For a democratic secular Iran. For peace and prosperity in the Middle East.
This weblog was created to act as a platform for the voice of secular pro-democracy activists in and outside Iran who are struggling against the religious dictatorship of the Islamic clerics in Iran.
My favourite quote:
"Evil only prevails when the good stay silent"
Looks like Boris Johnson's recent trip to Iran has been a great success and he has won the hearts and minds of Iran's ruling conservative clergy.
Below is the word by word translation of Mashad's Friday Prayer Leader, Ayatollah Alam-ol-Hoda , speaking during yesterday's Friday sermon to the faithful in Mashad, NE Iran, on "Booris the womaniser":
'"England's Foreign Secretary, this evil English individual, is intrinsically an evil person. Look him up and see who he was? Since 2003, 2004, when this Mr. Alexander 'Booris' Johnson, entered the political stage, he has made a name for himself in the English media, as Booris the Clown, Booris the Womaniser, Mad Booris, Booris the Liar. He was sacked in 2004, by the Conservative Party, by his own colleagues, after his sexual affairs were exposed in the press, but then, when this woman became England's Prime Minister, she brought him back as her Foreign Secretary. An evil man with a terrible track record, and now he comes to our city, to our country, to help two dirty spy traitors, who stretched their arms from here to shake the hands of the enemy to sell out this country, but the powerful hands of the judiciary and the security services grabbed them by the collar and imprisoned them. Now he, [Boris Johnsson], comes to help these two spies and makes out he has come here to express his opinion about 'human rights' to the Iranians! What audacity he has, and yet our officials sit down with him and have a meeting and negotiate with him! I mean which country does England represent? The Supreme Leader called England, the Evil England, the road grader for the US and the source of misery for the regional countries, this is how the Supreme Leader has described England!"
When I first started this blog, my motivation was to provide the English speaking public with an alternative account from the mass media nonsense that was being presented to them as "Iran news". I was urged by people in Iran who were telling me the Western media correspondents in Iran, to avoid getting deported, were painting an unrealistic rosy picture of what was happening there.
Lack of objective reporting coupled with lazy journalism is misleading the international public in an alarming way. So often, a correspondent writes his own politically motivated narrative as news, it then gets copy/pasted by others and before you know it; a media myth becomes an established fact!
One glaring example of this type of media myth, not specific to Iran news, is what the Western media refer to as the "1982 Hama Massacre" in Syria. Headlines suggest anything between 10,000 - 40,000 people were massacred and reading the articles one would get the impression that the Syrian government simply gunned down anything up to 40,000 peaceful Syrian protesters in the street!
The truth however is none of the journalists who have copy/pasted the Muslim Brotherhood's preferred narrative have ever bothered to look into the facts of what happened in Hama in 1982 and continue to mislead the public.
A more reliable source of what really happened in Hama in 1982 is the previously classified DIA [Defence Intelligence Agency] report published in May 1982.
According to this report, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, encouraged by the Islamic Revolution in Iran, planned an attack to trigger a similar revolution to Iran in Syria, by massacring 50 young Alawite cadets, which they thought would encourage the Sunni Muslims of Syria to commit similar sectarian killings of other religious minorities throughout Syria.
The Muslim Brotherhood does not consider Alawites to be Muslims and they considered the change of the Syrian constitution in 1973 which deleted any reference to Islam as the religion of state, to be a heretical move against Islam.
Despite some meticulous planning by the Muslim Brotherhood, which involved their sophisticated use of propaganda and media networks, they suffered continuous setbacks which prompted them to unleash a premature rebellion in Hama. The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood even provisioned that in the event the uprising failed, it would become a symbolic rallying point for their future activities and media propaganda, which is exactly what we are witnessing today.
According to the DIA report, on February 2nd, 1982, following a clash between Muslim Brotherhood and Syrian security forces, loud speakers on top of the mosque minarets in Hama, called on their followers to begin a holy Jihad against the government, even telling them at which specified mosques weapons were available. Teams of trained Muslim Brotherhood operatives who had even infiltrated into the Syrian armed forces, moved in their army uniforms to attack government targets, following the calls from the minarets.
