Jah5fv's List: Iranian Dissent

• Editors' Note Appended
• The shift is occurring against the backdrop of an economy so stressed that although Iran is the world’s second-largest oil exporter, it is on the verge of rationing gasoline. At the same time, the nuclear standoff with the West threatens to bring new sanctions.
• More than 30 women’s rights advocates were arrested in one day in March, according to Human Rights Watch, five of whom have since been sentenced to prison terms of up to four years. They were charged with endangering national security for organizing an
• Internet campaign
• “velvet revolution” in Iran.
• Also, two recent movies touched off controversy as too racy. One depicted an extramarital affair, and the hero of the second was an abortion doctor who drank and gambled, and yet was so beloved of the patients he had seduced that they sent him bouquets on his wedding night.
• Editors' Note: June 25, 2007

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• “They say bin Laden is dead. Allah willing, someone should come and kill this Monkey (Radan),” read another posting. “There are not just one or two bin Ladens. This sullied Iranian regime has a factory production line of bin Ladens.”
• Mohammad Ali Jafari, an official with the Revolutionary Guard,
• “more dangerous than a military confrontation.” 
• Iran's parliament has reportedly earmarked $500 million for a cyberwarfare campaign, and there is something called the “Basij cyber-committee” boast of training “1,500 active bloggers engaged in battle.”
• In one of the chat room leaks, pro-regime users discuss the benefits of spreading misinformation to news agencies, such as passing on details of a nasty human rights abuse story, only to subsequently have it disproved, allowing the regime to show up foreign news agencies as anti-Iranian, and propagandist.
• In another leaked discussion, regime cyber-savvy loyalists suggest flooding call-in shows on the Voice of America or BBC Persian with pro-regime sentiment.
• But none of the users, who include prominent Basij militia activists and bloggers such as Mohammad-Massih Mahdavi and Mohammad-Saleh Meftah, who have met with government officials and even Iran’s supreme leader in recent years have contested the validity of the leaks.

  • The authenticity of these leaks is not debated by the government

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• • Interesting site;
    
    Discusses corrupt regime actions;
    Like the execution of a park ranger on the left hand side
• • What is this?
    
    Days of arrest?

• • Blog of some sort?
    
    Linked from Fox News story on Iranian Cyberspace Dissent

• April 8, 2011
• On Feb. 28, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad boldly declared, "Iran is among the few countries in the world where no one goes to bed hungry."
• He recently announced that unemployment would be eradicated in two years. And the president defiantly insisted last November that Iran's economy is booming, despite international sanctions.
• But these days, the president's exaggerations are running up against economic reality: For the average Iranian, times are tough. The country's economy is weak, unemployment has skyrocketed to 14.6 percent officially (real numbers are surely higher),
• So stark is the contrast between the government line and reality that, for the first time, Ahmadinejad's perpetual optimism is losing — rather than winning — supporters.
• "We the workers of Parsilon [a factory] are hungry." Another sign in the crowd read, "Swear to God, we've come to a breaking point from all the discrimination and injustice."
• Enter the Green Movement, which understands that its opposition would be significantly stronger if the Blues would come on board
• As its leaders understand, the Green Movement's future hinges crucially on its ability to make common cause with the Blues. The continued deterioration of the economy creates that opportunity; only time will tell whether it will come to more than that.

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• • This seems like a highly contentious statement; How do I feel about this?

• Shirin Sadeghi

   

  Host, New America Now. Former producer, the BBC and Al Jazeera.
• The Iranian people have been in the streets for decades. The big moments are crystallized in media memory -- 1979, 1999, 2009, and now. There are people in the streets in Iran this week, as they were last week. They do not want an Islamic Republic of Iran. They want Iran.
• are part of an organized movement called the Green Movement.
• And then the phrase "where is my vote?"
• On placards and posters, and t-shirts, and buttons.
• It is not how people protest
• It didn't happen in Iran either.
• The millions -- and there were millions -- who were in the streets in 2009
• They want rid of the Islamic regime
• The Green leadership is a morally-compromised faction of the establishment
• As their individual histories and powerful political records have clearly reflected, they are not secular, they are not democratic, and they do not care about the inherent rights of the Iranian people, let alone see them as a priority.
• For most Iranians, the Green Movement is what the international media is calling the massive mobilization to dismantle the Islamic Republic of Iran.
• And yet, the irony is that while so many Iranians say this, they know, and so does the US State Department and the UK Foreign Office and the other governments who support the Green leaders, that the Iranian people are so miserable, so trapped in a nation overtaken by Islamists and their massively powerful military and security complex, that they will accept the Greens.
• In a poverty so deep as that which the Iranian soul has experienced in the last 32 years, hope is the only chance for survival.

