost their political medium, although in unprincipled attempts, they seem to be trying to gain it back now. However, even if they get back to power and run for elections, they would not enjoy support from people like they used to before June 2009. All that said, there was a contradictory factor here. Protesters announced their desire to live supreme leader-less which basically means a revolution in current Iran, but reformists and their discourses (which actually no longer work) were forced into the movement as a result of the coup which originally caused the street demonstrations. In fact, reformists were the most organized group with the most connections inside the country among all other opposition groups. Let's not forget that the reformist groups were part of the power in Iran all the way before the 2009 coup took place against them. Thus they had more connections and resources and tools for hegemonizing themselves and their narrations than protesters themselves and other opposition groups of whom some have been exiled for a long time. Thus a revolution (or a supreme leader-less and a just republic Iran) has been a dream of the current movement in Iran expressed in slogans and other forms, and this dream started at some point fairly soon after the formation of the movement, but it has not been articulated in official demands and offered narrations of the movement written mostly by reformist groups. One would feel suffocated because protesters' voices don't reach analysts and official letters, statements, and hegemonic narrations offered of the movement.

Ignorant dismissal vs. sentimentality and romanticization

2011-07-31T19:34:00.000-07:00

The current movement in Iran has been suffering among other issues from illiteracy of junky and racist analyses and political opportunism of reformist politicians, and the movement in Egypt from overly romanticization and sloganish nationalism. The movement in Iran has been, in a racist manner, ridiculed, demonized and internally has been subjected to reformists' opportunism, and the movement in Egypt, at least for a while, lost its connection to its realities. Such realities, such as the role of army and so on, got lost among the sentimental shouts and overly-romantic celebrations.

After the formation of North African and Middle Eastern uprisings, the double standards of anti-Iranian commentators became crystal clear so they now try to articulate their propaganda in more sneaky ways or have gone silent completely. Nevertheless, the movement in Iran, in its struggle for social justice, still has more work to overcome the reformists' opportunism (called pragmatism).

Egyptian people are heroically continuing their struggle to overcome the current power configuration while many of those commentators previously busy emptying Egyptian struggle from meaning by their overly-nationalistic or excessively romantic and poetic narrations barely acknowledge the current ongoing struggle. More power to Egyptian revolutionaries.

P.S. : Mr. Tariq Ali, who always feels the urge to convince his readers that he himself and his family have been secular and atheist, naively dismissed the movement in Iran (which showed he is so naive with regards to the events in Iran, at minute 30:50 in this video, but of course that didn't prevent him from commenting) and now has composed a sentimental poem for the Egyptien struggle. I somehow see little difference between romanticizing a movement, struggle, or revolution and dismissing it.

International progressives and Press TV

2011-07-31T01:33:00.000-07:00

I feel so disappointed when international progressives accept Press TV's invitation for interviews and such (like this interview). Iran's leftist student activists and worker activists, such as Abed Tavancheh, Arsalan Sadeghi and Reza Shahabi, whose econo-political views are similar to those Press TV's international progressive guests, are either imprisoned, silenced, banned from education or exiled. Why are international progressives so numb when it comes to their comrades in Iran? Do they really think Iran's government is anti-imperialist and Ahmadinejad is an anti-neoliberalism socialist? I strongly doubt that anyone who follows the news can be ignorant to this extent. So is it a matter of fashion and it's not fashionable to back up struggling progressives, workers, and revolutionaries in Iran?

Progressives' critique of US politico-economic policies and capitalist-democracy are needed for Iranian audiences but it matters to not let such criticism be abused by the propaganda machine of the oppressive government that worships the advice of World Bank and imprisons political and worker activists.

This case is somehow similar to a hypothetical situation in which Iranian progressives accept interviews with propaganda media of Israeli government to voice their criticism of Iran's government. The propaganda machine of the Israeli government needs criticism of Iran's government, obviously, not because it cares about social justice for Iran's citizens but, to put it simply, for its own warmongering and obscuration of criminal acts against Palestinian people. The same way, Iran's government needs the criticism against US government's politico-economic policies, obviously, not because it's against political corruption but to create an anti-capitalism and imperialism mask for itself and announce to Iran's pro-democracy and political justice people that democracy is a "subordination to unelected dictatorship of money, so pro-democracy Iranian activists should be happy with the brutal neoliberal supreme leadership system." Of course such ridiculous anti- capitalism masks have no customer or believer inside Iran, but apparently it manages to confuse the heck out of a good number of people outside.

My Tehran For Sale

2011-07-23T01:09:00.000-07:00

Marzieh Vafamehr, My Tehran For Sale

Marzieh Vafamehr, an actress and a director, has been arrested from a month ago and is held in Qarchak prison in Varamin where activists like Shabnam Madadzadeh are also held. Marzieh Vafamehr is arrested for playing in the movie "My Tehran For Sale" directed by Granaz Mousavi.

My Tehran For Sale, was made during 2008 and the team had permission for videography from Iran's cultural ministry. Granaz Mousavi, the director of the movie, is a poet and a movie director and lives in Australia. She said in one of her interviews that she always wanted to make a movie with her good friend, Marzieh Vafamehr, a movie that tells the story of their generation.The movie, My Tehran For Sale, is one of the most genuine Iranian movies I have ever seen. It's not made to look exotic, neither it has escaped to an obsolete story or landscape to avoid the gaze of the government and possible future troubles. Instead it happens under the skin of the city. The dialogues, songs, novels, poems, etc. in the movie are all from present time of Iran. It's not a movie nostalgic for some unknown past, nor is one of those disconnected from space and time.

In the movie, Marzieh Vafamher is called Marzieh and she is a fashion designer and acts in underground plays. Marzieh has left her family and lives alone. Her parents don't want her back even for a short visit as they are afraid that she might have bad influence on their younger daughters and encourage them to become rebellious like herself.

Marzieh has met a young man, Saman, in a party. He lives in Australia and is visiting Iran. They move in together and make plans for Marzieh to immigrate to Australia and live there together, but it doesn't work for them.

Marzieh passes the border illegally while hidden in a truck. She finally makes it to Australia but she is held in an immigration detention center. The immigration officer doubts the authenticity of her case. She's told she can go back to Iran or stay longer for her case to get decided. She responds back: do I have to decide now?

Marzieh is rejected by her family for her social identity. She separates from them to "freely" live her life, however, she is confined within the society's authoritarian rules and restrictive norms that force her to live underground. She is a fighter, so she has learned the unwritten rules to make the most out of that underground life (like most people who live in such societies). She goes to parties, concerts, and gatherings that she likes and she enjoys a deep friendship with a friend who has been arrested and lashed already two times for participating in "illegal" parties but keeps inviting Marzieh to more parties and more underground concerts. Such parties sometimes are brutally invaded by religious police and the punishment is either "a bribe or lashing," as Marzieh explains to her boyfriend.

Marzie's acting practices happen in a house that she calls Genie's Castle. Those plays were her escape to magic land of fantasy from the ruthless realities of her life. Not only her favorite roles in her real life are criminalized by her family, authorities, etc. but the roles she likes to play in the unreal world of theatre are also forbidden and at the end even impossible after one of the team members is arrested. Her lover, like her family, abandons her for her physical condition. Her body comes between her and her lover, her mentalities or social identity between her and her family, and the government between her and her fantasy world (or her playing roles).

Austrialia is a dreamland for Marzieh but it disintegrates for her by the end of the movie. "Ausralia is very cool, full of beaches and oceans, green grass, light, colorful clothes, Australia is like paradise, a paradise made of colored papers," Saman tells Marzieh. She moves to Australia to escape the space within which her social life and her dreams are illegalized and forbidden. However, she gets confined in an Australian detention center and has to explain to an immigration officer why her case isn't a fake one. There in the immigration detention center she is confined in her new space because of her origins and all her being is reduced to the previous space from which she uprooted herself, escaped and "put it on sale". Her fantasy world of plays was previously forbidden and repressed by Iran's authorities, now it comes back to her as she explains to the immigration officer, "In my head, I hear all the characters that were never allowed on stage, the Arab girl in Unsweetened Tea, the half finished film which was seized." She is in her disintegrated dreamland, Australia, confined in a detention center having nightmares about the characters of her fantasy world that she never took to stage, the dreams which never got actualized. However, she doesn't give up, when the officer tells her that she can go back to Iran, she asks if she has the time to think and decide, we don't know whether she goes back or stays in the detention center, however we do know that she hasn't given up and is even considering going back to the place from which she was badly rejected but knew its unwritten rules to fight and conduct an underground life.

The only downside of the movie for me was the fact that a girl like Marzieh, rejected by her family and graduated from college recently, can hardly rent a place all by herself in current Iran and conduct a life like Marzieh does. Normally, a girl in Marzieh's conditions, abandoned by her family and not possessing a well-off job, would have to deal with enormous financial hardship. I can't associate a particular social class with many of Mazieh's experiences. Any Iranian college or graduate student, from any social class, might experience some aspects of Marzieh's life. However, I think the director has consciously focused on not bringing the economic component into her story as it would make it even more complex and complicated or maybe it was unnecessary to her. The Circle by Jafar Panahi is focused on escapee girls who are less educated. These two movies together complement each other and in some aspects they are similar to each other.

Upon seeing "My Tehran for Sale," Mazieh Vafamehr immediately became one of my favorite actresses. She is so likable and her performance is fantastic. There must be something about her that makes her audience feel so close to her. I am deeply saddened by her arrest. To me Marzieh Vafamehr's arrest is the real life continuation of her character in the movie. In the movie she wasn't allowed to act her favorite roles in plays in Iran, she escaped to Australia to free her real and fantasy world but got confined in an immigration detention center, as if in continuation of the movie, she apparently came back to Iran from Australia in her real life and became imprisoned for her role in her fantasy world.

This poem by Granaz Mousavi, the director, that she herself recited in the movie suits Marzieh Vafamehr's current situation: "search my bag, what's the point?, my sigh that has forever heard "halt" lies in hiding in the bottom of my pocket, let me go, you know that I will sleep with raspberry bush and not regret, why always set your sights on the woman who sponges up her broken pieces and pins her heart to her sleeve, there is nothing in my baggage except innocent locks of hair, let me go"

P.S. : One of the documentaries made by Marzieh Vafamehr is about Shahrnoosh Parsipour. Shahrnoosh Parsipour is the writer of the novel "Women without Men" which was adopted into a movie by Shirin Neshat. The movie is in three parts: 1, 2 and 3. Marzieh is married to a prominent movie director, Naser Taghvaei and Sharnoosh Parsipour is actually the ex-wife of Naser Taghvaei.

Marzieh Vafamehr with her husband, Naser Taghvaei

An Islamist Revolution?

2011-07-21T12:54:00.000-07:00

Iranian women, 1979 Revolution

Now Angry Arab, the Arab-nationalist blogger, calls the 1979 Revolution the Islamist Revolution (link). Soon, the 1979 Revolution will be called the Al-Qaeda's revolution in Iran to make the "secular civilized men" happy. This method is to distort and demonize the 1979 Revolution in Iran in order to make a contrast and beautify the recent uprisings in North African and Middle Eastern countries. My suggestion to all propagandists whose recent job is to demonize the 1979 Revolution is to take a 101 Iran's history for making more sophisticated propaganda instead of these outrageously boring and nonsensical ones.

Angry Arab:"I and my leftist comrades in the late 70s (at high school and later at AUB) were supportive of the revolution against the Shah but despised Khumayni (sic) and warned against any alliance with his lousy Islamist movement and we criticized those leftists (like Adonis and Anouar Abdul-Malek and Samir Amin) who supported the Islamist Revolution in Iran."

Did Khomeini have an Islamist Movement? Really? Could you, dear Angry Arab, kindly elaborate on that Islamist movement and introduce it? And the leftists who warned against the "Islamist movement of Khumayni(sic)" were Angry Arab himself and some of his comrades, meaning there was no leftists inside Iran who warned against (late) Khomeini or supported him. No one including Khomeini himself knew of the path that the 1979 revolution was going to take. Khomeini, in fact, was an advocate of political freedom, econo-political independence, social justice, equality and even freedom of choice for women before monopolizing power which didn't happen naturally but through several different stages and widespread political oppression.

Juts a little bit of history:

Asef Bayat: Iran experienced an "Islamic revolution" without developing a pervasive "Islamist movement" - one that could "socialise", and connect the expectations of the people to the visions of the Islamist leadership. In the absence of such an Islamist movement, "Islamisation" was then inaugurated primarily after the revolution: by the Islamic state, from above, and often through coercion and compulsion. In consequence, from the very first days of the Islamic Republic the process provoked dissent. Today's crisis is the legacy of that disjuncture over the very meaning of the revolution... In the weeks and days that crystallised into the collapse of the Shah's regime on 11 February 1979, the cry of millions of Iranians marching in city streets and filling every public square created a deafening echo: Estiqlal, Azadi, Jomhuri-ye Eslami! ("Independence, Freedom, Islamic Republic!"). This pivotal yet broad demand - emblazoned on almost every banner, tract, and placard - became virtually the identity-marker of the Iranian revolution: an aspiration that was shared by and united the protestors and the emerging revolutionary leadership. Yet it did not take long before these respective parties began to articulate more precisely what they meant by these terms, and what they understood by the revolution. This process set the stage for protracted discontent on one side, and suppression on the other. For many Iranians in the late 1970s, the revolution was certainly a nationalist, anti-imperialist movement in which estiqlal (independence) was a key goal. The term reflected the sentiment of the time when most people felt that theirs was a "dependent" nation -dependent on the "west", and above all America. (link)

Also, this article by Asef Bayat (Democracy and the Muslim world: the “post-Islamist” turn) is helpful.

Hamid Dabashi in "Iran: A People Interrupted" explains extensively that the 1979 revolution was not Islamic but rather it was brutally and militantly Islamized in several different stages such as the Hostage Crisis, Iran's Cultural Revolution, the coup against Banisadr, Iran-Iraq war, etc. :

Hamid Dabashi: "The revolution did happen, the monarchy did collapse, and an Islamic republic ultimately succeed it. The more pertinent question is, when do we start the political narrative that will give a coherent account of how it all came about? If we take the 1953 CIA-sponsored coup as our point of departure, the revolution will be read in essentially nationalist terms. If we start with the 1963 uprising led by Ayatollah Khomeini, the revolution will inevitably assume a Shi'i (Islamic) insurrectionary disposition. If we begin with Siahkal uprising of 1971, then the revolution will have a markedly Marxist character. (In my account I will treat these departure points together.) What is certain is that the systematic and brutal Islamization of the revolution after the hostage crisi (1979-80) cannot be read backward in order to give the course of the revolutionary momentum an entirely Islamic disposition. This was a national liberation movement that arose from a multiplicity of economic, social, and ideological sources and aspirations. One particularly powerful and merciless Islamist faction ultimately managed (shrewdly and brutally) to outmaneuver all other factions, hijack the revolution, and call it "Islamic." (page 146, Iran: a people interrupted)

P.S. : You can read more about the Angry Arab's propaganda against the oppressed people in Iran here and here.

Palestinians demonstrating in Bilin, June 6, 2011

2011-06-17T13:32:00.000-07:00

Rape and torture: two principal means of Iran's state to hold on to its power

2011-06-11T09:58:00.000-07:00

Darius Rejali says "everyone forgets that the Iranian revolution of 1978-1979 was the revolution against torture. When the Shah criticized Khomayni as a blackrobed Islamic medieval throwback, Khomayni replied, look who is talking, the man who tortures. This was powerful rhetoric for recruiting people, then as it is now. People joined the revolutionary opposition because of the Shah’s brutality, and they remembered who installed him. " (You can read more here)

In the video below, a young Iranian female, arrested after the June 2009 election, explains her torture and rape in the detention centers. It's heart-wrenching, I couldn't stand finishing it. You can read more about it here.

Iranian Woman's Testimony of Rape and Torture from Human Rights in Iran on Vimeo.

Guest post: Hashem Khastar, an imprisoned teacher unionist

2011-06-10T11:38:00.000-07:00

Hashem Khastar,
an imprisoned teacher unionist

This piece was originally posted here.

"Hashem Khastar, leader of the Mashad Teachers Union and prisoner at Mashad’s Vakilabad Prison, was transferred to the ward for murder and drug trafficking convicts after publishing a letter exposing the inhumane conditions and secret executions at Vakilabad. In an interview with the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, Sedigheh Maleki, Khastar’s wife, expressed concern about his conditions. “Two days after Mr. Khastar was transferred from the ward of prisoners of conscience to Ward 5 which is where murderers and other hardened criminals are kept, I went to the Revolutionary Court to find out the reason for his transfer. One of the officials told me that because he wrote letters about the conditions at Vakilabad Prison, he was transferred to another ward so that he can directly experience the other things that happen in this prison. He told me to leave and that they would transfer Mr. Khastar back to the ward of prisoners of conscience, which has not happened so far.”