The DIA report estimates the numbers who took part in the attacks and drove out the government forces to have been around 1000, so a tiny minority of the population, but one that was well organised, well motivated and well armed.
By 9th Feb, Muslim Brotherhood communiques, whose sources stretched from Hong Kong to Vienna, boasted that they had killed 3000 government troops, which included the summary executions of "spies and informers". Voice of Arab Syria radio, stationed in the rival Ba'athist state in Baghdad continued calling Syrians to join the holy Jihad.
Far from the sensational media headlines of 30,000 to 40,000 massacred in Hama, the DIA report concludes the total numbers killed during the February 1982 crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood in Hama, number around 2000 which includes an estimated 300-400 members of the Muslim Brotherhood's elite Secret Apparatus.
Whether it is because of infiltration by the Muslim Brotherhood or sheer fear of the organisation, the massacres committed by the Muslim Brotherhood never seem to receive any public condemnation by the Western media or the officials in the West. There is never any legal moves against the assets and bogus charities held by the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, who have spread themselves throughout Europe. Leaders in the West fearing to be seen as Islamaphobes or upsetting "religious sensitives" than moving against the Muslim Brotherhood's organisation, seem to have given this secretive fundamentalist outlet, immunity to spread its tentacles throughout the European state institutions.
Obama's naive administration desperately seeking to partner with a "moderate" Muslim organisation, foolishly went to bed with the Muslim Brotherhood. An example of this catastrophic lack of judgement can be seen in this video when Obama's Director of National "Intelligence"(?), James Clapper, called the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt "largely secular"! What an utter fool!
Was James Clapper's outrageous gullibility, just sheer credulousness or was it a demonstration of how far the Muslim Brotherhood ranks have spread their influence in the West? Either way, the voters in the West, when choosing their leaders and officials must think hard about where their representatives stand in ensuring a secular future for their children.
Before paraphrasing the lazy journalists in the media in condemning the "Hama Massacre", think about what would happen if an ideologically motivated, well organised, armed and violent group stage a holy Jihad, in a European city, attack government targets, start beheading female nurses and teachers not wearing the Hijab and publicly execute other civil servants as "spies and informers"?
It is not up to me to tell America who they should allow into their country, but I think it is right to demand a clear explanation of who is excluded and who is not. Visitors to US have the right to know beforehand whether they qualify for entry and not have to face a humiliating procedure at the airport, and this has been my bone of contention with Trump's visa ban, the ambiguity and unclarity of it.
When the executive order was first signed by the new US administration, there were many ambiguities, made worse by the anti-Trump media frenzy. The UK Foreign Office issued a statement which clarified many points, but the US embassy failed to do the same and in fact by changing the statement on their website 3 times, and contradicting the UK Foreign Office statement, they made things even more unclear! In the last revised statement one paragraph even contradicted the previous one.
Below is the unhelpful response from the US embassy when I wrote to them for clarification:
"
From: PA Press Duty
Sent: Monday, January 30, 2017 4:34 AM
Hi ,
We'd refer you to DHS for any information.
Best,
Julia"
Which was about as useful a response as a water resistant tea bag!
There is however another side to the story which the mainstream media have failed to report. For more than 3 decades, the Islamic Republic of Iran has exploited the lack of proper vetting by Western countries, and have sent their agents, lobbyists and sleeper cells to establish firm roots on Western soil and this poses a very serious security risk.
This is best explained in the following speech by Hassan Abbassi, a political strategist and head of an IRGC think-tank called ‘Center for Borderless Security Doctrinal Analysis’ speaking to his audience in Iran:
Text of Hasan Abbassi's speech:
"I be brief with you
We have 2 million
Iranians there
be certain that I will
raise a guerilla army from amongst them against you
you know this well
look how vulnerable you
were on 9/11
when 4 Arabs from Saudi
who don't know how to
fight
managed to endanger
your foundations
yet with us you face a
nation even stronger
dont forget we have
7000 PhD holders in US
if only 11 people
created 9/11
do you realise what we
can do?
