The Iranian People Speak ( ? )

[luke]

The Iranian People Speak

The election results in Iran may reflect the will of the Iranian people. Many experts are claiming that the margin of victory of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the result of fraud or manipulation, but our nationwide public opinion survey of Iranians three weeks before the vote showed Ahmadinejad leading by a more than 2 to 1 margin -- greater than his actual apparent margin of victory in Friday's election.

While Western news reports from Tehran in the days leading up to the voting portrayed an Iranian public enthusiastic about Ahmadinejad's principal opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, our scientific sampling from across all 30 of Iran's provinces showed Ahmadinejad well ahead.

Independent and uncensored nationwide surveys of Iran are rare. Typically, preelection polls there are either conducted or monitored by the government and are notoriously untrustworthy. By contrast, the poll undertaken by our nonprofit organizations from May 11 to May 20 was the third in a series over the past two years. Conducted by telephone from a neighboring country, field work was carried out in Farsi by a polling company whose work in the region for ABC News and the BBC has received an Emmy award. Our polling was funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

The breadth of Ahmadinejad's support was apparent in our preelection survey. During the campaign, for instance, Mousavi emphasized his identity as an Azeri, the second-largest ethnic group in Iran after Persians, to woo Azeri voters. Our survey indicated, though, that Azeris favored Ahmadinejad by 2 to 1 over Mousavi.

Much commentary has portrayed Iranian youth and the Internet as harbingers of change in this election. But our poll found that only a third of Iranians even have access to the Internet, while 18-to-24-year-olds comprised the strongest voting bloc for Ahmadinejad of all age groups.

The only demographic groups in which our survey found Mousavi leading or competitive with Ahmadinejad were university students and graduates, and the highest-income Iranians. When our poll was taken, almost a third of Iranians were also still undecided. Yet the baseline distributions we found then mirror the results reported by the Iranian authorities, indicating the possibility that the vote is not the product of widespread fraud.

Some might argue that the professed support for Ahmadinejad we found simply reflected fearful respondents' reluctance to provide honest answers to pollsters. Yet the integrity of our results is confirmed by the politically risky responses Iranians were willing to give to a host of questions. For instance, nearly four in five Iranians -- including most Ahmadinejad supporters -- said they wanted to change the political system to give them the right to elect Iran's supreme leader, who is not currently subject to popular vote. Similarly, Iranians chose free elections and a free press as their most important priorities for their government, virtually tied with improving the national economy. These were hardly "politically correct" responses to voice publicly in a largely authoritarian society.

Indeed, and consistently among all three of our surveys over the past two years, more than 70 percent of Iranians also expressed support for providing full access to weapons inspectors and a guarantee that Iran will not develop or possess nuclear weapons, in return for outside aid and investment. And 77 percent of Iranians favored normal relations and trade with the United States, another result consistent with our previous findings.

Iranians view their support for a more democratic system, with normal relations with the United States, as consonant with their support for Ahmadinejad. They do not want him to continue his hard-line policies. Rather, Iranians apparently see Ahmadinejad as their toughest negotiator, the person best positioned to bring home a favorable deal -- rather like a Persian Nixon going to China.

Allegations of fraud and electoral manipulation will serve to further isolate Iran and are likely to increase its belligerence and intransigence against the outside world. Before other countries, including the United States, jump to the conclusion that the Iranian presidential elections were fraudulent, with the grave consequences such charges could bring, they should consider all independent information. The fact may simply be that the reelection of President Ahmadinejad is what the Iranian people wanted.

from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/14/AR2009061401757_pf.html

i must have read about 20 articles about the iran election the last few days, and i haven't got a bloody clue whats going on. i've read articles where people have claimed to have talked or had dinner with regime insiders who say the election isn't a scam and others who say it is scam! i've not actually seen any details of why the election might have been a scam, except that the looser says so.

in iran the candidates have to be vetted before they can run, there were loads of people who went for it, only a tiny few got through. why would they ok a candidate they didn't like, if it meant they'd then have to rig the election if he won? surely it would have been easier to just not allow him to run, like all the others they didn't allow to run?

whats interesting is of the polls taken by organisations based outside of iran, they were all predicting ahmadinejad would win, even the american heritage institute - a neo-con think tank - predicted he'd win. yet apart from the above article, and one or two others, you'd be hard pressed to find that information in the media coverage now, its all presented that mousavi was going to win, or it was going to be close. but this is based on nothing, and the polls shows the opposite.