  • These are highly charged statements
• After the current Green Leader, former President Mohammad Khatami, crushed the student protests of 1999, refusing to support the students, many of whom died or suffered in the violent prisons of the Islamic Republic, everyone in Iran realized that the Islamic Republic's establishment
• In the last 32 years, any individual who displayed any loyalty to the people of Iran above the Islamic Republic has been eliminated

  • Citation Needed
• Listen to them this year as compared with 2009 -- they are no longer merely denouncing Ahmadinejad -- they are denouncing the system itself.
• "down with the system", "down with the velayat-e faqih."
• They want a government of the people, for the people, and by the people.

  • Excellent cliched use of a USA saying
• When the Green Leaders win the power they have sought for years -- and they will eventually win -- they will not be off the hook, because the people want real change, not another game of musical chairs.

  • Will they eventually win?

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• The Iranian opposition consists of a wide variety of parties and groups with different ideologies and goals. Messrs. Khatami, Mousavi and Karroubi miss few opportunities to declare that they are not seeking regime change but change within the regime. They claim that Mr. Ahmadinejad has abandoned "the true teachings" of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who founded the Islamic Republic in 1979.
• 

• “Today, everyone was teasing me, asking, ‘Are you ready for your husband to go back to prison?’ ” Sharif said from the kitchen.
• The reformists, he told me, had to change their tactics and establish more direct bonds with Iranians. “We know that political reform has failed,” he said. “After the election, we should sit and talk to our people. In a taxi or the supermarket, we should make people learn about their rights.”
• the government eventually shut down every reformist newspaper they worked for.
• “I am more conservative than the new generation,” he wrote on his blog, which is in Farsi. “They are rule-breakers.” Mirebrahimi aligned himself with the reformists rather than with the young radicals, and he continued to defend Khatami,
• incremental change from within the Islamic system was the only way to bring democracy to Iran.
• The reformist-led parliament set up a committee to investigate the Kazemi case. On October 28, 2003, a member of the committee read its report at an open hearing,
• The parliamentarians left little doubt that Kazemi had been severely beaten by judiciary officials and died from blows to her head.
• Iran has an estimated three million to seven million Internet users, the most in the Middle East. Some sixty-five thousand Iranians post blogs, many of them evading government filters by jumping from server to server.
• At eight in the morning on September 29th, Mirebrahimi and Sharif were awakened by the police. Mirebrahimi was handcuffed and blindfolded at his bedside, and taken away.
• By late December, foreign pressure was mounting on the Iranian government to release the bloggers, who had not been charged with any crime.
• The statement that Mirebrahimi had signed was published in Etemaad. It read, in part:
• Officials in Khatami’s office instructed the bloggers to present their case to a special commission on human rights, which would then report to the President. When Mirebrahimi addressed the commission, he recalled, “The first thing I said was that when we leave this place, if any accident happens to us, just know that Mortazavi is responsible. After we told them everything that happened to us, the members of the commission were in tears. Even some clerics. Some parts of our story were so terrible that I asked my wife to leave the room.”
• After Mirebrahimi testified, Mortazavi tried to hunt him down.
• As Mirebrahimi told the story, “Khatami took a strong position against Mortazavi for the first time during his Presidency.
• But he added that the Presidential elections were likely to render this advance nearly irrelevant. “If Ahmadinejad is President, the only reformist left in government will be Shahrudi,” he said.
• Momeni’s organization, Daftar-e Tahkim-e Vahdat—the Office for the Consolidation of Unity—was founded in 1979. During the first decade of the Islamic Republic, the group functioned as an arm of the new regime, helping to purge the universities of people and ideas deemed contrary to Islam.
• During the spring, Momeni had become the public face of the student-led election boycott.
• “We aren’t interested in seeing who will be President,” he said. “We are just interested in constructing democracy.”
• Thirty-five thousand people signed an online petition calling for such a referendum.
• It was impossible to imagine that Khamenei’s regime, heavily armed and flush with oil money, would agree anytime soon to hold a plebiscite on its own survival, concede defeat, and disappear.
• Perhaps in time, some exiles have suggested, if activists could somehow mobilize a mass civil-disobedience movement against the government, a referendum could facilitate the end of the regime.
• “These two guys next to us are here for me. Whenever I go home, most of the time I see someone behind me.”
• Momeni left first. When my driver pulled up, the bearded men surrounded the car and took down the license-plate number. There was not even the pretense of stealth.
• Basij, a hard-line militia of young fundamentalists who provided physical enforcement for the conservatives. The Basij was created in 1979; during the Iran-Iraq War, it dispatched volunteers to the front,
• “The Basij is the heart and soul of the Islamic revolution in Iran, particularly the university Basijis,
• “Ahmadinejad’s term will be about moderate freedom.”
• some political activists, in the name of freedom, had questioned the role of the Supreme Leader. “I am so sad that these groups are trying to weaken the position of the Supreme Leadership, the thing we are most loyal to,” he said. “This is our identity as Muslims.”
• “The majority of the population is young,” he said. “Young people by nature are horny. Because they are horny, they like to watch satellite channels where there are films or programs they can jerk off to.”
• The regime could filter the channels, he suggested, or it could try to educate the people to tune in to more wholesome programming. He concluded, “We have to do something about satellite television to keep society free from this horny jerk-off situation.”
• My translator implored me, in a jaw-clenched monotone, “Please do not laugh right now. This is a very sensitive moment.”
• the frustration of the onetime Iranian élite under the rule of backward mullahs.
• Arash told me that he hated living in Iran. “These mullahs fucked up this country.
• The enforced sexual repression of the Islamic Republic had spawned a culture of extremes—virginity and arranged marriages on the one hand, sexual libertinism on the other. For young people from Iran’s middle and upper classes, promiscuous experimentation was the norm.