Hashem Khastar, a former teacher at the Agriculture Technical High School, is an agricultural engineer and Head of the Mashad Teachers Union. He was arrested on 16 September 2009 while taking a walk in a park and was transferred to Vakilabad. Khastar was sentenced to six years in prison. An appeals court later reduced the prison sentence of the lower court to two years. He has written three letters to Head of the Judiciary regarding the dire and inhumane conditions and secret executions at Vakilabad Prison.
“Mr. Khastar says Ward 5 is very crowded and that he sleeps on the floor. Sixty inmates are kept in a room with 15 beds; so 15 people sleep on beds, eight people sleep on the floor, and the rest sleep in the hallways. With this many inmates, the ward is always noisy and its environment is filthy and full of smoke. There is always a line for its bathroom and showers. What can I say?! If you have heard a description of hell, you could use it for Mashad’s Vakilabad Prison,” said Maleki.

“When the ward is so crowded, there are scuffles for sure. He knows we are very worried for him, so he doesn’t say anything and always just says ‘don’t worry, everything is O.K.’ But someone who was previously imprisoned in that ward told us that the ward is so crowded that prisoners continually step on each other’s feet, or sometimes someone just gets up and throws his drinking glass across the room and a lot of fights break out. Many inmates in that ward are either on death row or have life sentences, therefore they are stressed out and I don’t know if, God forbid, something should happen to my husband, how the authorities would be accountable,” continued Maleki.

"I worry for his health. He is seriously weak. Before he went to prison he weighed 87 kilograms, but he now weighs about 60. Though he was healthy before he went to prison, he is sick now. He has high blood pressure. During our visits, when I ask about his health he says that he has not yet recovered since his operation. Despite our requests after his surgery, he has not been given one day of furlough"."

You can read more about Hashem Khastar here.

The situation in Iran (part three): Ezatollah Sahabi

2011-06-04T13:42:00.002-07:00

Ezatollah Sahabi, Zahra Sahabi,

and their daughter Haleh Sahabi

I have several memories of Ezattollah Sahabi. I met him first at the school during the Khatami's first presidency when Sahabi came to give a talk with Habibollah Peyman. A few years later, I met him at Ahmad Abad at the house of Mosadegh. We were several hundreds of people at that gathering. It was 29 Esfand in Iranian calendar and the anniversary of nationalization of oil. I remember that Sahabi was walking between two men. A group of young people in front of me who saw him went towards him but he escaped and left the crowd very fast. I met Sahabi the next time again, during the second term of Khatami's presidency, at Fakhrabad mosque at Tehran where we were gathered to honor Forouhar(s) who were killed in the chain murders. Simin Behbahani recited one of her poems there and it was my first time seeing her and hearing her voice in person; it was an amazing experience. We lighted candles and moved towards the house of Forouhar(s) which was close to the mosque. People were softly chanting ey-Iran song. Groups of the people would go inside the house and walk around their yard and would come out to make space for the next group to go in. In the way to Forouhar(s)' house I saw Sahabi with two men next to him. When I met him, he had his finger across his lips asking people to not chant a slogan or sing a song. I was back then attending the meetings of Nehzat-e Azadi (The Liberation movement) and had many issues with those who were politically close to Sahabi although preferred them to reformists. My two brief experiences with Sahabi were symbolically the overall attitude of Nehzat-e Azadi (or national-religious groups in general ): asking people to go without chanting and avoiding people. In fact meli-mazhabi-ha (national-religious group) were very close to reformists except they were illegalized and not tolerated. They were expelled from the political sphere of the state for their discourses to be imitated and stolen by the reformists almost two decades later. From wikipedia: "they continued to exist as a barely tolerated force in the Majlis until the regime cracked down on it in the year 2000, arresting and placing on trial dozens of activists belonging to the group" (link)

I was introduced to a Nehzat-e Azadi group through a book-store I used to borrow illegal books and artsy movies. The owners of the store, both middle aged men, were very politically active and had a great taste of movies and books. One of them would rarely talk but the other one would give you an analysis of the movie or book you were borrowing and would discuss it with you further when you would return it. They had all the movies of Andrei Tarkovsky, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, and other directors popular in Iran. The book-store owners were both leftist but religiously attended the nehzat-e azadi meetings anyway maybe because all of their comrades were killed, exiled, silenced, dispersed and during the first presidency of Khatami the new wave of leftism wasn't still born or that strong. I accepted to go to their meetings and continued going for more than a year. We would sometimes go to reformist talks with a group. In one of those talks, a man who was imprisoned both during the Shah and after, asked the reformist speaker (Jalaeipour) if they would legalize meli-mahabi(ha) when reformists become more powerful in the state. This was seriously the demand and ultimate agenda of many of them to be legalized by the reformists to conduct more serious jobs through legal avenues. They were also confused with their religious aspects. In one of the last gatherings I attended, we were 40 or so people in the basement of one of their members and a speaker was discussing Nahj-ol Balaghe for us. We could have been arrested any time there. I told myself that attending such a dangerous meeting to read Nahj-ol Balaghe is not for me and eventually stopped going. Concepts such as organizing, strategizing, leading, etc. were too violent and militantly radical to them at that time.

I visited the book store last time that I visited Iran which was before the 2009 election and during Ahamdinejad's presidency. The store-owner told me that his store was put on fire and he guessed that it had been done by the state's thugs. He told me that he is disillusioned with transforming meli-mazhabi(ha) to a potent political force and he doesn't want to think about politics for a while. His book store was invaded by the books for entrance exam of universities and mainstream books like "how can we become happy?" and so on. The previous vibrancy of his store was gone. He said his store barely makes any money. I asked him for the books of Ali-ashraf Darvishian just for the good child memories I have of his books and he told me those have political connotation, give it up. I lost one of their movies, Hiroshima Mon Amore, several years ago and they didn't accept compensation. I bought it for them last summer and asked my friend who was going to Iran to give it to them. They gave my friend and me several books by Goli Taraghi, Belgheis Soleimani and Rouhangiz Sharifian. My friend told me the store-owner was so excited with the Green Movement and talked to him for 1 hour and said "this is it, we will win it this time".

The situation in Iran (part two): Haleh Sahabi

2011-06-04T13:42:00.000-07:00

Haleh Sahabi

One of the most tragic recent stories is that of Haleh Sahabi, who was a 54 year old political and women's right activist and a prominent researcher of Islamic feminism. She studied Physics at Tehran University and her studying was interrupted by the "Cultural Revolution" which resulted in the closing of the universities from 1980 to 1983. She had continued her studying in Physics after the opening of the universities. But she didn't continue her work in Physics and instead worked with a magazine and helped in the writing of several books and conducted her research in Islam and feminism. She believed that Islam can be narrated in a very progressive and feminist way and for achieving women's rights we don't need to un-Islamize the culture and politics but we can change the conservative-male-dominated narrations of Islam with progressive ones. For instance, according to Islamic law women can get paid for their labor at domestic sphere and breast-feeding. Haleh Sahabi believed that this is a very progressive right for women that Islam has granted and with providing other progressive narrations of Quran and Islam we can achieve justice for women within Islam.

As Hamid Dabashi has elegantly explained:

"Haleh Sahabi was sentenced to a two-year prison term after she had joined a rally in front of the Iranian parliament in the aftermath of the contested presidential election of 2009. While serving her term in jail, Haleh Sahabi was informed of her father's impending death. He was the prominent Iranian dissident Ezzatollah Sahabi (1930-2011), a revered democracy activist, known and admired for his mild manner, open-minded generosity of spirit, a liberal demeanor, and a commitment to non-violent activism on a religious-nationalist platform for over half a century. Haleh Sahabi was briefly allowed out of prison to be present for the final days of her father's life. Ezzatollah died, at the age of 81 on May 31, 2011… His funeral began on the following day, June 1, under tight security control, and - according to a number of reliable eyewitness accounts- including those of Ahmad Montazeri, the son of the late Grand Ayatollah Montazeri, and Ahmad Sadr Haj Seyyed Javadi, an aging opposition politician - a band of organised plainclothes security forces began to disrupt the funeral, ridiculing and humiliating the attendants, and moved to snatch the body of the deceased from those who were carrying it for a proper burial. Haleh Sahabi, leading the funeral, tried to prevent the disruption, while holding on to a picture of her father. The picture was violently taken away from her by a security agent and she was hit on her side. She fell to the ground in the scuffle and soon after died of a cardiac arrest … In Antigone, we are faced with the law of the land contravening the rule of traditions. But here and now, facing a vicious and wicked regime that is over-anxious about its own lack of legitimacy, Haleh Sahabi wrote in her living memory a different drama. "

For Ezatollah Sahabi and Haleh Sahabi
By Mana Neiestani

The funeral of Ezattollah Sahabi could have gone peacefully but the government of Iran, as always, managed to make it another display of its nonsense cruelty. One would think that a calculating oppressive regime would not turn such a peaceful funeral to another national trauma. As Dabashi says, "the Islamic Republic is so terrified of any public gathering, especially over dead bodies of its dissidents, precisely because this is the manner in which it took over from the previous regime and that it abused to outmanoeuvre its ideological rivals in order to stay in power". The Islamic Republic has atomized Iran's society and in persuasion of this goal most independent unions and syndicates are illegalized. On the other hand, the thuggization of the state's politics in Iran has costed the state a big deal such as the recent state's stimulation of national agitation and anger over the murder of a peaceful citizen who was temporarily out of prison for mourning the death of her father and was trying to protect the honor of her father in his funeral.

Haleh Sahabi's dead body was stolen from the family. No investigation of the cause of her death was allowed. Her body was washed at night with the lights of the security forces' cars and she was buried at night. You can see the photos here.

The doctor who visited Haleh Sahabi in the clinic said that Haleh was killed as a result of the internal bleeding that was caused by a blow to her body. The state's media has gone insane and published the most nonsense pieces such as Haleh Sahabi was killed as a result of the summer's warm weather or the most shameless one was that her health was already deteriorated for being in jail. However, a piece appeared in one of the most conservative websites in which the writer asked the state's propagandists to stop putting the murder of Haleh Sahabi under question and accept it but instead bang on the proposition that not all the actions of the thugs are approved or exactly ordered by the state. The writer of the piece failed to recognize that the plain clothes and thugs are sent to people's ceremonies and funerals by the order of the state and of course such "accidents" always happen like the time Arash Sadeghi's mother suffered heart attack and passed away after Arash's house was invaded by the state's forces at 4am.

The murder of Haleh Sahabi is going to cost the regime a lot. Haleh Sahabi is strongly respected among women's right activists, mothers of peace, student and political activists, etc. She was a peaceful compassionate, down to earth, and caring activist and scholar that most Iranians respect. She is also from a very well-known family whose father and grandfather who for their entire lives more or less stayed committed to liberal democratic values and advocated democracy. "Dear Haleh, rest in peace ... The women of Iran will continue your struggle".

The situation in Iran (part one)

2011-06-04T12:44:00.000-07:00

The situation in Iran is the most grotesque it has ever been during the last two years. Meanwhile the cacophony of war against Iran and stronger sanctions is becoming louder again. This would mean a total disaster for Iranian activists who reflect the voices of prisoners and struggling people in Iran: inevitably going silent about the Khamenei-Ahmadinejad's brutalities in favor of an anti-war unification. This would be another huge gift to Iran's brutal government to stay in power and unify people behind its broken back.

Some Iranian government's domestic plots are preposterous and some are devastatingly tragic. Iran continues to have one of the most executions per capita, more than any other country in the region and more than most of the countries in the whole world. Many of these executed victims are unknown and their killings don't cost the government of Iran as much as they should. Let alone the non-political prisoners, even in some cases the hidden victims of the political prisoners are invisible such as those who suffer or are killed as a result of the political activism of their children or parents.

The wife and mother of Masoud Bastani, an imprisoned journalist in jail from 2009, were visiting him in the prison two days ago. A security-man informs Bastani that his visiting time is over. Bastani asks him to let him say goodbye to his mother. The security-man removes him from the chair, hit his head on the wall, throws him to the floor, and hits his head with the security-man's boots. Mahsa Amrabadi, Masoud Bastani's wife, explained in an interview that after seeing this brutality Bastani's mother had passed out. Rajaei Shahr prison guards took Bastani to the prison's clinic. A doctor writes for Bastani to be transferred to a hospital as he suspects head injuries. Bastani's family don't know to this time whether he has been transferred to a hospital or not. Mahsa Amrabadi said in the interview that in some phone calls the jailers say Bastani is transferred and sometimes they say he isn't transferred. In one phone call they first claimed Bastani is transferred to the hospital but then they said that he is not.

Rasoul Bodaghi is an imprisoned teacher unionist who is in jail for his union activism. He is sentenced to 6 years in prison and is banned from conducting social activism for 5 years because of "spreading propaganda against the regime" and " endangering the national security". His mother was not allowed to visit him in prison as a result of the policy of punishing the prisoners. In protest to the maltreatment he and his comrades receive in the Rajaei Shahr Prison, he with several other prisoners (Keivan Samimi, Isa Saharkhiz, Mehdi Mahmoudian) have gone on strike. The news of Bodaghi being on hunger strike caused his mother to suffer a heart attack. She was transferred to the hospital but passed away several days later. Bodaghi hasn't been allowed to attend the funeral of his mother.

Some months ago Arash Sadeghi, a student activist who was already in prison for one and half years was temporarily released. He wasn't contacted by the government-agents or required to go back to jail. However, his house was invaded at 4 am by security forces. Consequently, his mother suffered a heart attack at 4 am and passed away. Later, Arash expressed that he wants to go back to jail impatiently as he was blamed for the death of his mother by his family and relatives.

Freedom for Palestine

2011-05-31T08:35:00.000-07:00

Guest post: The Role Of the Islamic Republic in Bahrain

2011-05-28T10:45:00.000-07:00

From Aljazeera Website: "The abuse of the Shia-Sunni divide also points yet again not just to the false sectarianism that seeks to discredit these democratic uprisings but also to the banal racialisation of these transnational, revolutionary movements that cross all such colonially manufactured hostilities. The fact remains that the Arab Spring cannot turn a blind eye to the brutalities of the Islamic Republic just because the US is its enemy. It is imperative that the criminal atrocities of the Islamic Republic be brought fully into the opening picture of the Arab Spring.

The Arab Spring will not fully blossom unless and until the green pastures of Iran are included in it. Labour unions, women's rights movements and student organisations are identical in their demands and aspirations for their civil liberties in both Iran and the Arab world. Enduring thirty years of a corrupt theocracy has given Iranians much to teach their Arab counterparts; these magnificent revolutionary uprisings from one end of the Arab world to the other has already galvanised the Green Movement in Iran. As the tyrannous regimes in both Bahrain and the Islamic Republic earn from each other how to suppress democratic uprisings, these democratic uprisings must also learn from each other how to topple their corrupt leadership - for in whatever language you learn it: al-Sha'b yurid isqat al-Nizam!" (You can read the whole article here)

No instrumentalization of Iranian women, even for the anti-imperialist causes!

2011-05-26T00:57:00.000-07:00

Katie Couric in an interview with Ahmadinejad asked him about the murder of Neda Agha-Soltan (R.I.P) by the thugs of Iran's state. Ahmadinejad's response covered two main propositions that he, or in general Iran's state-men, share with some progressive commentators.

Ahmadinejad firstly responded as follows,

"we are – very sorry that one of our fellow citizens has been killed. As a victim of an – agitation of circumstance. An agitation that was carried out with the support of some American politicians, the voice of America, and the BBC".

Ahmadinejad managed to obscure the econo-political issues that have caused Iranian people to stand against the state's oppressive apparatuses. In fact, Ahmadinejad reduced the state's thuggery and a nation's struggle to some conspiracies about imperialist states and took away any political agency from Iranian people in his interview. A little later in the interview, Ahmadinejad brought a print of a photo of Marwa El-Sherbini (R.I.P) and asked Katie Couric if she knows whose picture it was. Katie Couric failed to recognize Marwa El-Sherbini. Then Ahmadinejad emphasized that the Western media has turned Neda to a martyr but has ignored Marwa's story. Ahmadinejad said,

"American politicians do not want American people to see what goes on around the world."

The double standard syndrome of the media is a fact and there is no doubt about this. The media's double standards are not restricted to Euro-North American media (coded as Western media) but, for instance, Iran or Hezbollah's media also suffer from their biases followed most of the times with the least or no attempts to even conceal their double standards like NY Times that tries to sound "fair" and "balanced". Even if parts of the media try to be "objective" or claim to cover the neglected sides of the stories, those parts still favor some lives and stories to the others, for example, a death in Congo receives less progressive media's coverage than a death in Egypt. Therefore, people, even Ahmadinejad, who bang on the table of the media and mention its double standards evoke a righteous cause although they are blind to some other double standards. They are blind to double standards which are either conducted by themselves or are less important to them.