We dont need nuclear
weapons
you have 6000 nuclear
warheads
those warheads are our
target
for our guerillas to
destroy
not even an Iranian
guerilla movement
but we have people from
all Islamic countries
You can deport them all
But we are working on
the Mexicans too
and the Argentinians
too
we will guide anyone
who has problems with US
We have identified the
US's Achilles heel
we have all their
ground, naval, air , technology
and their other
vulnerabilities
and we let the global
guerilla armies have them
as it happens we have
set up a department for England too
we have the section for
England's implosion on our agenda too
"We must be happy about the US Sanctions and these sanctions are good!" - Hasan Rouhani speaking to IRGC commanders in 1995.
Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, spoke last week to the representatives of the Baseej militia who had come from across the country to celebrate the Baseej week and hear his latest guidelines. The Supreme Leader chose the occasion to pre-warn the US law makers against the upcoming renewal of the Iran Sanctions Act (ISA).
"If these sanctions are renewed, this is definitely a violation of the JCPOA. It is undoubtedly a violation of the JCPOA. And they should know that the Islamic Republic will surely react to it”. This was how the Supreme Leader and commander-in-chief of the Islamic republic of Iran chose his words and it was followed by the audience responding with their clenched fists shouting feverish chants of “Death to America”
As it turned out, the US law makers ignored the Ayatollah's warnings and the US Senate voted 99-to-0 to extend the ISA sanctions for another ten years.
“This sanctions regime is how we hold Iran accountable, strengthen our security and deter Iranian hostility towards our allies, especially the state of Israel,” said the Democrat Senator Gary Peters and added “Diplomacy is always our preferred course of action, but it does not work in a vacuum. It only works if it is backed up with credible deterrence.”
'Credible Deterrence' being the key issue which was always missing from Obama administration's foreign policy modus operandi.
So, the question now asked by everyone is how will Iran react? Well, so far it has been a flurry of verbal condemnations and not surprisingly a growing list of Iranian officials, including members of Rouhani's own administration and Rouhani himself, are aligning themselves with the Supreme Leader in condemning the US for reneging on the nuclear deal.
Reza Akrami, head of the Presidential Cultural Council and one of the closest allies of President Rouhani whose friendship with Rouhani stretches over five decades, said "The JCPOA was a trial that proved to us, the United States does not adhere to anything"
Soheila Jelodarzadeh, female 'reformist' member of Iran's law making body, the Majlis, reacted to the Senate vote by saying "America should now expect the consequences of violating the nuclear deal"
Mohamad Reza Aref, the US educated and current darling of Iran's reformists movement, also condemned the Senate decision and said "This will now have many consequences for America" Even the weatherman on Iran State TV decided to endear himself and started his weather prediction by saying "Well there is two things you can not rely on, the weather and America"!
Pro-Iran lobbyists and the remnants of Ben Rhodes's echo chamber have also been busy making the usual warnings and repeating the worn out threats of "Now the Iranian hardliners will be strengthened"
Will there be more than just rhetoric?
Despite the Supreme Leader's mastery in the art of hedging his bets and his public hardline gestures for his followers that he is not so sure about the nuclear deal, the truth is the nuclear deal was an agreement that was steered, guided and approved right from its inception and closely monitored in detail in every step of the way by the Supreme Leader himself.
It is also true that everyone in the Iranian establishment knows full well that the Nuclear Deal saved the Islamic Republic from an eminent economic collapse and ensured the regime's survival. The deal meant the wasteful economically unjustified nuclear program that was not bringing any tangible benefits for the Iranian population, was somewhat restricted in return for the lifting of the vast majority of crippling sanctions which were draining the regime's coffers and curtailing its military adventures in the region. It was a clear win/win deal for Iran and in no way will Iran try to terminate the agreement.The public rhetoric is just to find escape goats that can be used to explain to the public why despite the deal, their economic situation has not improved.
