Pedestrian

I must admit, for a fanatic, he sure is pretty well groomed.

Meet Hassan Abbasi, a top strategist for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (His English Wikipedia page is MUCH too kind to his views, check out his Persian page for a better description).

“Islam is not limited to our borders and our constitution. We have divine right to propagate it by force throughout the world.”

“It is very simple for us to carry out another 9/11 attack on the United States the moment we deem it necessary. We don’t even need an atomic bomb for carrying out such an attack, as we speak, we are training our forces in Argentina and Mexico.”

I must say, especially when he attacks the West, he can be very, very convincing; when he speaks of how the words democracy, civil society and human rights have only been weapons used by Western powers to spill more blood.

But he doesn’t stop there. He goes on at lengths about how “righteous” it is to spill the blood of both Westernized countrymen and Westerners themselves. He is very, very vague about who or what these Westernized countrymen are exactly.

And he doesn’t just believe words like human rights are misused as weapons. He goes on at lengths about how they are, in and of themselves corrupt and illegitimate demands.

If you listen to his older speeches (during the Khatami era), it is also frightening: the predictions he makes and the theories he put forth about a “Tenth Republic” (Ahmadinejad got elected in the tenth presidential elections in the IRI).

His words on Palestine may hit home too. But I must say, especially after the recent attacks on dormitories and on innocent youth, attacks that men like him have always endorsed and overseen, it will be increasingly hard to listen to Iranian statesmen go on about the injustices in Palestine.

In two words, his doctrine is: confrontation, war, and even more confrontation and war both inside and outside Iran’s borders. All for an “Islamic Society” that I don’t necessarily understand.

I guess I’ll have enough time “to understand” in the next four years

———————

I may add! We are teaching these guys manners! Unlike the fanatics in the Western world, this guy continuously speaks of “debates” he wishes to have with his opponents (the reformers)

As hard as it is to say this, as difficult it is to even think it, this man is now the president. And we will live our entire lives uncertain of the real results of this election. Personally, I think it would have been a close tie. But who knows?

I don’t recognize him as my legitimate president. Millions of Iranians, including his three opponents don’t recognize him as such. If he really won the election, he would have had no qualms about answering our questions. Nor would he have run to Big Daddy to try and scare the shit out of his people. But irrespective of all that went on and all the blood that HE spilled - or didn’t stop - to the rest of the world, he is the Iranian president. And he should be. The lack of credibility of the Guardian Council, or their insane antics is no one else’s business. We in the opposition will have to shut up eventually and find new ways of showing our disapproval that will not be harmful to Iran.

What is important now is that the strong, Western PR team behind Ahmadinejad clean up the mess he made. That he STOP behaving like the mocking, insecure conman that he is (you can listen to him call us “dust and dirt” here).

A divided Iran is dangerous for us all.

My guess is that they will tone down on the “morality police”  they had harassing teenagers all throughout the bigger cities this summer. They need to calm down the air and environment. The best way to get these kids to quiet down is to let them go about their business without any harassment.

Unless they really were planning on a total takeover. In that case, we’ve only seen the beginning of these militias roaming our streets.

As for what the opposition will do, that is still not quite certain. Where will we go? And how do we channel this ANGER?

Here you can find the audio of Mousavi’s question and answer session with 70 university professors (all of whom were immediately arrested after the meeting).

Some excerpts are:

“They accuse us of being European, American, foreign. That’s why I think it imperative that we make ourselves fully aware of any foreign interference, and we need to condemn and thwart such acts in their entirety. If we believe that one of the greatest achievements of this revolution is our independence, we need to be fully aware of any existing dangers. We need to have fully functional media outlets inside Iran so our people do not go to foreign outlets for information. Unfortunately, those inside Iran who have the power to do this do not seem to be doing much. They are only making the situation worse.”

“Even if we have problems with our laws, there is no way we can ever act outside of our own constitution. I have stated clearly why the Guardian Council broke the law by not staying neutral, but even I took my complaint to them as is mandated by our legal system. I can not stress enough that we will only act within the confines of the Iranian constitution.”