Among the so called progressive or "leftist" bloggers or commentators, it has become superficially fashionable to instrumentalize Iranian strugglers and revolutionary resisters to demonstrate the double standards of the so called Western media especially after the June 2009 demonstrations of Iranian people. Their act is similar to Ahmadinejad who instrumentalized Marwa El-Sherbini to escape explanation for the murder of Neda Agha-Soltan in his interview with Katie Couric. I do realize that the power relation between Ahmadinejad and Neda Agha-Soltan is not the same as the one between a self-described leftist commentator and, for instance, Mansoor Osanloo. However, their identical methodology suffers the same ignorance although an anti-Iranian-people-propagandist has much less moral repressibility over the suffering of Iranian "objects" of his/her flawed analysis than Ahmadinejad has as the "president" of Iran.

Here is an example of such instrumentalization of Iranian women to demonstrate the Western media or governments' double standards in their treatment of Saudi women:

Saudi women: why they are not on the agenda of Western feminists: Can you imagine if this happened in Iran? Can you imagine the world reactions? Can you imagine the outrage that would pour from Western capitals? "RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Authorities detained a Saudi woman on Saturday after she launched a campaign against the driving ban for women in the ultraconservative kingdom and posted a video of herself behind the wheel on Facebook and YouTube to encourage others to copy her..." Western governments have as much credibility on democracy and human rights as much as Dominique Strauss-Kahn has credibility on gender issues.

I have no doubt that the Western governments and media treat the suffering of the people in Saudi Arabia at best indifferently and support their oppressors and, simultaneously, imperialist governments pretend to be outraged by the suffering of the people in Libya to an extent of liberating them with their "emancipatory" bombs. The Egyptian and Syrian uprisings have not been treated the same as the one taking place in Bahrain by the imperialist powers, as another example of such double standards. Hassan Nasrullah and Iran's government also suffer from similar double standards: Syrian opposition is led by imperialists according to Iranian state's media, on the other hand, the opposition to Qaddafi urgently needs the imperialist intervention according to Hassan Nasrullah.

Now the question is why I oppose the fashion of instrumentalization of Iranian women for the purpose of displaying the double standards of the Euro-North American media and governments if I do agree that such favoritism obviously exist.

Iranian women have struggled, fought, resisted the patriarchy and oppression of several different governments for at least the last 200 years. Iranian women's struggle includes the resistance of women like Tahereh Qurat Al-Ayn, Maryam Farman Farmaian, Parvin Etesami, Forough Farokhzad... to recent ones such as Mehrangiz Kar, Jila Baniyaghoub, Shadi Sadr, Bahareh Hedayat, Mahdieh Golroo, etc. The women's battle for gender and political justice has been made not only by the struggle of the famous ones but many unknown women who sacrificed their lives and freedom. However, the fashion of instrumentalization of Iranian women to demonstrate the Western government and media's double standards doesn't recognize the subjectivity of Iranian women in their struggle but only in a sexist manner portrays them as the weak sweethearts of the Western government and media. That seems to be the only privilege of Iranian women, to be the favored sweethearts of the Western government, in the mentioned fashionable proposition.

In the fashion of instrumentalization of Iranian women to demonstrate the Western media and governments' double standards, Iranian women are only the objects used in the imaginative war with the "West". They have no agency and subjectivity. They are only handy to be used to make a point about the "West". In most cases, the commentators or state-men of Iran who instrumentalize Iranian women to make a point about Western double standards, rarely if ever talk about the independent struggle of Iranian women. In fact, in some cases such commentators and state-men dismiss and discredit Iranian women's struggle with the claim that their struggle has imitated that of the women in imperialist countries, or is only led by middle class "Westernized" women, or simply because struggling women's use of Twitter is such commentators' potato!

Ahmadinejad, the so called head of a state that has imprisoned women like Nasrin Sotoudeh, sisters of Marwa El-Sherbini, is wrong to instrumentalize Marwa in his dismissal of the murder of an innocent peaceful protester, Neda Agha-Soltan. In fact, Ahmadinejad doesn't care about Neda Agha-Soltan nor does he care about Marwa El-Sherbini, he only cares to show that the "West" is equally guilty by reminding Katie Couric of her ignorance of the suffering of Marwa.

Those commentators who don't see the links between the struggle of Iranian women and Saudi women and wittingly or unwittingly don't believe in any agency for Iranian women in their struggle are as Western-centric as Ahmadinejad is. To them, before these struggles matter, the attention they receive (or don't receive) from the Western media and governments is important * even if this attitude leads to portray Iranian women as the agent-less favorit sweethearts of the Western governments and media.

Related former post: Nationalism can cause racism and favoritism

*(and in some cases such struggles are evaluated based on the attention they receive or don't receive from the so called Western media and governments )

Baltimore Protest Calls For Economic Justice

2011-05-22T09:42:00.000-07:00

A documentary of an all girls high school in Iran

2011-05-21T22:33:00.000-07:00

I strongly recommend this documentary. It's made by Nahid Rezaei about 10 year ago during the presidency of Khatami. The director, Nahid Rezaei, has gone back to her high school, in Tehran, after 20 years.

At the end of the movie, the director talks about the hopes and aspirations that the 1957 revolutionaries had and their big dreams for the future. She contrasts the hope the 1957 revolutionary students had with the hopelessness of the students in her documentary.

This documentary reflects the naive over-simplicity of pseudo-class analysis which is fashionable when it comes to the struggle of Iranian people. The documentary reflects the fact that the state has regulated every insignificant aspect of social lives of people in Iran (such as high school girls shaping their eyebrows or nails or looking themselves in the mirror!) more than most countries in the region do with the exceptions like Saudi Arabia. Thus the struggle of Iranian people is much more complex than silly fake-class analysis, propagandists' claim of the regime popularity, etc. It's the experiences of citizens like these female students which are lacked in the shallow analysis of "leftist collaborators of native informers" who mostly don't even speak Persian.

The protesters who occupy the cities and shout slogans are people like these students in this documentary. During the protests in the streets they wear makeup and sunglasses as is the dress code of Iran's typical youth culture regardless of their social class. Then the commentators exoticize their bodies and clothing, and "leftist collaborators of native informers" either call them the agents of imperialism or humiliate them for using Twitter. But in fact as it's portrayed in this honest documentary, the strugglers themselves are much more articulate and deeper than those for whom the protesters are the objects of their analysis.

You can watch the next videos here: Part2, part 3, part 4.

End U.S. Support for Bahrain's Repressive Government

2011-05-16T22:58:00.000-07:00

I have signed this statement. You can sign it here.

West is going downhill and East is going uphill?

2011-05-15T22:19:00.003-07:00

Jalal Al-e Ahmad, an Iranian writer and intellectual, wrote a book called Gharbzadegi (westoxification or westerstruckness) in 1962, and his discourses expressed in that book have been vastly critiqued during the last several decades in both Persian and English. However, surprisingly to this day, some scholars and commentators keep banking on a simplistic imaginative division between "West" and "East," like in this article: [all the quotes below are from the same article]

"... While taking isolated chance incidents in different countries to make deductions can make one sound like Thomas Friedman, to me the two demonstrations symbolized two different trajectories the East [May Day in Turkey] and the West [Americans' celebration over Bin Ladin's death] are taking... "

How about considering the struggle in Wisconsin or the recent one in Greece instead of comercial expressions over Bin Ladin's death? If we do so, that would make it harder for us to over-simplistically draw an axes over the world and divide it to East and West and pre-evaluate the current or future struggles happening based on their location with respect to the axes of West-East. I have actually come across Turkish people who consider their country to be part of the "West" and want it to become officially part of the European Union which falsifies that division even further.

"It turns out Arabs understand democracy better than we do in the stagnant west"

How about South Americans and Africans? Where are they in this equation? It is not only simplistic to divide the world to West and Arabs, but it is also impossible to disregard the racial codifications expressed in such discussions about the region's uprisings: How about the Iranian labors who have striked weekly for the last two years or students who have sacrificed their lives and freedom? Are they in "West" or "East"? I do understand and have sympathy for this kind of bombastic talk by Muslim and Arab commentators but find it overly essentialist and only self-indulging. This method expresses that "You are dead wrong if you think only the North American and European commentators can essentialize Muslims and Arabs, we, the Muslim and Arab commentators, also can essentialize the 'West'. Thus we are equal." The inferiority complex plays a complicated game to overturn the problem but only deepens it.

It's similar to those who bank on oppression against women in Europe-North America whenever the situation of women in Muslim and Arab countries are mentioned as if the former whitewashes the latter--- it's a failed methodology practiced by Iranian government. Such an approach is always mistaken with an anti-imperialist one, unfortunately.

"Al Qaeda was not a villainous bad guy out of a Bond film or a comic book, determined to do evil for the sake of evil. It was a movement that arose in response to America’s imperial excesses. Many of its grievances were legitimate, even if killing American civilians is not the proper means of addressing them. If America ceased supporting the Israeli occupation and oppression of Palestinians, and if America ceased coddling Middle Eastern dictators, and if America ceased bombing Muslims, there would be little reason for Muslims to resent America, or retaliate against American civilians. The resentments are not a result of al Qaeda’s ideology. The same grievances have existed for decades, but the discourse used by those who fought imperialism has changed from Marxism and nationalism to Jihadist, even if the causes have remained the same."

It's not that Al-Qaeda "was a movement that arose in response to America’s imperial excesses," it was in fact manufactured by America's imperialism. As Hamid Dabashi says in his Green Movement book: "there was no al-Qaeda, or Taliban, or a bellicose Saddam Hussein armed to the teeth with US- and EU-supplied chemical, biological, and other weapons, until the United States government created these monsters in collaboration with the Pakistani intelligence, Saudi money, and Israeli strategic support - this only by way of a small dosage of historical record and remembrance, of course."

Even if we agree with Mr. Rosen that the anti-imperialist discourse has changed from Marxism and nationalism to Jihadism (whatever that means!), we can argue that such a hypothetical shift is a consequence of several decades of oppression against leftist and progressive movements in the light of cold war policies and installations of dictators in the region through military coups, etc. Misnaming the resistance as Jihadism, pushes the national liberation movements such as Lebanese Hezbollah in the same category as terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda which is wrong. Islamic movements, Shi'ite or Sunni, are not equivalent to Jihadism. There have been intellectuals like Ali Shari'ati who formulated the Islamic resistance, albeit with the use of Marxist and anti-colonial discourses, more efficiently than any leftist intellectuals have done in the region. Thus reducing Islamic resistance to Jihadism is reductionist, at least.

I do agree with the article when it says "the truth is al Qaeda was a fringe organization without roots in the Arab world." Whereas there have been several articles in which commentators claim that Bin Ladin was already killed in Tahrir Square. I find the symbolification of Tahrir Square helpful but I find its commercialization and poetification shallow. The proposition of "Bin Ladin was killed at Tahrir Square" may result in a false conclusion that Bin Ladin was not an irrelevant nonexistent for the people in the Arab and Muslim world before Tahrir Square took place. Bin Ladin meant racialization of Muslim and Arab people and humiliatingly random checks of Muslim and Arab men and women at the airports, and the bombings of Pakistani and Afghan people and the presence of security forces of North-America and Europe which was the continuation of US-Europe imperialism but only justified by Bin Ladinism. As Dabashi says in his Green Movement book: "It was Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terror organization that proved to be the more shadowy reflection of the US imperial imagination. The events of 9/11 were subsequently narrated officially in a manner that linked them to that shadowy organization, and yet remained nothing but the blowback consequences of the US military adventurism in the region since the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the commencement of the Reagan administration."

Bin Ladin was more than anything else an obsessive compulsive disorder of US corporatism that favored industries of war and media. His commercial aspects are revealed more clearly after his death in the media's reports about his wives, his use of viagra, porn videos, etc. Viagra pills and porn videos are supposed to emasculate him and portray him as impotent and in contrast the US as the big guy in no need of porn videos or viagra, however, we can't deny that such ridiculous news are also the spices over the commercial aspects of turning him to a celebrity. That's how the corporate media tries to keep his death "hot" for audiences.

Insanity and racism, Tel Aviv, April 2011

2011-05-01T21:03:00.000-07:00

"Hold on these people have diseases…" "It [Israeli government] talks about building a border fence, but it isn't doing much about it." "They talked about building a containment camp. No action there, either."

My Shoes Are Not All that Connects Me to this Land

2011-04-28T11:53:00.000-07:00

A letter by Farzad Kamangar. This was originally published on Persian2English.

My Shoes Are Not All that Connects Me to this Land

I shall not forget that, in this land, words sometimes turn into ‘crimes’ and ‘unforgivable sins’ as soon as one utters them. The brush of the pen on a blank piece of paper can ‘agitate the public mind’ and result in prosecution. Speaking what one thinks can be considered ‘propaganda’. Sympathy can be ‘conspiracy’. And protesting can be treated as an attempt to ‘overthrow [the regime]‘. Words are legally charged, so one should be careful.

I shall not forget to teach my eyes to, not believe everything that they see, and teach my tongue to not repeat everything [I hear]. What I hear every night is not a scream, waves, or a storm. Every night I hear the sound of the “dust and dirt” (+) that kept the city awake at nights.
I shall not forget that, in this city, there is no poverty line, protests, inflation, unemployment, injustice, hunger, inequality, oppression, tyranny, lies, and immoral and unethical behaviour. These are terms used and spread by the enemies.

Nevertheless, nowadays, under the skin of the city, something is happening that, inspires the words used by poets, is the subject and the scenario for the director, gives courage to the old and hope to the young, and motivates the disillusioned and the hopeless to move. Nowadays, it is as though the heart of the world beats in this city.

It is as though Tehran has turned into the Greenwich of the world; a point of reference. Nobody sleeps until the people of this city go to sleep. And until they wake up, our hemisphere does not see the light of day.

Nowadays, it is not necessary anymore to tour the world in order to find the spot where your heart will ache, or to find the place where the splash of the ink will leave you in solitude. It is not necessary to travel to the crisis ridden areas of the world to find the subject for photography. To compose a melody or to chant a song, one does not need to feel the pain of the people of Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan. You can tune your notes and tempos to the heartbeat of the worried mothers of the city. You can synchronize the drumbeat of your music to the *tone of the sticks hitting the backs and heads of the people (the protesters).

Nowadays, July’s weather has turned autumnal. It tells the tale of a forest turning into a desert. One can see everything, even if the TV is blind. One can hear everything, even if the radio is deaf. One can read the unwritten words between the black lines of the daily news, even if the newspaper has gone mute. One can feel and understand everything, even if surrounded by the thick, high walls of Evin [prison].
Nowadays I do not wander in the back alleys of our city alone anymore. My heart is beating in **Haft-e Tir Square, on Enghelab and Jomhoori streets. I hold a flower in my hand to offer it to the mourning mothers of this city.

These days, it is not only the solitude suffered by Ebrahim in Sanandaj (the capital of the Iran Kurdistan province) prison, nor just my lonely sisters and brothers in Sanandaj, Mahabad, and Kermanshah prisons. Their pain is weighing on my heart. I have dozens of imprisoned brothers and sisters here. I burst into tears when I hear their screams. A lump forms in my throat when I see their pained faces and torn clothes. I am proud of myself for having such sisters and brothers.

This city is not the same foreign, dull, polluted place with tall buildings anymore. These days, the city is full of ***Neda’s and Sohrab’s. It is as though after some long years, the “butterfly of liberty” (1) has flown across the sky of the city to join the people in a choir [for freedom and justice].

Farzad Kamangar Evin Prison December 5, 2009

Translation by Siavosh Jalili for Persian2English

1-Butterfly of Liberty was a song by maestro Khaleqi that he performed 40 years ago with the Tehran Orchestra.

TRANSLATOR’S NOTES
+ The term used by Ahmadinejad two days following the disputed 2009 June Presidential election to describe the protesters.
* Refers to the famous resistance song “Yar-e dabestani” or “My Classmate”. It is frequently sung at student gatherings.
**Central Tehran areas where the protests in the wake of the June 2009 Presidential election took place. Enghleab means “Revolution” and Jomhouri mean “Republic” in Persian)
*** Sohrab Arabi and Neda Agha Soltan were two young citizens who were killed by the security and militia forces in the first week following the June 2009 Presidential election)

Palestinians protest the wall, Bil'in, April 22, 2011

2011-04-24T11:26:00.000-07:00

Humanitarian bombs yes, but no Asylum

2011-04-24T11:13:00.000-07:00

Iranian asylum seekers on hunger strike and sewed lips in the UK
---photo from Guardian website

How about a no-fly zone over the bodies of these asylum seekers? The macho over-masculine imperialist powers can only emancipate brown people by their bombs but they can't let the same people seek refuge in their territories. Only humanitarian bombs and killings, no asylum!

Syria: No to Iran, No to Hezbollah

2011-04-24T10:33:00.000-07:00

Like so many other people, I am also counting down to the fall of Bashar al-Assad's government and the success of the Syrian people's revolution. The disturbing images coming out of Syria are all heart wrenching and at the same time heroic.

The fall of Bashar al-Assad is going to have a considerable effect on the amorphous stubborn government of Iran. The state media of Iran pretends that nothing special is happening in Syria and there are rumors that Iran's state is helping the Syrian government to repress the Syrian people's revolution--- which of course can be true. Apparently, the daemonic role of Iran's state in backing up the repressive regime of Syria is an understood fact for many Syrian people. In one of the videos, the Syrian protesters chant "la Iran, la Hezbollah" which means, "no to Iran, no to Hezbollah".