[faceless]

[tinfoilhat]the Rockefellers funded it??!?![/tinfoilhat]

I read on the Telegraph today that there were official government leaks saying that Ahmedinejad only came third out of the main five candidates.

It's good to see the Ayatollah's chipped in though - with any luck it's a genuine enquiry. Though considering how biased many enquiries are, even in the 'civilised law abiding West', I'm not exactly brimming with confidence about it.

[nico]

Right Luke. Since they were vetted, why would they allow some rival with leverage compete with Ahmadinejad, It just doesn't make sense. What I know about Iran is that it's a country like Argentina, 20% rich 80% living below the poverty line, all of a sudden there comes along a guy from the needy majority, the first thing he does is to force private universities to lower their fees, then he helps the poor in the rural areas and tells the army to stop handing out fake ranks and the universities handing fake PHD's.
So I am not surprised why he shouldn't be re-elected.
The Iranians should just get over it and accept the vote. He may be a fundamentalist with views contrary to western ideology, but I respect him and Chavez to have the balls and stand up to the great master. Who in the world had the balls to go to Iraq, outside the green zone and have a meeting with Maliki? He went to the United Nation's annual meeting 4 times even after the warnings he recieved from US authorities that he would be arrested.
The US has sure a hand in all the trouble in post election. This isn't the first time. They did the same with Chavez. This will probabely be history in a few days time.

[luke]

lenins tomb has a couple of good article with links to various other articles here and here

ed herman ( who wrote manufactuig consent with chomsky ) said on the medialens board

Wouldn't it be interesting to compare the media coverage of this Iran election with their coverage of recent elections in Egypt, with an accompanying analysis of the democratic and undemocratic qualities of each, freedom of public information, police treatment of alternative candidates and protesters, and the forms of exernal intervention in the two cases?

apparently; ( from medialens )

[Egypt] saw a mass round up (over 800 people) of opposition activists and canidates by the state authorities, as part of a 'shameless bid to fix the upcoming elections', according to Human Rights Watch, who went on to say that 'President Mubarak apparently believes that the outcome of the elections cannot be left up to voters'. 70% of ruling party candidates stood unopposed.

I remember this because it happened at the same time as Robert Mugabe was being accused of fixing elections on Zimbabwe. That received blanket media coverage, much like what we're seeing with Iran now, while the Egyptian elections went virtually ignored.

There was a a grand total of two articles on BBC Online about the situation in Egypt, as far as I can tell via an Advanced Search for March/April 2008 using the terms 'Egypt' and 'election'. But many, many more about the concurrent elections in Zimbabwe, and the situation in Iran now.

With the obvious difference between Mubarak on the one hand, and Ahmadinejad and Mugabe on the other, being that the former is an ally of the U.S./U.K., while the latter two aren't.

..

i read a really good article a while back looking at media coverage of elections in venezuela and columbia, the difference in the way western media covers 'official enemies' versus states that do what we say ( no matter how bad they are ) is really incredible. i heard miliband on channel 4 earlier saying ( correctly ) how the government doesn't control the media - they don't need to! i've often asked myself, how would our media be any different if the government did run it?! i really don't think it would be!

[funkyfunkpants]

The Pirate Bay has a link to an Iranian forum

http://thepiratebay.org/

[luke]

Mousavi States His Case

Mir Hossein Mousavi, the reformist candidate challenging Iran's authorities on the result of last week's presidential elections, is a masterful tactician who wants to overturn the re-election of his rival, President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, with allegations of a massive conspiracy that he claims cheated him and millions of his supporters.

These supporters, identifiable by the color green they have adopted, have taken to the streets in the tens of thousands and on Thursday were to stage a "day of mourning" for what they say is a lost election. This follows a "silent" march through the streets of the capital on Wednesday. To date, at least 10 people -- some Iranian sources say 32 -- have been killed in clashes.

Mousavi has lodged an official complaint with the powerful 12-member Guardians Council, which has ordered a partial recount of the vote. The complaint's main flaw is that it passes improper or questionable pre-election conduct as something else, that is, as evidence of voting fraud.

The protest, which seeks fresh elections, is short on specifics and long on extraneous, election-unrelated complaints. The first two items relate to the televised debates that were held between the candidates, rather than anything germane to the vote count.