If the US Senate vote is a violation of the JCPOA, then Iran should resort to the 'Dispute Resolution' section in the agreement that was envisaged for such situations and if the dispute resolution mechanism does not favour Iran, then Rouhani should take full responsibility for the failure and announce he will not be running for the next election.
He was after all assigned to carry out one very specific mission, i.e. to remove the crippling sanctions and save the Islamic Republic from collapse. He did that brilliantly using Zarif's superb diplomatic skills and credentials. If Rouhani has now failed in that, as the official rhetoric from Iran and the Supreme Leader's warnings claim, then his clasp to power can only be explained by his personal ambitions to stay in the perpetual shrinking power struggle within the Islamic Republic's establishment.
Should Rouhani publicly announce now that he will not run for the office in the next presidential elections it is almost guaranteed that the current frenzy of rhetorics against the Senate approval for another 10 year extension of the ISA will fizzle out almost immediately.
Right now however, those with the ambition of wanting to remain in the power oligarchy within the Islamic Republic of Iran, are all jumping on the bandwagon of condemning the US vote as a manifestation of America going back on its word and that includes Rouhani himself! But apart from verbal condemnations and rhetoric, most likely not much more..
When the US female chess champion, Nazi Paikidze-Barnes, and some of the world's other top female chess players announced last week, they will boycott the next world chess championships in Iran, because they have been told they are expected to wear the compulsory headscarves in Iran; it was a truly welcome news for Iran's women who have been fighting against the compulsory hejab forced upon them since shortly after the victory of the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran.
Iranian women have seen very little international support in their long courageous fight against not having the right to wear what they choose.
Western feminist activists who are quick to march, demonstrate and publicly express their support for Muslim women to have the choice to wear the repressive burkas & neghabs in the West, have so far largely ignored the struggle of Iranian women to have the right to choose what they want to wear.
But cowardice, hypocrisy and silence of the Western feminists to one side, the Guardian's attempt to turn the chess boycott into an action against the women of Iran was truly despicable.
Islamic Republic of Iran's own man in the Guardian, Saeed Kamali-Dehghan, the former employee of the IRGC affiliated Fars News Agency in Iran, did his best to hand pick the women inside Iran to speak out against the boycott in his article.
Kamali-Dehghan spoke to Mitra Hejazipour, ranked 40th amongst the women chess players in Iran and 2357th in the world ranking, he quoted her as saying
"It’s not right to call for a boycott. These games are important for women in Iran."
One can understand that Mitra Hejazipour wants to play chess with her Western counterparts and to do this she has to accept wearing the compulsory hejab, she may even wear the hejab of her own free choice and due to her religious convictions, but no one has the right to tell other women to accept the compulsory dress code that to many Iranian women is a manifestation of the repression against them. A repressive symbol which they have been fighting against on a daily basis with the Islamic Republic's "morality police".
On the very day that the international female chess players will take part in the tournament, the morality police will be confronting thousands of Iranian women in the streets and even detain and/or fine them, for no other reason that they have not fully observed the compulsory Islamic dress code.
According to the official figures from Iran's interior ministry, in the first two years of Rouhani's presidency, three million judiciary files have been filed against women who have not fully observed their hejab code.
So far in this current Iranian year, between March to September, 40,000 vehicles have been impounded justin the Iranian capital city, Tehran, because the female drivers or passengers were deemed not to be observing their obligatory Islamic dress code properly.
How can newspapers like the Guardian and the Western feminist activists be indifferent to these figures and at the same time expect non-Iranian women chess players to submit to the compulsory Islamic dress code too?
Saeed Kamali-Dehghan has further quoted Mitra Hejazipour as saying
"its an opportunity for us [women of Iran] to show our strength".