I am not writing this to criticize the heroic protesters of Syria for this chant as I understand the political context in which such slogans are spontaneously made and chanted by the uprising people. Thus it's ridiculous to assume Syrian protesters' slogan is racist or is pro-imperialism or zionism because it says no to Hezbollah which represents the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggle in the region. It can not be concluded that Syrian protesters are pro-imperialist or racist, as protesters' chant is spontaneous and has to be placed in the political context of their uprising. However, I would like to point out the double standards of those who reduced the whole Iranian people's movement to one slogan, "neither Gaza, nor Lebanon, I sacrifice my life for Iran," took that slogan out of its historical context, and banked on that one slogan to disdain and denigrate a whole movement made of different factions and ideas and dozens of chants. The examples of such reductionist reactions can be seen here, here, here and here, while such have not been observed in reaction to the similar slogan chanted by Syrian protesters.

There has also been an anti-Shi'i fetishization among the leftist collaborators of native informers against the Iranian people's movement. Anytime the Iranian protesters mentioned "I sacrifice my life" or repeated the 1979 slogan of "I will kill whoever has killed my brother," the anti-Shi'i stereotypes were uttered such as: "look they are talking about sacrificing their lives which means the pleasure of getting martyred." In such speech acts, a complex revolutionary political culture has been reduced and over-simplified to Western media's fear-mongering of Islam and Muslims. In fact the notion of martyrdom has often been instrumentalized for demonization of Islam and Muslims in "Western media".

Some of the leftist collaborators of native informers claim the reason they hate the oppressed Iranian people's movement is because the fall of Iran's regime makes the Israeli government happy. I wonder if they are applying the same Israel-oriented proposition to oppressed Syrian people's revolutionary uprising as the fall of Bashar al-Assad might make Israel happy, whatever that means. Double standards and racist dismissal of Iranian people's movement is not an exception, it is a rule for the leftist collaborators of native informers.

Iran's Green Movement in animation

2011-04-23T08:33:00.000-07:00

This documentary has four parts. You can watch the rest here, here, and here.

Guest Post: A Post-Modern Coup d'Etat?

2011-04-22T12:28:00.000-07:00

This article By Behzad Yaghmaian was originally published on Counterpunch.

Behzad Yaghmaian: "The young Egyptians' revolt for democracy achieved the seemingly unachievable result in short time. "The 18-day Revolution," many proclaimed when Hosni Mubarak abandoned power on February 11th. There were, however, skeptics who saw a hijacking of the democracy movement by the military and its domestic and foreign backers. Recent developments in Egypt support the views of the skeptics. The youth revolt ended without a revolution. The dictator fell, while Egypt's nascent democracy was aborted.

The protesters in Tahrir Square were young, courageous, and without much experience in politics and street protest. Their movement was spontaneous and impulsive, and their demands limited. They saw in the removal of Mubarak a chance for an Egypt that respected the political and cultural rights of its citizens. The protesters did not ask for a change in Egypt's unequal distribution of wealth and income. They did not demand the eradication of poverty, and the restructuring of an economic and social apparatus created by Mubarak, his allies, and the military.

The departure of Mubarak from power did not even bring about the limited political demands the young protesters aspired to. With Mubarak out of office, the military ordered the protesters to return to their homes and workplaces, "resume normal life," and end anti-government demonstrations. Soldiers evacuated Tahrir Square. Meanwhile, many protesters that were arrested in the days of rage remained in custody, and some beaten and tortured, human rights organizations reported. The violence against people continued.

A peaceful sit-in of 1000 youth in Tahrir Square was violently put down on March 9th. Protected by soldiers, thugs attacked the protesters. The 23-year-old Ramy Esam was among those arrested on March 9th. He was interrogated for four hours and beaten with sticks, metal rods, wires, ropes, hoses, and whips while an officer repeatedly jumping on his face, Ramy told Ivan Watson of CNN. Arrested female protested were forced to undress before male officers and subjected to a virginity test. Those not found to be virgins would be charged with prostitution, the authorities threatened the detailed women.

On March 24th, the Egyptian cabinet announced a new law that banned strikes and demonstrations which impeded the work of public institutions, Human Rights Watch reported. The law practically prohibits the types of peaceful activities which led to the fall of President Mubarak. A symbol of the revolt for democracy, gatherings in Tahrir Square are illegal in the post-Mubarak Egypt.

These and other alarming developments and practices indicate a concerted by the military to minimize the potential democratic gains of the fall of Hosni Mubarak. The rush to hold a referendum on the constitution, and the planned parliamentary elections in September will only guarantee the cling on power by Mubarak's associates, and other organized political forces like The Muslim Brotherhood.
The Tahrir Square movement was a revolt of the restless and disenfranchised young Egyptians against the older generations and their entrenched power and control of the society. The proposed elections have little chance of changing that power structure. The hasty elections will exclude youth and the women who fought Mubarak and his regime from organizing effectively and partaking in the process with well-defined platforms and demands. For now, it seems unlikely that the Egyptian youth will benefit much from their heroism and sacrifices. The question remains: was this outcome inevitable?

Egypt's strategic importance to the United States, and America's financial backing of the military were among the factors that helped derail the outcome of the democracy movement. The Tahrir Square demonstration created the possibility of a civilian transitional government that included youth leaders, representatives of women groups, and labor unions. Soon after the protests began, Mohammad ElBaradei emerged as a representative of a broad coalition of civilian forces. Even Muslim Brotherhood accepted ElBaradei's representation. But, a coalition of that nature was too open-ended and unpredictable for Washington, and the armed forces of Egypt. They would not have accepted a transitional government let by ElBaradei. ElBaradei, the winner of Nobel Peace, was quietly sidelined, and Omar Suleiman, a leading figure in Egypt's intelligence apparatus, and the close ally of Mubarak became the head of the transitional government.

People's protest shook the foundations of the government of Hosni Mubarak. The United States' backroom deal makings with the military, however, guaranteed the survival of old order and its U.S. friendly policies without the discredited dictator. A postmodern coup d'etat replaced a potential revolution."

The leftist collaborators of native informers

2011-04-21T23:40:00.000-07:00

Some commentators use the new alliance between Iran's government and Egypt's new government as a measurement tool for the (improvement or even) progressivity of the unfolding events in the region. I don't want to attend to the fact that such a measurement, even if Iran's government was progressive with a just cause, is false and falsifying. The part I would like to shed light on is that the last two year suffering and struggle of people in Iran (still ongoing strongly) means nothing to such commentators, absolutely nothing. The fact that Iranian people are tortured, killed, silenced, expelled, etc. by the government of Iran is not taken into the equations of such commentators when they express over-excitement about the new alliance between Iran and Egypt's government. As if the suffering people in Iran do not exist or are not even human. Let's assume these people were the killers and torturers of a bunch of dogs, not even human beings, was there anything to celebrate if such dog killers expressed interest in having a relationship with the new Egyptian government? If such suffering and struggle of the people happened in another nation (like it's happening in Bahrain, Syria, and Libya), would it still be as non-existant as the events in Iran are now? This is a double standard based on nationality that only a racist and tribalist imagination can utter. Over-excitement about the relationship between Egypt's government and the torturers of Ali Nejati, Mansour Osanloo, Bahareh Hedayat, Nasrin Sotoudeh, Rasoul Bodaghi ... is morally corrupted and it's also betrayal to those Egyptians dreaming of a progressive Egypt that neither submits to Zionism/ imperialism nor does it fall into the trap of backward reactionary governments who deceptively pretend to oppose imperialism. Now what would happen to this excitement if Mansour Osanloo(s) of Iran finally overthrow the backward rotting government of Iran? Would such commentators continue their business of ignoring and denigrating Mansour Osanloo(s) or they will change their attitude in a matter of minutes? I wonder.

Some of these commentators tried hard to discredit Iranian people's movement for the involvement of some of the reformist former-officials in it. To discredit Iranian people's grass-root movement, such commentators tried so hard to reduce it to a few former government persons who were expelled from power by the electoral coup (June, 2009). The new configuration of power in Iran could no longer tolerate the reformist camp and was going to monopolize power for the most reactionary and backward faction of the regime. It's nonsense that the existence of reformist former-officials in Iranian people's movement was an enough reason to discredit the people's struggle but the relationship of new Egypt's government with the most backward faction of the same regime is a sign of improvement for the new Egypt. Thus it seems that the involvement with the officials of Iran can only be considered as a sign of progressivity as long as such officials are harming Iranian people; such officials would become a sign of illegitimacy when they are expelled from power only for their minor siding with the people.

Some of these commentators have become kind enough to the brown people of Iran to put their struggle inside parentheses (+, +) when discussing the ongoing struggle in North Africa and Middle East. The existence of such parentheses shows the mentality that puts the struggle of the people of Iran in the periphery. Such a struggle is pushed inside the parentheses only based on nationality. In most of the recent writings, the last two year struggle of the people in Iran (started from 2009) is not even mentioned only because it would contradict with the racialized nationalism the writers would like to express. Thus I have to admit that this is a kindness coming from white masters to put Iranian people's struggle inside parentheses and to their periphery. Brown people haven't suffered, fought back and resisted against their authorities unless a white man acknowledges their struggle.

Such commentators are the leftist collaborators of people that Hamid Dabashi has named native informers:

From my review of Hamid Dabashi's book "Brown Skin, White Masks" published on Z-net:

The leftist collaborates of native informers

After the formation of the movement in Iran, June 2009, new collaborators of native informers came to being whose tireless job has been denigrating, ridiculing, and discrediting the resistance of the people in Iran. They have mockingly made baseless accusations against Iran's protesters. These new collaborators of the native informers fancy themselves to be leftist and anti-imperialist but they are in fact even more colonized in their minds than native informers. Some of them have accused the movement in Iran of having received pen cameras smuggled by the US government. The only two news-agencies who have actually come up with this propaganda are Fox News and one run by Iranian monarchists. The native informers and their new collaborators even share the same news-agencies when it comes to demonization and humiliation of the Iranian people's resistance movement.

These leftist collaborators of native informers haven't missed a minute to mock Iranian protesters and to emasculate and humiliate them by pretending that they are nothing but powerless agents of the empire. The main agenda of leftist collaborators has actually been the same as the native informers: to portray a nation as powerless.

"In much of the dismissals and derisions heaped on Iran's Green Movement, Massad's insight has been on full display. Iranians in this estimation have in effect been considered to be too feminine, too pretty, too weak, too middle class bourgeois, too chic (look at all those pretty women and their hairdos and sunglasses) to have their own uprising, and like all other women they needed help from the superpower." (Hamid Dabashi, De-racializing revolutions, published in Aljazeera online)

The leftists' colonial denigration of the Islamic aspects of a revolutionary culture

The leftist collaborators of native informers often oppose the empire but display a love-hate relationship with the government of Iran. They openly claim that they are against the government of Iran but they don't support the opposition to it either. The leftist collaborators' position is nothing close to critical support of the opposition. Instead, their job is to make propaganda against the opposition movement and to feed the accusation machine of the regime. These new collaborators have often distanced themselves from the empire's native informers but then all of a sudden started helping the native informers by de-historicizing Iran as a nation, taking the Iranian people's struggle out of its historical context and refusing to recognize Iranian people's long history of resistance (two revolutions during the last century). Some of them even stirred anti-Islamic sentiments in the US and Western Europe to discredit the Iranian people's movement. They claimed that a movement that shouts Allahu Akbar can not be pro-democracy. The root of such a claim is the proposition that "the Western values are incompatible with Islam." Again, it's very similar to the purpose of the native informers: to reduce Islam to Sharia. In fact, Islam is also a cosmopolitan religion and sociopolitical culture lived by 1.5 billion Muslims all over the world. Such collaborators, by mocking the Iranian protesters for shouting Allahu Akbar and for not having anarchist forces within them, were entering into an imagined competition with Iranian protesters over the approval of the fictitious white masters. The imagined competition was to prove who has endorsed whiter values. The fact that a Muslim population was shouting Allahu Akbar, demanding their votes, and sacrificing their lives for democracy and dignity shows the falsehood of the dichotomy of progressiveness and shouting Allahu Akbar. It is not just native informers who believe Western liberal democracy is the way to follow, but their leftist collaborators denigrate revolutionary uprisings if they do not follow the colonial formula that they have code-named as "secular." These "leftist" intellectuals are not native informers. They are worse than native informers, for in the guise of being in opposition they in fact carry their colonized mind into revolutionary uprisings and by ridiculing and denigrating them seek to subvert them from within.

The native informers wear white masks to hide their brown or black colors. But their leftist collaborators walk among the oppressed brown people with brown masks that have covered up their white masks. "I feel pain in giving these names, for the figure of the native informer the fictive white man presiding in their mind and soul has stolen me from me. He has owned up to robbing me from me and now can talk back to me in my own language, the language I thought I had successfully hidden from him so that I could speak freedom," Dabashi says. In case of leftist collaborators of the native informers, not only the fictive white man presiding in their minds and souls speak in our language, or in English with accents similar to ours, but he has also abused our anti-imperialist terminology and views to mock, ridicule, stigmatize our sisters and brothers' struggle for human dignity. He or she not only humiliates us in our struggle against our domestic tyranny but also caricatures our anti-imperialist resistance by abusing our suffering from imperialist oppression against ourselves.

The brown people who write letters from inside the prisons, who block their roads, who go on dry hunger strikes, who sew their lips in refugee camps, who smoke cigars in each other's faces to survive tyranny's tear gas, who shout slogans and record a few seconds or minutes of their chants, have no voice when it comes to the interpretations of their revolutionary uprisings by the leftist collaborators of the native informers. Such interpretations are predicated on Western conducted polls, or on Western media's (mis)reporting of the uprising, rather than on the people themselves. Any representation of the brown people is more reliable than brown people themselves in the leftist collaborators' colonized minds.

Hamid Dabashi says in Back Skin, White Masks: "The black man who dares to speak---as did Fanon, Said, Malcolm X, Leopold Sedar Senghor, and Aime Cesaire---is called anything from passionate to angry, but never 'reasonable.' He may have a point, he is repeatedly told, but he is so angry he defeats his own purpose. Reason and composure, of course, are white."

The Courageous Women of Iran

2011-04-14T09:21:00.000-07:00

This video has three parts. You can watch part 2 and 3, here and here.

Lessons of Egypt for Iran

2011-04-12T13:55:00.001-07:00

Brown Skin, White Masks

2011-04-11T06:44:00.000-07:00

My review of Hamid Dabashi's recent book "Brown Skin, White Masks."

The imperialist threat against Iranian physicists

2011-04-10T15:05:00.000-07:00

I came across a very interesting piece in Physics Today Magazine written by John Hauptman about a "hitlist" of certain Iranian physicists and the threat of Israeli nuclear war against Iran:

John Hauptman: "With surprising ease, I found a hitlist from Iran Watch (http://www.iranwatch.org), which is part of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control; it contained Alimohammadi’s name, home address, details on his wife and children, workplace, phone number, and professional affiliations. Of course, the list has now been removed. A second recently murdered physicist was also on the list, along with dozens more physicists and professors. The neo-conservative groups affiliated with Iran Watch are the same groups that trumped up the war in Iraq with fallacious and unsubstantiated claims of weapons of mass destruction." (read the rest here)

Hasan Nasrollah's double standards

2011-04-10T13:20:00.000-07:00

OK, my blood is boiling. I can't help but talk about it. I'm strongly critical of the oppressed Iranians' slogan which they shout "Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, I sacrifice my life for Iran!" However, if you are not one of those who criticize the masses to feel superior to them, look carefully to understand why the oppressed people in Iran shout such slogans. The smell of racism is stopping our noses from working. The rot has poured over us so badly that we don't smell it anymore. If you don't believe that, look at all the progressive weblogs that still link to Mr. Fox news and somewhere, Matthew Cassel, Monthly Review, and so on.

Some days ago on a mailing list one of those commentators that fancies themselves a Marxist told me there are some motions underway in Iran, like those in Turkey. Can you imagine someone saying the same about the revolutionary movements underway in North African and Middle Eastern countries? Can you imagine someone saying there have been motions underway in those countries and getting away with it on a Marxist mailing list? This is what I call the normalization of racism and denigration of a group of oppressed people.

Now, to have a better understanding of the depth of this racism that has made the struggle of Iranian people invisible, read this speech made by Hasan Nasrollah [1]. Look how when a revolutionary movement is made by the hypocrites' favorite people, even imperialist so-called emancipatory intervention is justifiable. This shows the corruption of these forces, Leftists or Islamists, that always bank on some kind of power, be it the reactionary Iranian government or the reactionary Western imperialist powers. What would you expect from Hasan Nasrollah that made a national feast in Lebanon for Ahmadinejad, one of the killers of Iranian people? Did you hear any opposition to that feast while Iranian people were drenched in their blood and suffering in prisons and detention centers and mothers were crying for the murders of their beloved ones? Instead of feeling superior to the people that sacrificed their lives to shout "Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, I sacrifice my life for Iran," understand in reaction to what backwardness that they have faced they are shouting such slogans.