[on why he did not announce his candidacy earlier than 1 month before the election] “There is no doubt in my mind that had I for instance, announced my plans to run in October, out entire campaign would have been locked behind bars by Nowruz (March)”

[in regards to what should be done now] “Some people think that what we have already done, before and after the election, was organized and preplanned. Unfortunately, we were very short on management and planning. A lot of what we did came spontaneously from ordinary people. [the gathering at Tehran’s Toopkhaneh] wasn’t planned by us. Nor the one the day before that. Some think we have a group of thinkers and planners who sit around and decide what we should do or how we should go about things. That’s not the case. Even this “green” that has come to represent my campaign was suggested by a young 18 year old boy during one of my trips. He suggested that I wear a green scarf around my neck. And it just took off from there.”

“[the most dangerous thing right now] is a feeling of hopelessness that may prevail over some, especially the younger generation. We need to do our best to keep that from happening. Our entire history can not be summed up into these four years, and our entire people are not defined by one government along. Through out our long, documented history, we have had our ups and downs and nothing is attained easily. Our youth need to understand that. The youth need to understand that they[the hardliners] were never going to “offer the country to us on a platter”. We have to keep our youth hopeful. And we need to find practical ways of doing so. The next month is going to be a very difficult one.”

“This movement will not have one leader. Mr. Karoubi, and I, with Mr. Rezaie (who I haven’t been able to contact today) along with a large group of intellectuals and activists, we are going to get together and talk this out. But this movement can not be defined by one person, it is only repersentative of a struggle within the people, and it must stay and be guided by them as well.”

And FINALLY Mr. President-of-Lets-Fuck-our-own-civilization-but-have-dialog-with-the-rest (Khatami) made a statement without wetting his pants. About time already you old wuss.The most interesting part of it was when he said: “If this poisoned air of militarism and propaganda continues, and considering all that has happened in recent weeks, we can be utmost certain that there was a velvet revolution in this country - a revolution against the people and their republic.”

Here you can find a TV interview with Mohseni-Ejei, the head of the Ministry of Intelligence in Ahmadinejad’s cabinet. He is talking about the ballots. “You know well that when people vote, they write a name on a ballot, and fold it once or twice, and then throw it into the voting box. These forms are piled one on top of the other throughout the day. Fraud can only occur if, prior to the election, neat, crisp sheets are written and placed at the bottom of the box, so as not to take any space - no more than a few centimeters. If we do find sheets like this - with no folds, with no bends or alterations, crisp and clean, then, as you say, we can be certain that they are fraudulent.”

I really hate using this picture, because anything that is propagated by the mainstream media has “DECEPTION”  written all over it, but 10% of the votes were “randomly recounted” by the Guardian Council in front of IRIB’s cameras, and this is what they looked like:

If you think this picture is too fuzzy to show anything substantial, I’ve watched the actual footage on TV - these really are “crisp, clean, unfolded sheets” the way the honorable minister is describing.

Worse still is that the spokesman for the Guardian Council was asked why these sheets were not folded and he did not respond. He simply reiterated the fact that 10% of the ballots were “randomly chosen.”

And just to laugh off some steam, you can watch this hilarious clip from IRIB1. Here, the host is speaking to a clergyman about polygamous families and a lady calls in to talk about how well she gets along with her husband’s second wife. Then she says: “Our husband is great, he has the same name as our elected president Mir Hossein Mousavi ” … And that’s when she’s cut off and the clergy continues talking about how great it is that some women are able to get along with their husband’s “other spouses”.

I am  sure it is

I am copying this entire text from Naj’s blog:

————————

Kianush Aasa was buried yesterday. He was 27 years old. He was finishing the last year of his master’s degree in Petrochemical Engineering in Tehran’s university of Science and technology (Elm o San’at). He was gunned down by a bullet fired from a so-called “Basiji”. After he is shot, his body is immediately removed from the scene. No one knows what happened to it until recently that after frantic searching of all Tehran hospitals, the family has been able to find it in a Tehran morgue. He was returned to his hometown, Kermanshah (which is one of the Kurdish provinces of Iran.)

Kianush’s funeral was not advertised, and his family was prevented from talking about the manner of his death. However, a crowd of 6000 accompanied his body to the graveyard. The crowd was accompanied by heavy but uneventful security presence.

Kianush was an environmental activist, and a member of an evironmental protection NGO in his hometown, Kermanshah. He loved music and played Tanbur well. His thesis supervisor, Dr. Ashrafizadeh was the only person to give a speech in his funeral. He mentioned that among many qualities, he was a top student, a genius who will not be easily replaced.

Kianush was gunned down in Freedome Square, June 15, 2009!