To watch the Islamic Republic successfully force non-Iranian women to wear a headscarf is no show of strength for the women of Iran at all, if anything its a show of strength by the Iranian regime and Saeed Kamali-Dehghan knows this very well. The truth is that the Iranian women already show their strength by fighting the much despised morality police, on a daily basis throughout the country.
Saeed Kamali-Dehghan also quotes Ghonche Ghavami as saying
“The world must hear the pro-reform voices of people inside Iran and not ignore these pleas by isolating the country.”
Ghoncheh Ghavami is a UK-Iranian dual national graduate from SOAS university in London. She left UK to live with her family in Iran after suffering some emotional problems. In UK, she was very active and vocal against the Iranian regime and participated in many demonstrations without wearing the headscarf. She was arrested in Iran after attempting to enter the volleyball stadium in 2014 with other Iranian female activists. Although others were released the next day, Ghoncheh was further detained and later sentenced to imprisonment after some alleged evidence was discovered on her mobile phone that was said to endanger Iran's national security. Since her release, she has been under pressure to back the Rouhani administration and say the "right" things in favour of the situation in Iran, so that it may lead to the lifting of her ban to leave Iran. For Saeed Kamali Dehghan to purposely select someone like Ghoncheh under such constraints for a quote in his article is not just bad judgement, its suspicious to say the least
Hanieh Farshi, a former imprisoned female blogger in Iran, reacted to the Guardian article and the way the Iranian women were selected by Saeed Kamali-Dehghan, by posting this on her Facebook today:
"
I have been jailed, I have paid the price, why doesn't a newspaper like the Guardian ever talk to someone like me and hear how we have suffered from the effects of the boycott of female sports by the Islamic Republic itself? For years we can't watch female sports on state TV, for years women's swimming has been excluded from the list of world sports, and then they tell us the Hejab issue is not important?! Who says it is not important? Is it not important for them [The Guardian] that for 38 years we have had to exercise our natural right [freedom of choice in what to wear] in secrecy and in hiding?"
Despite all of Saeed Kamali-Dehghan's attempts to turn the tables against the female chess players who called for a boycott, most fair and decent people should see that the likes of Nazi Paikidze are only defending their own dignity and integrity by expressing solidarity with the repressed women of Iran.
Islamic Republic of Iran is the only country in the world which forces compulsory hejab throughout the country and also forces non-Muslim foreign visitors to comply too.
One last word, those of us who remember the apartheid years in South Africa, will recall similar arguments that Saeed Kamali-Dehghan has posed in his disgraceful article in the Guardian. During the apartheid years, calls by the anti-apartheid movement in the West to boycott sports matches played against South Africa were always confronted by the right-wing pro-South African regime's lobbyists as leading to isolation and having a detrimental affect on the black players themselves. We were always told by the western leaders keen on doing business with the apartheid regime that boycott of South Africa hurt the blacks most and yet the leaders of the anti-apartheid movement inside the country always told us otherwise.
Curiously, when it comes to the Islamic Republic of Iran's apartheid against women, the Left in the West suddenly resort to those same arguments used by the pro-apartheid lobbyists.
Darya Safai, shown in the picture on the left, is a passionate Iran volleyball fan, who attends all the Iran international volleyball matches played outside Iran. As well as an enthusiastic volleyball fan, Darya is also a tireless peaceful civil rights campaigner for Iranian women to be allowed to enter the volleyball stadiums in Iran. A basic right that has been denied to Iranian women in recent years.
Darya is often seen amongst the spectators, holding a placard raising awareness about the plight of Iranian women and their right to enter volleyball stadiums. This weekend, she hit the international news headlines again:
Apart from an ardent volleyball fan and women's rights campaigner, Darya is also a successful dentist, a wife, a mother of two children, and a very charming pleasant woman, but she is also, it seems, an enemy of the US State Department which is trying to cuddle up to the Islamic Republic of Iran by what the US State Dept likes to think of as its "Volleyball Diplomacy" with Iran - a crass replica of the "ping-pong" diplomacy with China, in yet another pathetic attempt to "change the behaviour of the Iranian regime"!