Dear Hasan, if you were not an ignorant dependent of the financial support of the reactionary government in Iran, you would know that the Iranian oppressed people's movement would very well fit in the speech you have given and from which you have racistly excluded the Iranian people. You are not the only one. On your side you have academic snobs that are as corrupted as yourself, so keep going without worries. Iranian people need neither your support nor Imperialist support that you implicitly requested in your speech for those oppressed people you favor.

[1] Hasan Nasrollah: "Any accusation that claims that America is behind these revolutions, has incited and stirred them, and is leading them represents a false, unjust accusation of these peoples, especially if we talk about these five regimes [Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, and Yemen] which are allies to America. They are regimes that follow America and harmonize with it, that have offered and still offer services for the American plot, and that do not constitute any threat to the American policy -- which is Israel in the Middle East region. Is it logical that the American government criticizes obedient, harmonizing, submissive, and allied regimes and incites popular revolutions?" (read the rest here).

Namelessness and facelessness of brown victims

2011-03-27T13:37:00.000-07:00

The human details about one of the recent victims in Tel Aviv have been comprehensively covered in this article. Such details are non-existant when it comes to Palestinian victims. The portrayal of the human face of "white" victims is not an exception, it is a rule, and the namelessness of brown victims is common sense. Few would protest to such dehumanizing treatment and many accept it as the order.

"A British national killed after an explosion ripped through a bus stop in Jerusalem was an evangelical Christian who was studying Hebrew… Mary Jean Gardner, 59, originally from Orkney in Scotland, was caught in the blast yesterday afternoon when a device weighing up to 2kg exploded in a busy bus station… Ms Gardner worked for Wycliffe Bible Translators and spent much of her life living in Togo… She leaves behind her parents, who still live in Orkney, but she was not married and did not have children… Wycliffe executive director Eddie Arthur described her as a "lovely lady who was very popular"… He said: "Mary worked with Wycliffe in Togo since 1989 where she was part of a team translating the New Testament into a language called Ife… "The New Testament was finished in 2009 and Mary had then gone on to work helping other people… "She was in Israel for six months studying Hebrew in order to go back to Togo to translate the Old Testament… "Mary was an extremely popular and competent colleague and we valued her very highly… "She will be sorely missed by her ex-pat colleagues and colleagues from Togo… "She was a lovely lady who was very popular." … Mr Arthur continued: "She was someone who had shown a huge dedication to the people she worked with. She spent years of her life living in a remote area of Togo, dedicated to the Ife people." … "(Ms Gardner) was critically wounded as a result of the bombing, and rescue services transferred her to hospital, where doctors fought for her life for about an hour and ultimately were forced to declare her dead." (link)

In "Black Skin, White Mask" by Hamid Dabashi, which I am currently studying, this namelessness of brown victims has been comprehensively discussed:

Hamid Dabashi: "Every time we see the Israelis plotting to murder a Palestinian in revenge for the 1972 Munich Olympic attack they are eating and drinking; yet never do we see their Palestinian targets so much as sipping a glass of water. Why? Do Palestinians not eat---If you pick them, will they not scream?Why the humanizing effects for the Israeli assassins but never for their Palestinian victims--- who, it turns out, actually had nothing to do with the Munich attack?…The compelling question remains: Why is it that death and destruction causes so much loathing and outrage when it takes place in Mumbai, London, Tel Aviv, or New Kandahar, Beirut, or Gaza City? The answer can not be sought in the sandy domains of malice and malevolence. It must be carefully cultivated in the immediate historical vicinities where the politics of despair and the economics of domination combine to create a moral mandate to divide and rule---where are perceived as more human than others. " (Black Skin, White Mask, March 2011)

Khak Magazine

2011-03-15T12:04:00.000-07:00

Guest post: De-racialising revolutions

2011-03-14T12:18:00.001-07:00

This article by Hamid Dabashi was originally published on Aljazeera website.

Hamid Dabashi: "In much of the dismissals and derisions heaped on Iran's Green Movement, Massad's insight has been on full display. Iranians in this estimation have in effect been considered to be too feminine, too pretty, too weak, too middle class bourgeois, too chic (look at all those pretty women and their hairdos and sunglasses) to have their own uprising, and like all other women they needed help from the superpower.The "real revolution" was what "the real men" did in the "Arab world", not only without American help but in fact against American imperialism.As the Iranian Green Movement was thus feminised (by way of dismissing it as feeble, flawed, and manipulated by "the West"), the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions are assimilated aggressively into a pronouncedly masculinist Arab nationalism.The homophobic anxieties of the Arab masculinist nationalism, if we were to extend Massad's crucial insights, thus protest too much by dismissing the Green Movement as something effeminate, soft, middle class, bourgeois, and above all supported by the "superpower"."

"Revolutionaries often struggle to reconcile their accomplishments against those of competing 'others'.

Soon after the brutal crackdown on Iran's post-electoral uprising in June 2009, rumours began circulating in cyberspace and among ardent supporters of the Green Movement that some of the Islamic Republic's security forces, recruited to viciously attack demonstrators, were, in fact, not Iranians at all, but "Arabs".

Snapshots began circulating with red circles marking darker-skinned, rougher looking members of the security forces, who it was said were members of the Lebanese Hezbollah or Palestinian Hamas. Iranians, like me, who come from the southern climes of our homeland, look like those circled in red and remember a long history of being derogatorily dismissed as "Arabs" by our whiter-looking northern brothers and sisters, were not convinced by the allegations.

We also recalled that in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the massive influx of Afghan refugees into Iran all sorts of crimes and misdemeanours were attributed to "Afghanis", with that extra "i" carrying a nasty racist intonation in Persian.

Cut to almost two years later, when "the mercenaries" who were deployed by the Gaddafi regime to crush the revolutionary uprising engulfing Libya were reported to have been "African". "As nations evacuate their citizens from the violence gripping Libya," Al Jazeera reported, "many African migrant workers are targeted because they are suspected of being mercenaries hired by Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan leader." The Al Jazeera report further specified: "Dozens of workers from sub-Saharan Africa are feared killed, and hundreds are in hiding, as angry mobs of anti-government protesters hunt down 'black African mercenaries', according to witnesses."

Revealing the 'other'

These travelling metaphors of racially profiled acts of violence - that violence is always perpetrated by "others", and not by "oneself" - now metamorphosing as they racialise the transnational revolutionary uprisings in our part of the world are a disgrace, a nasty remnant of ancient and medieval racism domestic to our cultures, exacerbated, used and abused to demean and subjugate us by European colonialism to further their own interests, and now coming back to haunt and mar the most noble moments of our collective uprising against domestic tyranny and foreign domination alike.

The manifestations of this racism are multifaceted and are not limited to the revolutionary momentum of street demonstrations or the anonymity of web-based activism. It extends, alas, well into the cool corners of reasoned analysis and deliberations.

The racist identification of certain "Arabs" among the security apparatus of the Islamic Republic by some pro-democracy activist Iranians was in turn reciprocated by some leading Arab public intellectuals (by no means all) who are still on the record for having dismissed the massive civil rights uprising in Iran as a plot by the US and Israel and funded by Saudi Arabia, condescendingly equating it with the "Cedar Revolution" in Lebanon.

That astonishing sign of barefaced inanity was in turn reciprocated by equally (if not more) inane reactions on the part of some Iranian activists who have ridiculed and dismissed the Egyptian or Tunisian revolutions as a "glorified military coup" or else boasted that "Arabs" were doing now what "we" did 30 years ago, concluding that "they" are backward at least by a factor of a 30-year cycle.

This closed-circuit cycle of racism feeds on itself, and its cancerous cell must be surgically removed from our body-politics.

The Arab 'other'

The roots of Arab and Iranian racism towards each other, and of both Arab and Iranian racism towards "black Africans" are too horrid and troubling to deserve full exposure at these magnificent moments in all our histories. Aspects and dimensions of these pathologies need to be addressed only to the degree that they point to a collective emancipation from the snares of racism transmuting into cycles of racialising violence.

On the Arab side, as Joseph Massad has demonstrated in his Desiring Arabs (2007), in the course of Arab nationalism, the trope of "Persian" was systematically racialised and invested with all sorts of undesirable and morally corrupt and corrupting "sexual perversions", and thus a "manly" and "straight" heteronormativity was manufactured for "Arabs".

In much of the dismissals and derisions heaped on Iran's Green Movement, Massad's insight has been on full display. Iranians in this estimation have in effect been considered to be too feminine, too pretty, too weak, too middle class bourgeois, too chic (look at all those pretty women and their hairdos and sunglasses) to have their own uprising, and like all other women they needed help from the superpower.

The "real revolution" was what "the real men" did in the "Arab world", not only without American help but in fact against American imperialism.

As the Iranian Green Movement was thus feminised (by way of dismissing it as feeble, flawed, and manipulated by "the West"), the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions are assimilated aggressively into a pronouncedly masculinist Arab nationalism.

The homophobic anxieties of the Arab masculinist nationalism, if we were to extend Massad's crucial insights, thus protest too much by dismissing the Green Movement as something effeminate, soft, middle class, bourgeois, and above all supported by the "superpower".

The Iranian 'other'

The pathology of Iranian racism has a different genealogy. Engulfed in the banality of a racist Aryanism, a certain segment of Iranians, mostly monarchist in political disposition, has been led to believe that they are in fact an island of purebred Aryans unfortunately caught in a sea of Semitic ruffians, and that they have been marred by Arab and Muslim invasion and need to reconnect with their European roots in "the West" to regain their Aryan glory.

Predicated on the historic defeat of the Sassanid Empire (224-651) by the invading Arab army in the Battle of al-Qadisiyyah (636) in particular, this national trauma has always been prone to xenophobia of the worst kind.

Not just "Arabs" but "Turks" and "Mongols" - corresponding to successive invasions of Iran from the seventh to the 13th century - have been the repository of Iranian racism. This racism also has an internal manifestation in the derogatory and condescending attitude of self-proclaimed "Persians" towards the racialised minorities like Kurds, Azaris, Baluch, etc.

The external and internal racism then comes together to manufacture a fictitious "Persian" marker that is the mirror image of its "Arab" invention. The binary Persian/Arab, rooted in medieval history and colonially exacerbated, in turn becomes a self-propelling metaphoric proposition and feeds on itself.

Racialising revolutions

Predicated on these dual acts of racialised bigotry, pan-nationalist political projects have been the catastrophic hallmark of our post-colonial history over the last century.

As pan-Iranism has competed with pan-Turkism in Central Asia and exacerbated pan-Arabism in West Asia and North Africa, their combined calamity, mimicking "the West" they have collectively helped manufacture to loathe and copy at one and the same time, comes together and coalesces in an identical act of bigotry against "black Africans".

The current proclivity towards the racialisation of transnational revolutionary uprisings in our world partakes in that ghastly history and if we do not surgically remove it, it will send us on a goose chase precisely at the time when we think we are being liberated.

As the Zimbabwean journalist and filmmaker Farai Sevenzo has noted:

"In the violence of the last fortnight [mid-February 2011 in Libya], the colonel [Gaddafi]'s African connections have only served to rekindle a deep-rooted racism between Arabs and black Africans. As mercenaries, reputedly from Chad and Mali fight for him, a million African refugees and thousands of African migrant workers stand the risk of being murdered for their tenuous link to him."

Farai Sevenzo also reports: "One Turkish construction worker told the BBC: 'We had 70-80 people from Chad working for our company. They were cut dead with pruning shears and axes, attackers saying: 'You are providing troops for Gaddafi. The Sudanese were also massacred. We saw it for ourselves.'"

This ghastly manifestation of racialised violence is not exactly why millions of people from Senegal to Djibouti, from Morocco to Afghanistan, and from Iran to Yemen are dreaming for better days for their children.

Racialising violence

Racialising violence is the very last remnant of colonial racism that knew only too well the Roman, and later Old French Republic, logic of "divide and conquer", or "divide and rule" (divide et impera or divide et regnes), a dictum that was ultimately brought to perfection by Machiavelli in his Art of War (1520).

The criminal record of European colonialism in Asia and Africa is replete with this treacherous strategy. Germany and Belgium both put the dictum to good use by appointing members of the Tutsi minority to positions of power. The Tutsi and Hutu groups were re-manufactured racially, an atrocity at the heart of the subsequent Rwandan genocide. The British had similar use for the colonial maxim when they ruled Sudan and sustained a divide between the North and the South, which in turn resulted in successive Sudanese civil wars.

The colonial history of the rest of Africa is replete with similar divides, as is the history of Asia - particularly in India where the British were instrumental not only in re-inscribing the caste system to their colonial benefits, but also in fomenting hostility between Muslims and Hindus, which ultimately resulted in the catastrophic partition of India and Pakistan along religious lines.

The old colonial adage has renewed imperial usages. Soon after the US-led invasion of Iraq, a US military strategist, Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, wrote an off-the-cuff analysis on the Sunni-Shia divide, The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam will Shape the Future (2006). He effectively blamed the carnage in Iraq on ancient Sunni-Shia hostilities and linked it to the strategic hostility between the Islamic Republic and Saudi Arabia - a well thought out strategic intervention that turned the US, in the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, into a good Samaritan and entirely innocent bystander.

The strategy was so successful that the book became a bestseller in the US, while its author was subsequently recruited into the US diplomatic meandering to find a similar lullaby out of the continued fiasco in Afghanistan.

Solidarity of a younger generation

But these tired old clichés are the dying metaphors falling behind the trails of a liberated world, free to map itself out into different, more embracing, horizons.

Today beyond the reach of these colonial and imperial treacheries, we as a people have a renewed rendezvous with history - and if these revolutions are allowed to be assimilated backward into outdated and dreadful racialising elements evident in pan-Arab, pan-Iranian, pan-Turkic, ad nauseum frames of references, we will all be back where we were two centuries ago and all these heroic sacrifices will be for naught.

Fundamental demographic and economic forces are driving these revolutionary uprisings from Asia to Africa to Latin America and even to Europe and North America. Events we have seen in Iran, Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya, with vast and variegated resonances from Morocco to Bahrain and from Afghanistan to Yemen, are changing the very planetary configuration of who and what we are.

We cannot allow these nasty colonial vestiges to cloud the horizon of where and whence we are headed. And we will not: Not everything in our midst attests to our worst fears. Quite to the contrary: The younger generation of Arabs, Iranians, and Africans speak and act an entirely different language and sentiment. The transnational solidarity is what has ignited these uprising in the first place and what will sustain them for years to come. Evidence of that fact and phenomenon is abundant in the streets and squares of our Tahrir Squares and Meydan-e Azadi alike.

In reaction to the anti-Arab sentiments in the Green Movement, other activists wrote articles on the Palestinian artist Naji al-Ali's Hanzala and soon the Palestinian figurative hero appeared with a green scarf keeping demonstrators company in Tehran; and the day Hosni Mubarak left office, the first young Egyptian that the BBC interviewed said in solidarity with his Iranian counterparts that Iran would be next, as indeed Wael Ghoneim, the young Egyptian internet activist, sporting a green wristband when addressing the rallies in Tahrir Square, said he was delighted to know Iranians interpreted it in solidarity with their cause.

From their economic foundations to their political aspirations, these revolutionary uprisings are the initial sketches of a whole new atlas of human possibilities - beyond the pales of racialised violence, gender apartheid and, above all, obscene class divisions." (link)

Message of Solidarity with Wisconsin Workers

2011-03-12T14:08:00.000-08:00

This statement of support from Iranian workers with Wisconsin workers is translated by Revolutionary Flower Pot.

Message of Solidarity with American Workers

American Workers,

We have heard the sounds of your protests against the brazen attack on your rights, imposed on you by the capitalist system. Wisconsin Governor's plan is one of the latest attacks that, along with all the other attacks, against you, our fellow class members. Based on what we have heard about this plan, the workers' share of contribution to the pensions has been raised by 5.8%, to the healthcare services by 12.6%, and the wages are to be cut by 8%, and their work-hours will be increased. [Also,] the legal responsibilities of workers' representatives in bargaining with the employers will be reduced, and special privileges will be granted to the employers for firing/laying off workers and ...

We remember how capitalism in the U.S. has always tried to resolve its crises by putting more pressure on you the workers. The state that protects capital (whether during Republican or Democrat administrations), in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis, in order to prevent the bankruptcies of more banks and financial and other companies, has been taking enormous sums of money from people's pockets and taxes in order to inject several hundred billions of dollars into these banks and institutions, so as to prevent a chainlike collapse of key institutions of capital. We know how during periods of growth of capital and capitalists, enormous amounts of wealth is extracted and stolen from our labor and lives, and during the periods of reduced profitability how those wages for us, wage slaves, get even more taken out of them, lest this exploitative system of capital gets harmed or collapses.