We were all waiting for this. But we never dreamed it would be so macabre. Especially when all it does is lessen the real threat in the eyes of every day Iranians.

After thousands of people were imprisoned during the past few weeks, they are being dragged in front of our TV screens one by one to read their “confessions”.

Iran’s leaders, whoever they are, need to be cautious and paranoid. We have real, immediate threats outside - and possibly inside - our own borders. So why do these leaders constantly make a mockery of these threats? Why do they make them ludicrous, outlandish and quite unreal in the eyes of the population?

Even before reading this yesterday (a report on Iran by the Brookings Institution), I always try to tell my friends in Iran to “be careful” or to “take things slowly”. “Why?” they ask. And lightly as possible, I try to explain. And there was a time when we could have lively, heated discussions about these imminent threats and how we could find ways to thwart them.

But now, they will have NONE of it.

“P, I was there yesterday, I saw those men with my own two eyes. There were hundreds of them and they were completely coordinated with the police. They took orders from inside” or “what do foreign powers have to do with the words that Mr. X [some government official] spoke out loud yesterday?”

How can I even whisper the words “velvet” to these friends when in the past few days, they have been witnessing such macabre, dangerous miscalculations on the part of their own leaders? When they are this angry and bitter? And quite rightfully so.

How can they beware of “foreign agents” when they see their own friends, kids they are with 24/7 at school, doing homework, writing assignments, spending every minute of the day together, on television claiming to have been “plotting” against the Islamic Republic in the confines of some cave for the past ten years?

Mohammad Ghouchani is, in my opinion, Iran’s brightest journalist. Uncompromising, sincere and a master of the art. In the confession he has taped he’s “admitted to attending velvet revolution classes with his wife and mother-in-law”. These words are the EXACT word-for-word translation of his confessions taken from a government website. And yes, they do sound as stupid in Persian.

Such words, such actions not only decrease the level of awareness to foreign involvement they shut out that possibility in the minds of many people completely.

I am in RAGE because the people heading this movement today, were the ones, to use the words of that vile Brookings report “who only sought specific changes — but they are not incompatible with the continuation of the Islamic Republic.” It was quite clear who they were and what they wanted and what the population was willing to give them.

For all these cries of a velvet revolution, it is now that the real danger is slowly going to present itself. For all the threats of outside interference, alienating and making a mockery of these kids is going to do the job better than George Soros or Obummer ever could.

Mousavi finally released a detailed account of his claims. They span 54 pages, and there are some very serious, unanswered allegations in there. They can be found here. I am not going to spend any time translating them, because for me, it is no longer whether there was fraud or not. I have spent weeks trying to look over all the evidence, all the eye-witness accounts, all the information I could gather from inside Iran. For me it is no longer whether there was fraud, but what we should do now, now that we are certain there was.

And with the mockery and farce created out of this mess, I only pray that people do nothing. Go back home and weep in silence. There may be thousands of guards outside, hundreds of security men, but by now, after years and years of this same story, we have simply become too good, too masterful at hearing the sound of the silent weeping sieving through every door and window. We can feel it. And they can too, even if they pretend otherwise.

In this blog, I am not going to waste my time talking about irrelevant butchers and psychopaths like the MSM or Prince of Darkness himself, Reza Pahlavi. I have not watched a single MINUTE of this whole charade on TV and will NEVER do so.

But it strikes me as quite odd that the only MSM outlet I have always tuned into, the Huffington Post, did not have the barbaric Israeli assault on Gaza as their main headline for TWO WHOLE WEEKS (not even two minutes). Nor were the mutilated bodies of the brave, innocent victims of Israeli massacres constantly paraded on that site the way Neda’s was tirelessly and continuously replayed. Nor did the decrepit Nico Pitney feel obligated to take the victims’ “questions” to the White House.

If this monster is what the “free world” has turned into, I want none of it.

These people were all wrongly and unjustly imprisoned, tortured and/or forced into solitary confinement.

BUT THEY DID NOT SELL THEIR SOULS TO DICK CHENEY AND HILARY CLINTON.

SHAME, SHAME, SHAME ON YOU THE ROXANA SABERIS AND MOHSEN SAZEGARAS OF THIS WORLD.

IT IS UTTER SICKNESS.

FUCK YOU and the worthless, murderating pieces of SHIT to which you bow down every morning for your day’s meal.