Greg Sullivan pursuing
his Volleyball Diplomacy
In 2014, when Iran volleyball team played a friendly match against the US, Greg Sullivan, [seen in the photo] from the US State Dept, hoping that he would win favours from the Islamic Republic, sent a "warning" to Lori Okimura, chairwoman of USA Volleyball federation, that some kind of violent disruptive Iranian saboteur will be attending the match!
Okimura had the impression, based on the State Department's message, that Darya was an "agitator of sorts who could potentially cause trouble" but when Okimura met Darya, she realised the US State Dept warning could not have been further from the truth.
During that friendly match, Okimura had her first run-in with Iranian gender politics. At the State Department's request, according to Okimura, USA Volleyball flew in a male delegate from its headquarters in Colorado Springs for the various ceremonial gatherings between Iranian and American officials, effectively replacing Okimura due to her gender, even though she lives in the Los Angeles area. "When they found out that the president of USA Volleyball was a woman," Okimura recalled, "they asked for the other guy."
This is the sad state of affairs after 8 years of Obama administration, that a secular women's rights and peaceful civil rights activist is seen as a threat and the Mullahs in Iran along with their Shia militia in Iraq are regarded by the US State Dept as their new allies!!
US ally enjoying the warmth of flames from a burning human
Darya Safai, shown in the picture on the left, is a passionate Iran volleyball fan, who attends all the Iran international volleyball matches played outside Iran. As well as an enthusiastic volleyball fan, Darya is also a tireless peaceful civil rights campaigner for Iranian women to be allowed to enter the volleyball stadiums in Iran. A basic right that has been denied to Iranian women in recent years.
Darya is often seen amongst the crowds, holding a placard that raises awareness about such a basic right being denied to the Iranian women. This weekend, she hit the international news headlines again:
Apart from an ardent volleyball fan and women's rights campaigner, Darya is also a successful dentist, a wife, a mother of two children, and a very charming pleasant woman, but she is also, it seems, an enemy of the US State Department which is trying to cuddle up to the Islamic Republic by what the US State Dept likes to think of as its "Volleyball Diplomacy" with Iran - a crass replica of the "ping-pong" diplomacy with China, in order to "change the behaviour of the Iranian regime"!
Greg Sullivan pursuing
his Volleyball Diplomacy
In 2014, when Iran volleyball team played a friendly match against the US, Greg Sullivan, [seen in the photo] from the US State Dept, hoping that he would win favours from the Islamic Republic, sent a "warning" to Lori Okimura, chairwoman of USA Volleyball federation, that some kind of violent disruptive Iranian saboteur will be attending the match!
Okimura had the impression, based on the State Department's message, that Darya was an "agitator of sorts who could potentially cause trouble" but when Okimura met Darya, she realised the US State Dept warning could not have been further from the truth.
During that friendly match, Okimura had her first run-in with Iranian gender politics. At the State Department's request, according to Okimura, USA Volleyball flew in a male delegate from its headquarters in Colorado Springs for the various ceremonial gatherings between Iranian and American officials, effectively replacing Okimura due to her gender, even though she lives in the Los Angeles area. "When they found out that the president of USA Volleyball was a woman," Okimura recalled, "they asked for the other guy."
This is the sad state of affairs after 8 years of Obama administration, that a secular women's rights and peaceful civil rights activist is seen as a threat and the Mullahs in Iran along with their Shia militia in Iraq are regarded by the US State Dept as their allies!!
US ally enjoying the warmth of flames from a burning human
It is not up to me to tell America who they should allow into their country, but I think it is right to demand a clear explanation of who is excluded and who is not. Visitors to US have the right to know beforehand whether they qualify for entry and not have to face a humiliating procedure at the airport, and this has been my bone of contention with Trump's visa ban, the ambiguity and unclarity of it.