Under the guise of 'freedom' and 'democracy' and defense of American people's interests, and using the wealth produced by the workers, [American capitalists] militarily attack other countries in the world. While those who really get harmed by these attacks are the American workers and workers in countries under attack, capitalist states and capitalists in these states -- in short, the capitalist world-system -- find themselves new markets, new resources and new strategic positions that provide the conditions for increasing their power. We know that from these trickeries and deceits, capital's share is the ever more increasing concentration of wealth, and the workers' share is nothing but more misery and more wretchedness. (You can read the rest here)

Scientific results?

2011-03-12T12:17:00.000-08:00

"A rather bizarre study carried out by German researchers suggests that staring at women's breasts is good for men's health and increases their life expectancy." (link)

Another one:

"There were differences between women and men. Overall, the results suggest that, compared with men, females identify more strongly with their image and appearance and use Facebook to compete for attention, said the lead author of the study, Michael A. Stefanone, an assistant professor of communications at the University of Buffalo." (link)

If these statements about "women" were made by a cleric or a Muslim male commentator, we would witness a massive international reaction, but such so called "scientific" results can be published under the shadow of "scientific objectivity" without being challenged, let alone massive international remonstration. Thus Ayatolah Sadeghi, for getting off the hook, had to say that he had conducted "scientific" research and found out that there is a correlation between women's clothing and the possibility of earthquakes. His sexism could have been dismissed if it was stated as a result of "scientific research".

Gaddafi compares his crackdown to Israel's war against Palestinians in Gaza

2011-03-08T18:59:00.000-08:00

From Louis Proyect's blog: Speaking with France 24 later Monday, however, Gadhafi defended his military’s right to oppress rebel activity, comparing his crackdown to Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip in 2009, saying that “even the Israelis in Gaza, when they moved into the Gaza strip, they moved in with tanks to fight such extremists.”...“It’s the same thing here! We have small armed groups who are fighting us. We did not use force from the outset… Armed units of the Libyan army have had to fight small armed al Qaida bands. That is what’s happened,” Gadhafi said. (Read the whole story here)

Iran's regime does it a little "smarter" than Gaddafi. Iran's officials change the discussion about their domestic widespread oppression by referring to the human rights violations, invasions and occupations of Israeli and US governments. Their method is more sophisticated than Gaddafi's as it not only, like Gaddafi's, distracts the focus of the discussion from their inhuman treatments of Iranian people and reminds the interviewers of their red line of oppression done by imperialist governments but Iran's officials manage to also indulge themselves and their apologists in a fake moral gesture of being against the injustices done by the US and Israeli governments. Gaddafi is being more direct in admitting his similarity to the Israeli government, whereas Iran's government secretively admits its similarity by its need to use such injustices to justify its oppression at home and at the same time it portrays itself as an anti-imperialist. Gaddafi says I did what the Israeli government did in Gaza. He is right: he has done a similar job and of course the part of the international media which has "justified" Israel's invasion of Palestinians will be forced to react more weakly to Gaddafi's inhuman treatments of Libyans after such an analogy is made. It's like Gaddafi says, "I did the same job as Israeli government did to Palestinians in Gaza, but the US government justified one by saying that Israel has the right to defend itself, while I have been been threatened to be bombed." Gaddafi uses the European and North American governments' hypocrisy to obscure his actions at home. Iran's officials use the US and Israeli governments' oppression to conceal its acts at home and to ridiculously claim to be pro justice and anti-imperialist. That's exactly why oppressive governments are mutually supportive of each other and their causes. In his interview with Larry King, Chavez once vaguely made an interesting analogy between the Venezuelan government's relationship with Iran's government and the US's relationship with the Israeli government.

"Chavez: Now, the internal situation in Iran, that's an internal situation. I do not meddle in those internal situations in affairs in Iran. And the same thing with Iran. The same thing with the U.S. You have relations with many countries.
Larry King: Are we going to blame the U.S. for having relations with dictators and monarchs?
Chavez: Israel, for instance, the United States -- you support Israel and Israel is a genocidal government. Iran has not invaded anyone. The Iranians have a revolution. The previous leader was the shah. He -- this is democracy in Iran with the Islamic style. But you have to be respectful."

Kavita Ramdas: "Women’s Rights are Workers’ Rights"

2011-03-08T14:52:00.001-08:00

Kavita Ramdas : "as Shirin Ebadi once said, you know, when I asked her—I said, "Is there a office for the feminist movement in Iran?" And she said, "No, but there’s a chapter in every household." I think that’s true. I think that’s equally true in Egypt."(link)

Current Necessities of the Movement

2011-03-05T23:56:00.001-08:00

My dear friend, Revolutionary Flower Pot, has kindly translated an essay I wrote in Persian recently. I am delighted to have his translation of my writing. You can read the whole article here.

The demonstration of Iranian women, March 8, 1979

2011-03-04T22:54:00.000-08:00

This video is in Persian. It's still important to watch for non-Persian speakers especially after so much demonization of the 1979 revolution and revolutionaries of Iran in the media during the last several months. It's the demonstration of Iranian women on International Women's Day of 1979, after the revolution, in protest to mandatory Hijab, the betrayal of their political freedom demands, and other inequalities imposed on them by the post-revolutionary regime. Note that among them there are also protesters with hijab who are against mandatory hijab. Thankfully there are such historic videos and evidences, otherwise one would never know how some of the rightist and leftist, mostly male, commentators would ridiculously portray the Iranian women of the time.

Leftists, stop being the mirror image of imperialist powers

2011-03-04T12:46:00.000-08:00

You can watch these videos of Libyan revolutionaries (+, +) for having a more elaborate understanding of against whom the branch of "Somewhere and Fox News" are standing in the name of "anti-imperialism". The "Somewhere and Fox News" leftists are the mirror image of imperialist powers. They back up their favorite dictators and accuse the uprisings against their favorite tyrans as being led or financed by the CIA. Of course their claims are based on evidence from "Somewhere and Fox News". Some of these dudes assume their audiences to be unintelligent and think that by saying nonsense such as "I don't like Ahmadinejad, Khameneie, Gaddafi, etc. but I don't like the uprising against these dictators either" they can become absolved of moral corruption associated with dismissing oppressed people's uprisings. What does it mean to not "like" a wretched population's uprising for their human dignity? It's not a kind of donut to like or dislike it, rather it's a collective survival action that such commentators simply dismiss in the position of a little imperialist.

The "Somewhere and Fox News" leftists accuse such uprisings of not being led by Lenin as if the Lenins of such countries haven't been killed, tortured, imprisoned, exiled for decades, as if their favorite uprisings have been led by Lenins and haven't had ties with US and other super-powers and as if their favorite uprisings do not include liberal factions. What else do you guys want on top of Lenin as the leader of revolutions in Iran, Libya, Egypt, etc.? How about "Baghlavaa topped with some extra honey" as my Kurdish Grandma would say or "Kabab with an extra tomato" as Persian speakers would say?

P.S., The points I am making here are related to a previous blog post "The similarities between Western Press and anti-imperialism" and the discussion on Mike Ely's website.

Hypocrisy and the trap of fake anti-imperialism

2011-03-03T19:57:00.000-08:00

Ali Akbar Salehi , Iran's foreign minister, has been interviewed by Vicky Morgan of France 24 (by the way I loved Vicky's facial expressions in response to Salehi's shameless lies and she seemed to deeply care about what's happening in Iran). In the interview, Salehi has proclaimed that no one has been shot by Iran’s security forces during the last 2 years (No, no, we didn't shoot people!) and also pretends to be unaware of the abduction of Mousavi, Rahnavard, Karoubi and Fatemeh Karoubi to the military prison named Heshmatiyeh. When Salehi gets confronted with the naked face of his and Iran’s regime hypocrisy for “supporting” the recent uprisings, he responds to the interviewer that there are two kinds of social movements: authentic and fake. Consequently he means that the current social movement in Iran is fake and different than those happening in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, etc and wishfully tries to justify the pathetic hypocrisy and huge oppression of Iran’s regime. The interviewer could push it further and ask him to explain how he measures such authenticity. Surprisingly, the nonsensical dismissal of the Green Movement by Salehi, Iran’s foreign minister, is similar to the arguments made by IR’s apologists and propagandists in which they, in a racist and tribalist way, try to mockingly contrast the Iranian people’s movement with those happening in North African and Middle Eastern countries.

At the end of the interview after Salehi denies the shootings of the innocent protesters in Iran and the abduction of a former prime minister and a former chairman of the parliament and their wives and after he dismisses one of the harshest oppressions against opposition done in the region by Iran’s government (e.g. one execution / 8 hours in 2011 ), he condemns the US imperialism in Afghanistan and the killings of the people there. Unfortunately there are political immature individuals and seekers of selective truths who take the condemnation of US imperialism in Afghanistan by people like Salehi seriously and categorize the clownish state-men of Iran as anti-imperialists. Nothing but racism can explain the fact that such seekers of selective truths ignore the atrocities done by Iran’s state, the neoliberal and anti-workers policies of Iran's regime, the silly fabrications and hypocriticism of state-men like Salehi and only consider IR’s phony condemnation of US and Israel imperialism. Such seekers of selective truths also disregard the fact that Iran’s government needs US and Israel's imperialism to get itself off the hook from taking responsibility for all sorts of oppression and human rights violations that it does at home as Salehi instrumentalizes US imperialism in this interview to change the discussion and escape the hard job of making “justifications” for the IR’s crimes.

Of course, the US and Israeli governments instrumentalize the regional activities of Iran’s regime to “legitimize” their interventions in the current domestic affairs of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Palestine, etc. Thus the relationship between Iran and Israel/US is more a collaborative one than a meaningful real oppositional one. In fact, the US, Israeli and some European governments abuse the memory of the long-term outcome of the highjacked Iran’s 1979 revolution to scare off the recent North African protesters of the notion of revolution. Even the imagination of Iran’s government benefits the cause of imperialist powers.

“US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned Tuesday that Iran was aggressively trying to take advantage of the domestic upheavals across the Arab world, and warned that the United States needed to maintain robust aid and involvement in the region to keep Tehran from succeeding. Clinton described Iran as working “every single day with as many assets as they can muster, trying to take hold of this legitimate movement for democracy,” in testimony before the US House Foreign Affairs Committee”. (Source)

Recently Esmaeil Hosseinzadeh, the author of US Militarism, has mentioned in his recent article published on Payvand that:

An indication of how passionately the Arab street detests their leader’s catering to the US-Israeli interests, or how they resent the brutal treatment of Palestinians, is reflected in the fact that, according to a number of opinion polls, they have consistently expressed more respect for the Iranian leaders, who are neither Arab nor Sunni, than their Arab leaders-because, contrary to most Arab leaders, the Iranian leaders have (since the 1979 revolution) firmly stood their ground vis-a-vis the egotistical imperialist policies in the region. (Source)

Dear Mr. Hosseinzadeh, it’s unfortunate for internationalist progressives that the insincere and sinister support that Iran’s regime extends to the Palestinian cause and its fake anti-imperialism have received enthusiasm from the innocent oppressed people and some opportunists in the region like the anti-Iranian people hypocrite, Hasan Nasrollah. The fake anti-imperialism and support for the Palestinian cause by Iran's regime is aimed to distract the world from the regime’s devilish inside jobs against Iran’s citizens, to (unsuccessfully) balance out its lack of legitimacy at home by making supporters outside the country and to claim being against the injustice in the region while leading a tyrannical regime inside.

The crisis of falling into the fake anti-imperialism trap of Iran’s regime indicates that anti-imperialist notions and support for the Palestinian cause suffer from dependence on counting on state-men who slaughter their own people and are unqualified to even speak in favor of Palestinians as they in their own countries commit crimes similar to those done by the Zionist state. What would cause one to not take issue with indifference toward Iranian people’s suffering (symbolically expressed in the opinion poll that Mr. Hosseinzadeh have mentioned in his article)? It seems that the importance of people’s suffering caused by different states is prioritized based on oppressed people’s nationalities, ethnicities, races, or the relationship between their oppressors and the US/ Israeli government. Such a stance toward oppressed people’s suffering is racist, hypocritical and state-oriented.

Salehi, Iran’s foreign minister, shamelessly mentions in the interview that the two protesters who were killed by the state’s thugs during the 14th of February, 2011 were Basijis. Let’s wait to see if Matthew Cassel would write another article based on the fabrication of the intelligence ministry or Salehi, Iran’s foreign minister, for In These Times about the killings of Basijis by Iran’s peaceful protesters.

Guest post: Iran's labor movement and struggle

2011-03-03T18:02:00.000-08:00

The sign reads: "Swear to God, we've come to a breaking point from all the discrimination and injustice." (Translation from Tehran Bureau)

Ahmadinejad visited Lorestan. He was welcomed with two signs. One reads "We, the workers of Parsilon, are hungry" and the other one reads "Swear to God, we've come to a breaking point from all the discrimination and injustice." (You can read more about the event here)

This article (copied below) was originally published on Iranian. It gives a great account of the labor struggle and movement in Iran.

Nasser Shirakbari: "While the discussion of labor unions in United States is controversial, the Iranian society under the Islamic Republic can benefit the cohesiveness it brings among a suppressed working class and presents a forefront imbued with strength in numbers. The Islamic Republic has come to recognize this strength in populace and has guarded against it.

On January 15, 2011, three labor Unions in Iran released the following statement: Reza Rakhshan, the head of the Haft Tapeh Sugar Cane Workers Syndicate, commenced his 6 month jail term given to him by the District 13 Court of Appeals on January 3.

While all charges against Rakhshan were dropped by a lower court, the subsequent motion by the prosecutor’s office resulted in a six month jail term at an upper court on charges of “propagating lies” and “disturbance of public peace”.

We condemn the sentence on the head of the Haft Tapeh Sugar Cane Workers Syndicate and call for the repeal of all sentences against labor activists and for the release of all jailed workers, including Behruz Nikufard, Alireza Saeedi, and Behruz Molazadeh. Wishing the spread of peace and justice throughout the world; Tehran and Suburbs Vahed Bus Workers Syndicate, Haft Tapeh Sugar Cane Workers Syndicate, and Founding Board to Relaunch Metal and Mechanics Syndicate.

In 2005 Mansour Osanloo (see video) organized an independent trade union of bus workers, consisting of 17,000 members, called Tehran and Suburbs Vahed Bus Workers Syndicate. In doing so, he was able to negotiate a pay raise of $50 per month, owners providing uniforms for the workers, 2 year contract, and other concessions for women workers. On July 10, at a bus stop, he was abducted and dragged away into a car. While being taken away, he shouted his name, so others know who he was. He was taken to Evin prison. There, he was beaten and cut off portion of his tongue to set example for others. Osanloo had been in and out of prison in the past few years. His most recent detention came 3 weeks after he announced of his travel outside Iran. In June he joined fellow transport workers at the International Transport Federation in London, and told them he needed their support. He travelled to Brussels to meet with the International Trade Union Confederation and other similar organizations. He explained his goals were to obtain better salaries and improving the lives of workers in Iran. The International Labor Organization which is a United Nations agency urged the Iranian government to drop charges against Osanloo and other labor organizers and grant them right to independent Unions. The ITF reported in March 16, 2010 that he was moved again within the Rajai Shahr Prison system to ward 5, which is reserved for drug addicts and HIV positive inmates.

In September 2010 Barez Tires went on a 4-day strike. It ended when Kerman labor office gave them some assurances. In November a change in management level brought some willingness to discuss issues and provide answers in exchange of not to strike. Later with the pretext of subsidies cuts, the management did not meet the negotiated matters, prompting a new round of strikes in January 2011. The workers one by one shut down operation. By next day they had 3,500 workers on strike after the night-shift joined them. Among their demands: Permanent contract instead of month by month. To receive Full compensation for overtime. Calling for two days off per week instead of one every other week. Also, protesting production bonuses which have been reduced last October.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had foreseen the troubles ahead for his subsidies cut, and knew the organized opposition might be the unions that may cause disturbance. So he went on a preemptive strike at the beleaguered Unions. In early September 2010, he issued threats to all trade unions and labor activists across Iran against union organizing activity. Meanwhile labor leaders were detained; jail terms were added to those already in detention and placed restrictions on labor reporting. A communiqué were issued to all local and national Media by the Supreme National Security Council on October 5 that there will be no coverage of labor activity of any kind. The SNSC which is the Country’s highest decision-making body also issued a warning to ILNA (Iran Labor News Agency) for its previous labor reporting. By December, a massive security force was in place to crush anyone “disrupting” or protesting on behalf of the unions or individuals.

In the quest for freedom, an atmosphere where individual talents can blossom to productive essence to benefit all, we search for viable options. Unions have been an actor in the political scenes in Iran. They have conducted many strikes in the past decades, and participated in 2009 post-election demonstrations. The interwoven structure of a union with its profound grievances, make them a potent force that no revolution for change can do without them.

Islamic Republic allows only State approved unions that deals only on minor issues such as illegal use of temporary workers, layoffs, dispute over unpaid wages, pension etc. – negotiations on wages and working conditions are not on the table. These Unions exist within the recognized industries like oil, steel, and manufacturing plants. Many workers on construction and individual contractors do not have a union and cannot have one. The goal of having independent unions has been a contentious issue between the working force and the government.