In the midst of all the questionable data that is “tweeted”, written and produced, trying to make out what is really happening on the ground is consistently and constantly excruciating - even if you are there. Unfortunately for most of us, both the right and the left have turned this into an epic Hollywood movie with one bad guy (Ahmadinejad and Mousavi respectively) going after the good (Mousavi and Ahmadinejad respectively). On the ground however, things just aren’t as simple.

We love to hate Rafsanjani. The man who was largely responsible for Ayatollah Khamenei’s current position as the Supreme Leader, head of the powerful Assembly of Experts, president from 1989 to 1997, and quite possibly a very wealthy man. He may have money, but the revolutionary guard, the basij, and the main core of the leadership (both financially and militarily) are not within his grasp. Just yesterday he came out in full support of the Supreme Leader signaling his position clearly.

We love to pound Rafsanjani. Link Mousavi, Karoubi or Rezaie to this extremely controversial man. And I personally have enough reasons to despise him. But what do we really know about their opponent? I also find problematic the dark, wealthy, mysterious men who surround Ahmaidnejad, few of whom you know of, or whose names you might have ever heard.

I think one quandary that we Iranians are by now quite used to grappling with is the level of complexity that has come to unfold, and I see most foreign outlets (right, left, center, etc) reducing that complexity to trivial child’s play. Freedom fighters fighting an oppressive, brutal regime or Clueless teenagers unknowingly working for foreign means or Rasputin (Rafsanjani) working to overthrow a kind, righteous man (Ahmadinejad)

None of these views are politically or socially correct. Not entirely at least.

I wish more than ANYTHING that Ahmadinejad’s “Sahaam-e Edaalat” and “Maskan-e Mehr” were as clear-cut and dignified as certain progressive outlets believe them to be. But sadly, I know for a fact that that is NOT the case. Nor do progressive outlets battling “neo-liberals” have a clear cut view of basically one of the only mega-corporations in Iran - the revolutionary guard … and we all know who that corporation is supporting.

An unknown man whom only some Tehran residents knew as a relatively weak mayor, Ahmadinejad, ran for president four years ago with six other candidates. Amidst wide allegations of fraud, he was pushed up from spot #3 to #2 in very dubious circumstances. That year, like this year, the other candidates cried foul. But they were immediately silenced by Ayatollah Khamenei.

When he was brought to number 2 and ran a second time against Rafsanjani, his win didn’t surprise many as he was running against a very unpopular fellow.

But 17 million votes for an unknown? Maybe … But we certainly can not be sure anymore.

In retrospect, his rise was all part of a wider move signaling the ideals and ideas that had emerged within the core of the Iranian leadership at the end of the Khatami era. Motivated by sincere calculations, or malicious ones we will never know. We do know however that they have come to believe that the reformist era MUST come to an end, by ANY MEANS NECESSARY - vote rigging, assissations (the assassination of the reformist Saeed Hajjariyan) or suppression of the masses (silencing student movements).

This move began with the the seventh parliamentary elections which to this day remain Khatami’s most disgraceful sell-out. The Guardian Council went so far as to disqualify parliament members themselves and gave new meaning - even compared to its own standards - to handpicking the winners. Khatami was asked NOT to go along with the election, but he did anyways.

Hardline Control of Parliament: Check.

Hardline Control of Goverment: Check.

The judiciary and the leader were already theirs.

This phenomena has forced us to rethink and reevaluate our own usage of the word “hardline”. We have come up with a slew of alternatives: pragmatist hardliner, reformist hardliner, hardline hardliner, ad nauseum.

But I don’t think the Ahmadinejad circus ends there. During his four years as president, he disposed of over 15 ministers and high ranking deputies.

This man sure loves his soccer. When he was asked why he ran such an unstable, shaky government, he compared running the country to a game of soccer where the players “might be continuously shuffled around.”(You may remember, that after the election when asked about the allegations put forth by the other candidates, he once again used the sport to explain the situation)

And I think in that very metaphor he continuously uses, you have the secret to Ahmadinejad’s success. Those explanations he gave sound quite fanatical and deranged. But for some, he’s just the kind of guy whose words you can understand.

And in this game he was playing, you may have heard of Ali Kordan, Ahmadinejad’s interior minister who was forced out by parliament for having a fake degree from Britain’s Oxford University. You may also remember his bizarre, comic speeches about his “honorary degrees” - and how undeniably outlandish they were.

