This Gets Worse

I couldn't stay away from watching the televised UK sailors press conference at 3:00 pm on Friday. I was curious to hear their side of things.

When they started reading their written statements, my jaw nearly dropped to the floor. Thats it?? Just a bit of solitary confinement, and a few aggressive interrogation questions and they played into the hands of the Islamic Republic?

When Lt. Felix Carman talked about mock executions, I thought well at least this is something, but even that small bit of my sympathy with the sailors went away when the sailors were interviewed later without reading pre-prepared statements, and one of them was asked about the mock executions Lt. Carman talked about. The sailor responded "I think that was more someone's imagination than anything else."
So even that bit was not a substantial harrowing experience.

I thought to myself you absolute wimps! Iranian teenagers welcomed death rather than play the games of the Islamic Republic in the massacre of political prisoners in 1988. My friend Fariba Marzban, a female ex-political prisoner in the eighties endured 7 years of imprisonment including more than 400 days of solitary confinement and the horrendous torture which became known as the coffin torture, where female prisoners had to sit in a small confinement, draped in a chador, and face the wall for hours and days without uttering a word or making a movement, and Fariba still didnt give in to her captors. She was just an ordinary teenage sympathiser of a Left wing organisation at the time, caught while handing out leaflets.

Look at what Batebi has had to endure, what Fakhravar has been through, the mental pressures of "white torture" and several mock executions, and yet they did not break up like these UK marines did. In fact right on the day the British sailors were arrested, two Iranian women activists were jailed because they would not sign a submission to promise they would not engage in such activities again, and yet here we have combat trained marine officers betraying their country immediately after a few "aggressive questions" are thrown at them. Total utter wimps!

Iranian dissidents who have been forced to make TV confessions in the last 28 years have been through hell before they got to that point. Iranian journalist, Siamak Pourzand, in his 70s, put up more resistance before making a TV appearance, than these supposedly young, fit trained marine fighters . Just the sheer sight of Pourzand's weight loss made it known to everyone what he had been through.

Our heroic officers of the Shahrokhi air base, made a mockery of their live TV Kangaroo trial, and while they knew firing squads awaited all of them, they stood so tall and resolute to the mullahs that the live coverage of their so-called trial had to be suddenly cut off short by the state broadcasting.

Twenty-eight years of sheer resistance by Iranians had totally discredited the Islamic government of their staged TV confession shows. Yet here we have the UK marines restoring some credibility back to the Islamic government because they could not stand a few days of solitary confinement and a few aggressive questions! Thank you UK marines!!

I came across an excellent article in the Telegraph, Inside the Real Iran by David Blair and Damien McElroy. At least some British journalists had enough sense to distinguish between the people of Iran and their rulers, and not call the rent a mob Baseejis, led by the well known thug, Haji Bakhshi, outside the UK embassy in Tehran, as "Iranian Students".

Columnists like Stephen Glover, spelled out how I felt by the whole affair, and I was sort of reassured that the British public will in no way view these wimps as heroes.

But worse was yet to come! The news of UK marines being able to sell their stories for six figure sums to UK tabloids hit me like a baseball bat across the head, what? Have the chiefs of UK armed forces gone soft in the head as well as in their training procedures? But even that was not the end of it all. UK bishops, normally on the same par as the British judges in stupidity and absurdity, thanked and praised the rulers of Iran for their "faith in a forgiving God"!
Where was the "faith in a forgiving God" when pregnant women were being executed inside the Evin prison, or when Zahra Kazemi got battered to death during her interrogation, or Christian priests and converts murdered in Iran, where were these charitable Bishops?

Today Iranian Arabic Channel, Al-Alam released more film footage of the marines. They were playing table tennis and chess and the daft looking Lt Felix Carmen was shown joking with the camera men.

I have had enough, how can one relax in the middle of all this insanity and foolishness?

Uncle Napoleon, was the name of a fictional character in an Iranian novel, who suspected the British of being behind everything, even when his water supply was blocked by his neighbour. The term "Uncle Napoleon thinking" has become part of the Iranian vocabulary, if referred to someone, it means they are conspiracy theorists who believe the British to be behind everything. The Iranian masses also have a saying, 'lift a mullahs beard and you see the writing "Made in Britain" underneath'.

After the events of the last few days, I am not sure if I have become an Uncle Napoleon like thinker, or just think that "Mad Dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun". Their marines have humiliated their country but now they are rewarding them for it too. There seems to be a competition between the Iranian authorities and the British establishment, as to who can spoil these cute puppies even more.