Unions have a friend in Iran’s Majles, Ali Reza Mahjoub, and head of the Workers’ House. He has criticized President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for his subsidies plan, adversely affecting the working class. Labor activist wanted their agenda at the top of Greens Movements’ demands. Instead they have received statement of concern for their living standard and labor rights.

It is imperative the power of unions be employed along with other existing groups in a unified element to challenge the Islamic republic regime. It takes a broad coalition of all people, students, intellectuals, organizations and Women’s groups to unite with the working class, and support them in their pursuit of better life. In return receive the unions’ support, forming a united social front, with the power to bring a meaningful change".

Mousavi, Rahnavard and the two Karoubis

2011-03-02T21:29:00.001-08:00

Zahra Rahnavard on the left and Fatemeh Karoubi on the right.

Mousavi, his wife Zahra Rahnavard, Karoubi and his wife Fatemeh Karoubi are abducted into a military prison named Heshmatiyeh. The authorities haven't dared yet to take responsibility and admit that these people are abducted. Some of the state-men have claimed that the four of them are at their homes and if their lights are off they have probably left to their relatives' houses or smilar nonsensical silly claims. The fact that after the demonstrations of the 14th of February, 2011, Karoubi, Mousavi and their wives have been under house arrest and an iron wall has been built around the house of Mousavi is never mentioned or acknowledged by the state-men. Thus the government of Iran is not as fierce and powerful as some of its propagandists and apologists wish it to be.

But, who is Zahra Rahnavard?

From Wikipedia:"Zahra Rahnavard earned her bachelor and master's degrees in art and architecture from University of Tehran. She also has master's and PhD degrees from Islamic Azad University in Political science.Rahnavard was among the early revolutionaries against the Shah. In the last years of the Shah, she was close to Ali Shariati, a dissident Islamist leader… She served as the chancellor of Alzahra University in Tehran, Iran, from 1998 to 2006, and as a Political Adviser to the former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami.Rahnavard was the first Iranian woman appointed as a chancellor of a university since the Iranian Revolution of 1979. She was nominated to this post by former Minister of Science, Research and Technology, Mostafa Moin. After the election of president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005 and the purging of reformist officials from the government, Rahnavard was removed or resigned from her position as the chancellor of Al-zahra University in 2006, replaced by Mahboubeh Mobasheri. She is the wife of Iranian ex-prime minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi (the last Prime Minister of Iran) and has three daughters. Since Mousavi's entry into the 2009 presidential race she has actively participated in his campaign. Rahnavard is the author of 15 books…"

And who is Fatemeh Karoubi? I suggest Fatemeh Karoubi's open letters written during the last two years to be read for a better understanding of her courageous and strong political character. Two of her letters can be read here and here.

From Wikipedia: Karroubi served as an advisor to her husband on social affairs and social issues when he served as the chairman of the Majlis of Iran from 2000 until 2004. She also served as the deputy minister for social affairs in the government of former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami during his time in office. During the 2009 Iranian presidential campaign openly campaigned with her husband, a previously unusual move for the wife of a male politician in Iran. She actively participated in all aspects of her husband's presidential bid, "I give speeches and do as much as I can to support him. We think about victory. We want the current situation to change." Additionally, Karroubi served as the head of the Karroubi campaign in Tehran Province. The couple's second son, Taghi Karroubi, worked with his parents as one of his father's campaign managers. She openly criticized the policies of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during the campaign saying, "We have a very rocky economic situation... there is a lack of economic, political, individual and social security."During the 1980s, Karroubi played a significant role in the construction and management of hospitals and other medical clinics for the Martyr Foundation. The foundation worked with families who had lost members during the Iran-Iraq War. Fatemeh Karroubi publishes a magazine for Iranian women called, Irandokht (Daughter of Iran). Karroubi is also the head of an Iranian woman's group. Karroubi has been critical of government policies towards women in Iran. She is particularly harsh toward the "unequal status" of women's employment opportunities in the country, especially for high paying positions saying, "They think only men are the bread winners and hence they don't hire women in senior positions." She also criticized the lack of female candidates for political office in the run-up to the 2009 Iranian elections. The Guardian Council, which approves all candidates for office in Iran, approved only four male candidates from a list of 476 men and women who registered to run for President of Iran. She told the AFP before the election that, "Women's rights are widely being breached...One of my objections is that they (the Guardian Council) did not qualify even one woman."

I agree with Payman Jafari's comment about the abduction of the Mousavis and Karoubis:

"Although Mousavi and Karroubi do not have a radical programme and strategy for change, everyone who aspires to real democracy and social justice must condemn their arrest." (Source)

The arrest of Mousavi, Rahnavard, and Karoubis indicates the regime's fragility and extreme fear of the Green Movement, its solely militaristic approach in confronting the movement (restricted to widespread arrests, execution and lengthy sentences, batons, tear gas, tortures, recent abductions, etc.) and the fact that authorities do not find it possible to even openly admit their killings, recent abductions, etc. The abduction of Mousavi, Rahnavard and the two Karoubis was one of the ultimate aces of the state before committing Gaddaffi's kind of massacre or another widespread execution like the one during the 80s by Khomeini but I think the government of Iran does not currently afford committing such crimes. Killing one student during the demonstrations required Iran's government to steal the killed protester's photo, photoshop it, fabricate a Basiji ID for his dead body, arrest his brother after his brother told the story and to claim the killed protester was spying for Iran's government after videos and photos of the killed protester in oppositional activities were published by his friends. Several different conspiratorial videos were also made in "justification" of the murder of Neda Agha-Soltan. Thus the murder of Iranian people is not as easy and costless as the authorities and their supporters would wish.

The Iran's government and its propagandists proclaimed that the Green Movement is dead during the last year and often reduced the movement to Mousavi and Karoubi, the heads of the Fetneh as they call them--- like some leftists reduce the Green Movement to its leaders. However, even after the recent abduction and the house arrest of Mousavi and Karoubi from the 14th of February, people have already protested two times and it has been planned by the Green Movement's activists to protest every Tuesday including on the 8th of March, the International Women's Day. Another state's fabrication during the last several demonstrations has been the claim that everything is calm in the cities and people who are out in the streets are there to shop for the Iranian New Year, Norouz. However, the abduction of Mousavi, Rahnavard and the two Karoubis and the arrest of thousands of people during the last several weeks display very clearly that how dumb the state-men of Iran are as they don't even try to back up their lousy fabrications in their actions. If everywhere is calm, people are shopping for the new year, and the Green Movement is dead, why thousands are arrested and several have been killed and Mousavi: a former prime minister from 1981 to 1989, Zahra Rahnavard: a university professor and women's rights activist, Karoubi: a former chairman of the parliament from 1989-1992 and from 2000 to 2004, Fatemeh Karoubi: a former deputy minister and an advisor of a presidential candidate and political activist are all abducted and hold in a military prison?

The abduction of Mousavi, Rahnavard and the two Karoubis have brought two reductionist reactions from some of the "ultra leftists" and reformist politicians. The former doesn't acknowledge the importance of Mousavi, Rahnavard and the two Karoubis in the movement and their resistance to the system alongside the people--- even though not as progressive and radical as we would hope. The latter group doesn't have the power but if it did it would have illegalized all the chants and events except those in favor of Mousavi and Karoubi. Both groups are disconnected from the reality and seem to believe, one way or another, in the delusion of Iran's state that the movement will "end" or protesters can be manipulated when Karoubis and Mousavis are stolen from the scene.

The strong condemnation of Mousavi, Rahnavard and the two Karoubis' abduction is not equivalent to submission to their entire political beliefs and ideals. One can strongly oppose their abduction, support their role in the movement, ask for their release along with other political prisoners and spontaneously criticize those parts of their views that one finds problematic. The reduction of the movement's demands to the release of these people (as some of the reformists do) is false, the same way that disregarding their abduction and their role in the movement (as some "ultra-leftists" suggest) is wrong.

We also have to understand that the emergence of a movement with highly progressive independent leaders in a country like Iran that has undergone multiple series of widespread killings, exiling and imprisoning of progressives and leftists during the last several decades was absolutely impossible. The fact that Mousavi and Karoubi have (or better to say had) a leg in the state and a leg outside of the state has helped the people in Iran's destroyed civil society to organize and more clearly display the state's hunger for power monopolization to different sociopolitical layers of the society.

The recent demonstrations in Iran

2011-03-02T12:47:00.000-08:00

People of Tehran, Eslam-Shahr, Shiraz, Tabriz, Isfahan, Mashhad, Rasht, etc. protested yesterday, the 10th of Esfand (in Iranian calendar) or the 1st of March. Eslam-Shahr is an impoverished area in southern part of Tehran. A working class teacher from Eslam-Shahr, Abdolreza Ghanbari, is sentenced to death for taking some videos during the December protests of 2009 (his story here). The Shiraz's demonstrations were so strong. On the same day, three prisoners accused of drug activities were hanged in Shiraz. Many of these hangings of drug accused and other non-political prisoners are politically driven and the days that execution orders are carried are carefully picked to crate a climate of fear or to distract from political events. It's a way for the government to claim power in a country that many of its citizens are economically and sociopolitically discontent.

Fatemeh Mohtashemipour whose open love letters during the last two years to her imprisoned husband, Mostafa Tajzadeh, have been very famous is arrested and is in a prison of the Revolutionary Guard. 30 people have been arrested on a street in Tehran called Palestine, how symbolic this must be for all of those who consider Iran's regime to be a supporter of Palestinians. The arrested protesters of yesterday's demonstrations were held in the building of IRNA (Islamic Republic News Agency) and several schools. How dumb a government must be to use the building of its official news agency as a prison? Iran's government has entered its phase of post-propaganda and post-wearing fake morality and legitimacy masks. A government that can't even pretend that its official news agency is independent from the thugs, security forces, and intelligence officers must be already done. The state's capability of creating propaganda, which its own supporters could pretend to believe, has also come to an absolute zero let alone coming up with ideologies or ideals that would "justify" its power thirst and legitimacy.

The daughter of Rafsanjani, Faezeh Hashemi, was arrested during the previous demonstrations by Basijis. A Basiji was recorded in a video shouting at her the most vulgar words, calling her a whore and threatening to rape her . The Basiji who was shouting vulgarities, an alien invented in the factory of the IR, was nothing like what one would have in mind of the stereotypical features of the Basijis during the Iran-Iraq war era: innocent looking bearded religious guys who were too shy to look straight into the people's eyes and had nationalistic and religious ideals. The new trend of Basijis who threaten to rape people and shout the most vulgar words at them are not religious or idealistic as some commentators have suggested, but rather they are the symptoms of a malicious diseased establishment that has brutalized some of the citizens, for status or economic benefits, to the extent of their robotization. Many protesters have reported that the plain clothes who have recently beat them with batons were as young as 14 years old or even younger. That's something to consider from an oil exporting government that among its forces are the poor innocent kids.

Some of the videos of yesterday:

Shiraz:

Shiraz. A security forces van is parked in the middle of the street and is arresting the people:

Shiraz. People are chanting: "Mubarak, Ben Ali, it's the turn of Seyed Ali"

Tehran. The chants in the video: "Down with the dictator", "the honored Army member, come on the side of the people",

Tehran: Enghelab Square:

Tehran, Nayayesh Highway. The banner says: Dictator, say hi to the end:

The role of "Arab Women" in recent uprisings

2011-03-02T09:01:00.000-08:00

Overall this interview (video below) is interesting and some crucial points are mentioned but what was very saddening for me was Betty, the Ethiopian caller from London, whom Riz Khan didn't let finish or articulate her question. The recent uprisings have been covered up with so much Arab nationalism that many commentators forget that some of these events are happening in Africa. The Arab nationalism hasn't let any meaningful solidarity be created between recent uprisings and other ongoing struggles in other African countries which on their own are not attractive enough for the international media to focus because of these countries' unprivileged economic system and geopolitical situation.

In this article, for instance, Behzad Yaghmaian has discussed the consequences of the recent North African uprisings for African people and the relationship between African tyrants, European racist anti-immigration disorder, African immigrants and the recent North African uprisings. Nationalistic stances are usually stingy, exclusive and backward as they don't let different groups of oppressed populations (across different nationalities, ethnicities, etc. ) make links between their struggles, regardless of silly divisions.

Hamid Dabashi:

"What we are witnessing is a new planetary awakening far beyond Arab or any other ethnic nationalism. The world is giving birth to a new geography of itself. We must allow for and prepare for a different mode of postcolonial thinking (not yet dreamt by Bengali intellectuals) that will allow the synergy amongst these revolutionary uprisings to work themselves out and stop assimilating them backward into arrested jingoism of one sort or another"... "Though every Arab from Morocco to Yemen has every reason to be proud of what the world is witnessing in awe and admiration, neither pan-Arabism nor any other colonially racialized category is a sufficient hermeneutic parallax within which to understand, interpret, and advance forward what is today happening in our liberated world. The liberating geography of this uprising goes far beyond the Arab and even Muslim world. From Senegal to Djibouti similar uprisings are brewing. The commencement of the Green Movement in Iran almost two years before the uprising in the Arab world has had far reaching implications deep into Afghanistan and Central Asia, and today as far as China there are official fears of a "Jasmine Revolution." (Read the whole article here)

Middle East Revolt Inspires Iranian Resistance

2011-02-23T19:55:00.000-08:00

The claim of car accident is a new Basij ID issued for dead bodies

2011-02-21T06:26:00.000-08:00

Hamed Nour-Mohammadi, a biology student at Shiraz University (located at Fars province), was killed yesterday during the demonstrations. Hamed was originally from Alashtar, Lorestan province, and was living at Dastgheib dormitory of Shiraz University up to yesterday, before Iran's government killed him. Plain clothes forces threw him off a bridge yesterday and on the road he was hit by a car and killed.

Fars News (which we call False-News; its coverage of Iran's events is irrelevant and naive like non-Persian speaking commentators such as Leverett and Angry Arab) claimed that Hamed Nour-Mohammadi was killed in a car accident and the state's security forces were not responsible. The state's propagandists have probably thought it's easier to claim that Hamed was killed in a car accident than (like what they did to other killed protester, Sane Jaleh) photo-shopping his photo, issuing a Basij ID for his dead body and proclaiming that he was a state's person (from superior "race") and was killed by Iranian weaponless protesters. The fabrication of a Basij ID could have caused Hamed's friends to put videos and photos of him online to prove that Iran's government is prevaricating about Hamed being a state's thug like they did in case of Sane Jaleh. Consequently, the government would have to claim that Hamed had been spying for them in those photos and videos published by his friends, like the absurd scenario they made for Sane Jaleh. So this time Iran's state decided to claim that Hamed was killed in a car accident and was not part of the fetneh (sedition) movement.

Dear R.F.P. has very well explained Sane Jaleh and the absurdity of issuing a Basij ID for the dead body of a protester here:

"Of the signs of desperation we see coming from the Iranian regime, some are more absurd than others. Their latest record-setting performance in the category of absurdly vicious: stealing the body of a martyr, Saane' Zhaaleh, whom the regime's goons had shot dead, by the security forces and then claiming that the man they had killed was a Basij member killed by protesters (even though he was Kurdish and a Sunni, a student of theater literature at Art College, and an opponent of the government); then, not allowing his friends, family and classmates to participate in his funeral; then, when his brother reveals the truth, arresting the brother; then putting pressure on the whole family to go along with the whole absurd insult".(link)

Yesterday's demonstrations, on February 20th (1 Esfand in Iranian Calendar), were held in many different cities of Iran such as Zahedan, Rasht, Shiraz, Isafahan, Mashhad, and some Kurdish ones such as Mahabad, Sanandaj, and Marivan.

Also, the demonstrations of February 14th brought a vast majority of non-student youths and middle aged workers to the front of the scene of the protests in Tehran. Not that they were previously absent in the movement, but rather, they have gained a new momentum in leading the movement in public space. These groups of people do not write in citizen's media, websites, or so on as much as more educated or well-connected layers of the society do. Thus they have also been less exposed to reformists' talks and ideologies. For example, when they occupy and lead the public space their chants and actions reflect the reality of the everyday struggle of the ordinary people in Iran and not the reformists' discourses. I don't mean to put down the student's movement or claim that they don't reflect the reality of the society or that they are less radical than the unemployed or underemployed non-student youths or that reformists are homogeneous as many of them are too radicalized to be considered a reformist anymore. Let's not forget that figures from students like Majid Tavakoli, Bahareh Hedayat, Mahdieh Golroo, Abed Tavancheh, etc. are of the pillars of the Green Movement. However, the new momentum of non-student youths and middle aged workers whose income mostly comes from random underground businesses has greatly helped in the transformation of the movement into its post-reformism. The subsidy cuts, revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, deteriorating economic conditions, state's intensifying violence against people from different sociopolitical beliefs and different social classes, irrelevance of reformist discourse have all helped in this transformation.