At times they were SO outrageously macabre, that they sounded unreal - scripted.

And while we cried, hissed and hollered at the outrage, and praised the despised parliament for throwing him out, Ahmadinejad quietly brought in Kordan’s place, a little known man by the name of Sadeq Mahsouli.

After the outrage Kordan had caused, many of us were not that concerned with the return of Mahsouli who had once been rejected as a nominee for the oil ministry, given his immense wealth, questionable ties and lack of experience. And these were not accusations hurled at him by people or the reformist camp - but that very parliament.

By many accounts, Mahsouli is one of the masterminds behind this charade  and the recent absurd, ludicrous behavior of his ministry do little to qualm those worries.

And frankly, I don’t think he gives a damn.

If there is one thing the events of the past few weeks have shown ALL of us Iranians, no matter which side of the political spectrum we are on, it’s that while Western media and many Iranians themselves laugh off Ahadminejad as a brainless psychotic, the operations he runs (or vice versa) are indeed B-R-I-L-L-I-A-N-T beyond our WILDEST imagination. And now I can only wonder: when there are such humongous brains behind him, why introduce someone as laughable as Kordan?

In the spirit of conspiracy theories, I believe this was part of that “bigger picture”. This was a surefire way to get Mahsouli - and a certain faction of the revolutionary guard- within the interior ministry.

In retrospect, a man with a fake “honorary” PhD may have been to our advantage.

We may have felt momentarily triumphant, but for now at least, he is the one to have the last laugh.

I’ve never been that fond of the mediocre Iranian “scholar” Reza Aslan. Anyone who is a regular of Anderson Cooper’s 360 can’t be particularly enlightening or insightful. But he had never struck me as being a complete douchebag either … Until now.

This man is quite possibly the most DISHONEST AND DESPICABLE man to be on network TV ever since the chaos over the Iranian elections began.

As I mentioned here before, the rumors concerning the “ousting of the leader” are particularly dangerous and lethal right now. Ahmad Qabel and quite a few others have addressed the rumors flying everywhere about Rafsanjani planning to unseat Khameneyi (In fact, that is the headline of the Huffington Post as we speak). They think this rumor is being propagated and produced by those accusing the protesters of orchestrating a “velvet revolution”. Mousavi, Karoubi, Khatami, etc claim to want a fair election WITHIN the frameworks of the IRI. As long as there are strong rumors to the contrary claiming that they are working towards an overthrow of the system, Ahmadinejad’s supporters can stop these protests based on those very allegations (which they already have).

I am starting to believe that maybe Aslan is in fact an AGENT of the Iranian Nazis. Why else would he INSIST on these false, DECEITFUL rumors day and day out since this chaos began? He just doesn’t stop. And he does not tire of quoting that he has “sources”  in Iran telling him this bullshit.

(The rest of his commentary too is quite lame and untrue, but as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone, who the fuck cares?)

SHUT THE FUCK UP ASLAN!!! SHUT UP YOU IGNORAMUS, MORONIC SWINE. You know NOTHING of the streets of  Tehran or of the people there. ANYONE who knows DIDDLY SQUAT about the Iranian ruling system, and the expediency council would blurt out ABSOLUTE PROFANITY FAR, FAR closer to the truth than the DUNG and SLIME you spit out on network TV.

The interior ministry finally released the individual ballot box totals yesterday. The mere fact that it took them TWO WHOLE weeks to report results they had the night of the election, makes me doubt these numbers entirely.

But this blog has been tirelessly going through all the numbers and they’ve come up with some very interesting observations. I’ll soon translate more of their graphs and analysis.

Since street protests are no longer a solution out of this mess, people are frantically trying to come up with other ways to show their dissent. If not for any other purpose, this might serve to keep the thousands of  fatigued, bored and now extremely hopeless young people busy.

Some current ideas circulating the web, emails and phone conversations are:

• The cries of Allah o Akbar from the rooftops every night
• Releasing green hydrogen filled balloons into the air this Friday (a dumbass idea if there ever was one)
• Turning on their car headlights during the day
• Writing famous phrases on money. This is a 5000 Toman bill and it is stamped with: “Death to the Dictator” and “Where is my vote?”

• Turning on all household appliances at a specific time during the day to bring down the vulnerable power grids of Tehran  (Friday 1 p.m. has been suggested by some as to coincide with the Friday sermons)

Do you have any ideas you can share?