  • Good part to consider writing about
• Iranian men, he said, were expected to be both promiscuous and “psycho-jealous.”
• We are all outlaws.”
• The outlaw life, for many young Iranians, involves all-night parties and illegal drugs.
• Iran has the highest rate of opiate addiction in the world.
• At parties I attended, some Iranians smoked opium as casually as Americans smoke marijuana.
• “8 Mile,” the movie starring Eminem. As he explained the film, “It’s about growing up in a place you don’t like and working your ass off to get out of it.”
• He then added, in a tossed-off manner that stopped me cold, “But none of these countries will ever give me a visa. So I’ll probably die here with my dreams.”
• They seemed to outnumber the Rafsanjani campaigners, whose slogans were becoming increasingly absurdist.
• “D.J. Ali Akbar!” one group of campaigners shouted, to Arash’s delight.
• “Rafsanjani,” he said, and made a face, pantomiming rolls of fat at his waist and a turban on his head. “Ahmadinejad,” he said, smiling, and tugged on his own clothes, holding out a level hand equal to his own height.
• “You have a new President,” I said.
• “Ahmadinejad”
• Finally, he said, “Everything is finished.”
• “Thirty million Iranians didn’t vote for Ahmadinejad. The government can’t put them aside and not see them. These thirty million may keep quiet for the moment, but when the time is right they will defend their rights.”

  • A point to consider writing about
• Ahmadinejad acted with apparent confidence

  • Bravado; honor
• he signalled that Iran would not abandon its quest for nuclear technology,
• he declared that Israel should be “wiped off the map.”
• Now that the hard-liners had complete control of the government, Aghajari said, they would be held responsible for meeting the people’s needs
• his inability to make the economic changes he promised, even while the walls closed in on Iran’s cultural and political life. Within a year, Aghajari believed, Ahmadinejad would face an angry and disappointed populace.

  • Another good point
• Curiously, Ayatollah Khamenei issued an edict in October that gave sweeping new powers to Rafsanjani, who runs a government body known as the Expediency Council—a move widely seen as an effort to rein in Ahmadinejad.
• The new President, in other words, may be too hard-line for even the Supreme Leader.
• “I’m optimistic,” he said. “The people of Iran should experience this period so that things go better in the future. If the people hadn’t experienced theocracy, they would still be waiting for it. But now that we have experienced theocracy, there is no future for it here.”
• If he had been more forceful, there could have been a civil war.
• its Prague Spring—a flowering of freedom that quickly withered.
• Yet today I see that it is more difficult and more dangerous than I’d imagined.

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• Hamid Tehrani, the Persian editor of the blogging network Global Voices.
• there were fewer than 1,000 active Twitter users in Iran at the time of the election.
• "Some people did provide updates from Tehran, but many didn't check out. When someone tweeted that there were 700,000 people demonstrating in front of a mosque, it turned out that only around 7,000 people showed up."
• "YouTube was important, because so many people watched the videos … It was living proof of what happened and it's difficult to fake, despite what the Iranian government claimed," says Tehrani.
• "Twitter was massively overrated. But spaces like YouTube and Facebook have been very important for sharing information."
• "I wouldn't argue that social media really mobilised Iranians themselves – the protest were best organised using SMS."
• "People began to realise they should pay more attention to the reality on the ground and not become imprisoned by the visual bubble created online.
• The cornerstone of this movement is not technology, it's people."

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• but the loudest cries were  heard in a medium that didn't even exist the last time Iran had an election.
• So what exactly makes Twitter the medium of the moment? It's free, highly  mobile, very personal and very quick.
• The vast body of information about current events in Iran that  circulates on Twitter is chaotic, subjective and totally unverifiable.
• It's  impossible to authenticate sources. It's also not clear who exactly is using  Twitter within Iran, especially in English.
• Anecdotal evidence suggests that  the bulk of tweets are coming from "hyphenated" Iranians not actually in the  country who are getting the word out to Western observers, rather than from the protesters themselves, who favor other, less public media.
• This is, after  all, a country where the government once debated the death penalty for  dissident bloggers.
• Twitter didn't start the protests in Iran, nor did it make them possible.  But there's no question that it has emboldened the protesters, reinforced their  conviction that they are not alone and engaged populations outside Iran in  an emotional, immediate way that was never possible before.

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