My friend who participated in the protests of February 14th around Navab street told me that the non-student youths and middle aged working people's presence in the recent demonstrations was astonishing. She told me that she said this to a man next to her and he nodded and said we struggle everyday to survive so we have become galvanized and know how to fight. Then he had asked her to escape after being attacked by the thugs and told her that he is in his 70s and has lived longer than her so it would be less painful for him that he dies than her in her 20s. She said she broke into tears and couldn't hide it from him.

Iran's state has decided to not step back even a notch and instead use subsidy cuts, executions, killings, arrests, tortures, poisonous tear gas, etc. to overcome the people's power. However, the inflexibility of the regime on the one hand and its simultaneous failure, on the other, in forms of economic exploitation, mismanagement, corruption, militaristic neo-liberalism and socio-political oppression have brought more underrepresented layers of the society into the movement. Workers who have struggled for the most basic economic demands such as the increase of income to poverty level have been brutally oppressed by iron fists of the regime and know better than anyone that justice will not materialize in a climate that their least rights such as the one to protest their poor working and living conditions and the subsidy cuts would not be met.

Hamed Nour-Mohammadi was killed by the state's goons. Rest in peace.

The tear gas used by Iran's thugs has caused blood vomiting and the loss of voice

2011-02-20T19:57:00.000-08:00

Three Iranian protesters who participated in the 14th February demonstrations and were tear gassed have reported that they have suffered several different symptoms that they previously didn't suffer when they were tear gassed:

"Shadi Sadr, an Iranian human rights lawyer, told the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran that at least three people who participated in the 14 February protests have expressed that the tear gas used against the protesters was different from the ones used previously. According to the three individuals, when they returned home after exposure to the tear gas, they suffered symptoms such as severe nausea, vomiting blood, and loss of voice and their symptoms have not yet subsided.
According to an opinion issued by the Iranian Armed Forces Legal Office, though use of tear gas is not considered a crime, “any type of bodily injury to others which according to Islamic Penal Code is recognized eligible for payment of Diya [blood money] or Qisas [retribution], is considered a crime and it may be pursued in qualified judicial courts. Type of the instrument used in creating the bodily harm is irrelevant to whether or not a crime has taken place.” “I know of three people who are suffering from pains which were unprecedented as compared to the previous occasions. One of them had severe nausea and vomited blood, to the point where he was seen by a doctor and has had to take tests. One of them continues to have no voice through today and cannot be heard even 10 centimeters away. All three are suffering from severe muscular pains and cramps,” Shadi Sadr told the Campaign. The distinguished Iranian lawyer also said that other people who attended the 14 February gatherings have confirmed the symptoms of this tear gas through her Google Reader. A source reliable to Ms. Sadr told her “My friend told me today that she and at least three other people are suffering from body aches, sore throat, and severe cold-like symptoms.” They also reported that they were previously exposed to tear gas, but they had never experienced such symptoms before.
The referenced individuals have stated that substances in the tear gas used on 14 February were different. After exposure to the tear gas, none of these individuals were able to leave their homes due to severe pain, nausea, and other physical symptoms, and they have had to stay home. In order for human rights organizations to follow up on bodily harm caused by tear gas used on 14 February 2010, Shadi Sadr recommended that they see physicians and take blood tests which would show the effect of harmful substances on their body". (link)

The brother of Iran's state, the Israeli government, killed a peaceful Palestinian protester by tear gas. She was tear gassed when protesting peacefully against the Israel's racist colonial wall. The non-state (or non-submitted) people in Iran, outsiders (in Persian gheirekhodi ha), are racialized as second class citizens and considered an inferior race by the state. I would not be surprised at all to learn that Iran's regime is using poisonous tear gas to get rid of the "inferior race" who dares to take political action and stand against the state's oppression and systematic discrimination. The state expects an absolute submission to its God given power, no challenge can be tolerated even from a former president, prime minister, speaker of parliament or so on.

International solidarity is urgently needed to closely watch this case and speak up against it. Most likely we will learn about it in the coming weeks when more poisoned protesters announce the results of their medical tests and their symptoms.

The district of eggs, potatoes and beans shouts down with dictator!

2011-02-19T11:55:00.000-08:00

I am at the Denver airport waiting for my flight to Boston. I just read a piece by a protester of recent demonstration in Iran, 14th of February, describing the scene. It was so strong but I don't have time to translate all of it. Just this part for now.

"Thanks Mr., I will get off at Navab [translator's note: a district in Tehran, named after Navab Safavi, between Enghelab and Azadi Squares which is between Tehran and Sharif Universities] It feels that the main street is for cars, and the main street isn't a place for us [protesters] ….
Navab, Navab Safavi, weren't you the one that was considered to be an insider but was killed by the insiders? Down with you and your killers, both.
This is not what I say,
The local youths of this ghetto district,
renters' district,
poor students and prostitutes' district,
the district of eggs, potatoes and beans
the marginalized people's district,
say it.
It's only here that you hear:
Down with the dictator! "

It's oppressed people's struggle for justice, not racialized nationalism

2011-02-19T11:26:00.000-08:00

I have permission from Prof. Golbarg Bashi to publish this here.

An Egyptian friend of Golbarg sent this message to her during the uprisings in Egypt:

"I am thinking of going to Egypt. I think that you and Hamid have some experience with such protests. Can I have a phone number to call in case I need advice? Thank you. May the better future begin for all".

Here is Prof. Bashi's comment about the message above and the recent revolts and uprisings in the region which I find extremely important as the concept of solidarity free of race, nationality and language has been so gigantically disregarded among progressives and progressive media. We have been encountering a huge amount of heated nationalism coming out of recent events and progressives should not forget their role of emphasizing solidarity between oppressed people's uprisings as opposed to unquestioningly glorifying and prettifying race/ethnic-oriented nationalisms.

Golbarg Bashi: "On January 26th, 2011, Hamid [Hamid Dabashi] and I received a message from a dear Egyptian friend--this is what we call trans-continental, trans-national solidarity between world citizens--not pan-Iranism or pan-Arabism etc. What we're witnessing in the region is not "Arab" or "Persian" or some other ethnic "awakening"...it is people fighting to regain their dignity, regardless of their nationality, race, and language--these uprisings are not, as Hamid puts it based on "colonially manufactured and racialized nationalism of one sort or another"

Hamid Dabashi: Galvanized by Egypt, Revolution Spreads

2011-02-18T12:48:00.000-08:00

Karoubi to Iran's state: "be courageous enough to hold a public trial for me"

2011-02-18T08:30:00.000-08:00

Iran's regime and its forces are left with no discourse other than threats of imprisonment, execution (even before arresting and trial), killing, fabricating Basij IDs and other violent and oppressive tools. Also, the secret or open apologists of Iran's regime are left with nothing except for racist and biased dismissal of the Green Movement without laying out any reason, as their reasons would contradict their support for other uprisings in the region so they prefer to go silent now.

Yesterday, Karoubi , under house arrest, asked the government to be courageous enough to hold a public trial for him like the one that was held during the Shah for Khosrow Golesorkhi, a communist activist, and some other people. Today, February 18th, is actually the anniversary of the execution of Khosro Golesorkhi (R.I.P.). Also, about a year ago, Karoubi said that he is going to visit the families of leftist prisoners although he has political differences with them. He also visited the houses of several imprisoned unionists like Mansour Osanloo and Reza Shahabi. This is one of the achievements of the GM: the radicalization of the forces, such as many former state-men (like Tajzadeh, Isa Saharkhiz, Karoubi, etc.) and independent activists (like Mohammad Nourizad whose famous prison-letters are one of the most important events of the GM). That's exactly the reason that those who hold up their noses to the GM for the participation of reformist figures in it were so dead wrong. Many leftists who have actively participated in the movement have voiced their discourses and consequently have pushed the movement forward and with it many people. No one can compare the Mousavi pre 2009 election with the Mousavi of today. No one could have imagined that Karoubi, the former speaker of the IR's parliament, would ask the regime to hold him a public trial like that during the Shah for Golesorkhi, a communist activist, poet and journalist. No one could have imagined that Mohammad Nourizad, a conservative state's movie director, would have written a letter from Evin prison, while under torture, and apologized to the people for the IR's betrayal of the people's 1979 revolutionary dream of justice in their country.

Commentators who were skeptical of the movement for the presence of the reformist (former) state-men in it were wrong in disregarding the people's power and for obsessing with and reducing the whole movement to those formerly or currently members of the state. The same false argument has been made by those who dismiss the Egyptian uprising (that hopefully becomes a revolution) for the presence of liberal figures like El-Baradei and Muslim Brotherhoods in it. How can you disregard all different factions involved in a revolt and reduce it to a bunch of figureheads? How can you disregard the whole radical and progressive new institutions that come to being through people's uprising just because protesters shout Allahu Akbar or pray during the demonstrations? Isn't such approaches Islam-0-phobic and reductionistic?

Those protesters in Iran who shouted in the streets about 1 year ago that "our comrades didn't sacrifice their lives for us to submit and praise the murderous supreme leader" (koshteh nadadim ke saazesh konim, rahbare ghaatel ro setaayesh konim) (se the video here) proved that the system is not reformable. It took some of the intellectuals and reformist state-men active in the GM a year and two revolutions or uprisings in the region (Egypt's and Tunisia's) to recognize the people's message and to not denounce protesters' anti-supreme leader slogans for being "too radical" but radical people in the streets finally succeeded and they pushed the conformists and pragmatic reformists to follow in their foot-steps. Now, even activts like Ebrahim Nabavi talk about a revolution and think that "our comrades didn't sacrifice their lives for us to submit".

Karoubi has asked the government to "at minimum have the courage to hold a trial similar to those during the Shah's reign, trials like those held for the late Golesorkhi, Taleghani and Bokharai in which media outlets were at least allowed to report on the trials and even publish some of the details of the defense."

Who is Golesorkhi?

From wikipedia:

"Khosro Golesorkhi (22 January 1944, Rasht - 18 February 1974, Tehran) was an Iranian journalist, poet, and communist activist in Iran during the Cold War. Hooman Majd has described him as a "Che Guevara-like figure for young Iranians in 1974." Famous for his leftist and revolutionary poetry, Golsorkhi was convicted along with his friend, Keramat Daneshian, a director, of plotting to kidnap the Shah of Iran's son. The military court was televised live, mainly because at the time of the trial, Shah was hosting the Conference for Human Rights in Tehran. At his trial, Golsorkhi was given the opportunity to read a speech in his own defense. He began with some eloquence comparing the struggle of the Iranian left with that of Imam Hussein, the revered martyr of Shia Islam. He then continued to discuss the evils of land reform, as practiced by the Shah's regime, and the struggles of the Iranian peasants who first labored under the feudal system in Iran and then under the corrupt land reform. At this point, the chief judge of the military tribunal told him that he should limit his speech to his own defense. Golsorkhi responded by saying that his defense is the defense of the masses against tyranny. The chief judge said, once again, that he should only defend himself. Golsorkhi picked up his papers and said: "I will then sit down. I will not speak and I will sit down." He sat down and did not speak in his own defense any further. Once asked if he will continue his terrorist business he answered "Yes". Golsorkhi's execution was broadcast on state television. The court became a symbol of the Shah's dictatorship and hypocrisy, due to its content most of the trial proceedings was censored. After the 1979 revolution the entire trial was shown on public television, but again it was censored after the fall of Mehdi Bazargan's government.
He was executed, and was acclaimed a hero by socialist Guerrillas because he wished not to be blind-folded".

And here is Golesorkhi's defense--- It's in Persian but one can still get a sense of how eloquent, fearless and poetic he was without knowing Persian:

Some time ago I realized that some of my most favorite Iranian songs that I used to consider love-songs were in fact composed in honor of Golesorkhi. Golesokhi is referred to as Shaghayegh in poems. Shaghayegh means red poppy or corn rose. His last name, Golesorkhi, means a red flower (sorkh is red and Gol is flower). This poem composed by Ardalan Sarafraz and sang by Daryoush is an example. This one composed by masoud Amini and Sang by Fereydoun Foroughi is another example.

Karoubi's full statement:

From Deutsche Welle:

"As an adviser of Mehdi Karroubi, I wish to read a direct message to your audience from Mr. Karroubi that I received minutes ago under very difficult conditions." Mr. Vahedi added: "Mr. Karroubi emphasized that although his message is addressed to the public at large, first and foremost he would like to extend a deep and heartfelt apology to his neighbors whose peace and comfort was once again disturbed last night Wednesday February 16th, 2011 until 3:00am by government thugs. These individuals proceeded to use extremely vulgar words in their slogans, words that are not even worthy of families associated with this regime. Mr. Karroubi and his family would like to extend their deepest apologies to all those who were forced to listen to the vulgarities expressed by official government agents."
While reading Mehdi Karroubi's message his adviser continued: "The events that occurred yesterday clearly demonstrate that a direct order was given by high ranking individuals from within the government and in accordance to this directive, individuals were required to demand the the trial of Mr. Karroubi and Mr. Mousavi. It is very clear that after 22 months, individuals such as Rohani, Nategh Nouri, Ghalibaf and other friends such as Abtahi have been pressured into giving interviews."
According to Karroubi's adviser Mojtaba Vahedi, Karroubi's message to these individuals was as follows: "Now that you have executed the mission given to you by the government, I suggest you do something humanitarian. Ask the government to put us on a public trial. At minimum have the courage to hold a trial similar to those during the Shah's reign, trials like those held for the late Golesorkhi, Taleghani and Bokharai in which media outlets were at least allowed to report on the trials and even publish some of the details of the defense."
Karroubi's adviser continued:"Mr. Karroubi said if this regime has the courage to hold a public trial, we will prove whether it is we who seek to overthrow the government or individuals from within the regime itself who have such intentions. It goes without saying however that the intention to overthrow [the government] has already begun, as this government is no longer a republic nor is it Islamic. These gentlemen overthrew the Islamic Republic long ago.The tactics by the IRIB (Iran's International Broadcasting) demonstrated how corrupt they are and in the event that there is a trial, Mr. Karroubi does not expect for his trial to be broadcast on the national television, but hopes at minimum that newspapers and other media outlets would be allowed to cover it."
Mehdi Karroubi's adviser concluded: "Mr. Karroubi emphasized that a government that puts so much pressure [on its citizens], if it was courageous, if it was willing to stand by its own words and was willing to tell the truth, would hold a public trial. In the event that such trial takes place, Mr. Karroubi will prove that this government was overthrown by its own leaders and is no longer a republic, nor is it Islamic."

Shahin Najafi's song for Sane Jaleh

2011-02-18T08:12:00.000-08:00

The song is in Kurdish and Persian. The translation of the lyrics is from Shahin Najafi's page:

Kurdish

Mother, stand tall and shed tears, for my heart craves to wail

Dear mother, I want blood stained tears

The flower of my hundred dreams is laid to rest in this earth

Battle grounds are crimson by the color of my blood

Persian

Saneh, you were a hailstorm from the clouds

When our green tree was drying up

you brought down an axe on the roots of these night worshipers

Feb. 14th belongs to you

May you be happy now with Amir, and Sohrab and Neda ...

You have nothing in common with Keyhan (Conservative Newspaper) and Hossein, the interrogator (Hossein Shariatmadari?)

Kurdish

Mother, stand tall and shed tears, for my heart craves to wail

Dear mother, I want blood stained tears

The flower of my hundred dreams is laid to rest in this earth

Battle grounds are crimson by the color of my blood

I swear by the fiery tears and your inner suffering

My blood was shed for the battle

But its not that important, I hold my head up high

My departure is better than having a heart all torn to shreds

I am saying this for those who didn't even know my name: that I never sold myself (my beliefs)

Of course its clear that no one knows me better than me

I have nothing to do with Keyhan and Hosssein the interrogator

Saneh was never in league with those who sold their conscious

I will never be a victim of Shariat Madari's words

I want to see him one day swing in the wind, hung from his neck

I am a Kurdish child

Martyr of the path of freedom

I am a dove with bloodied wings for my motherland

May I never see the day that you are wearing black from head to toes (in mourning)

The world will not forget those like me and Farzads

I was a green martyr and these accusations do not stick to me

My mother, forgive me that I left you alone so soon

My path, had always smelled like blood, the path of freedom

That a relative, a vagrant and a loser, now causes trouble for my brother

Mother, one son is gone and the other now caught in the wolves' clutches

your share will be tears, because you are the mother of these Kurdish children

Persian

Saneh, you were a hailstorm from the clouds

When our green tree was drying up

you brought down an axe on the roots of these night worshipers

Feb. 14th belongs to you

May you be happy now with Amir, and Sohrab and Neda ...

You have nothing in common with Keyhan and Hossein, the interrogator

Kurdish

Mother, stand tall and shed tears, for my heart craves to wail

Dear mother, I want blood stained tears

The flower of my hundred dreams is laid to rest in this earth

Battle grounds are crimson by the color of my blood

P.S. : More about Sane Jaleh

P.S. : More songs by Shahin Najafi (here, here)

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