There is also some innuendo, such as a claim that Ahmadinejad used state-owned means of transportation to campaign around the country, overlooking that there is nothing unusual about incumbent leaders using the resources at their disposal for election purposes. All previous presidents, including the reformist Mohammad Khatami, who is a main supporter of Mousavi, did the same.

Another complaint by Mousavi is that Ahmadinejad had disproportionate access to the state-controlled media. This has indeed been a bad habit in the 30-year history of the Islamic Republic, but perhaps less so this year because for the first time there were television debates, six of them, which allowed Mousavi and the other challengers free space to present their points of view.

With respect to alleged specific irregularities, the complaint cites a shortage of election forms that in some places caused a "few hours delay". This is something to complain about, but it hardly amounts to fraud, especially as voter turnout was a record high of 85% of the eligible 46 million voters. (Ahmadinejad was credited with 64% of the vote.)

Mousavi complains that in some areas the votes cast were higher than the number of registered voters. But he fails to add that some of those areas, such as Yazd, were places where he received more votes that Ahmadinejad.

Furthermore, Mousavi complains that some of his monitors were not accredited by the Interior Ministry and therefore he was unable to independently monitor the elections. However, several thousand monitors representing the various candidates were accredited and that included hundreds of Mousavi's eyes and ears.

They should have documented any irregularities that, per the guidelines, should have been appended to his complaint. Nothing is appended to Mousavi's two-page complaint, however. He does allude to some 80 letters that he had previously sent to the Interior Ministry, without either appending those letters or restating their content.

Finally, item eight of the complaint cites Ahmadinejad's recourse to the support given by various members of Iran's armed forces, as well as Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki's brief campaigning on Ahmadinejad's behalf. These are legitimate complaints that necessitate serious scrutiny since by law such state individuals are forbidden to take sides. It should be noted that Mousavi can be accused of the same irregularity as his headquarters had a division devoted to the armed forces.

Given the thin evidence presented by Mousavi, there can be little chance of an annulment of the result.

from http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/afrasiabi190609.html

[faceless]

Here's an interesting story - read the caption under the photo, it originally said "Supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi again defied a ban on protests', then check the correction at the bottom...

Here's another photo from the same event. It's good to know the BBC are on the ball!

[faceless]

Shappi Khorsandi on how her family fled the mullahs in Iran for Britain and they sent a death squad after them
Iranian comic Shappi Khorsandi on turmoil in Tehran... and her own traumatic childhood
Matt Roper
20/06/2009

As Iran's only female comic, Shappi Khorsandi's day job is to make people laugh. Not always easy at the best of times - but especially difficult this week as her homeland is ripped apart by rioting after the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

As she prepares for a prestigious primetime slot on Michael McIntyre's Comedy Roadshow tonight, Shappi, 36, admits: "All week I've been feeling a dull ache inside. Like all Iranians, before the election I'd sensed a glimmer of hope that things could change. But the fact that it was rigged in such a massive, obvious way is a huge insult to all of us."

Shappi has lived in England since she was six and has been desperate for news of friends and relatives back in her homeland. She says: "The phone lines have been down all week, so it's difficult to get an accurate picture. My friends post updates on Facebook, but recently they've been posting in Farsi, the Iranian language, as they need to write quickly. It's been driving me crazy as I can't understand what they're saying. I'm very concerned about one friend, an activist who recently tried to claim asylum in Britain but failed and got deported." Thirty years ago, her dad Hadi - a poet and satirist - had to flee Iran after poking fun at the Ayatollah Khomeini, who had recently taken power after overthrowing the Shah.

She says: "My 19-year-old uncle Masood was shot dead while he was out demonstrating in the Iranian revolution of 1979. My father was a child of the revo-lutioand thought that the Ayatollah would give the country back to the people. But he broke his promises."

When the Ayatollah took control, Shappi and her family were staying in London, where her dad had taken a temporary job. She says: "My father was euphoric and decided to go back to Tehran for a few weeks. He was still poking fun at things he didn't agree with, and when the Ayatollah imposed the hijab on women, my father wrote this joke about a man who had his wife flogged because she'd shown her hair to some dinner guests.

"The joke was that it was a hair that had fallen into the soup she was serving. The mullahs made a big fuss and my father was declared an enemy of Islam. One day, a 1,000-strong mob surrounded his offices shouting that he was going to die. He had to flee down the back stairs into a car, and friends managed to get him onto a plane. When he arrived back in London he was shell-shocked and heartbroken. We claimed asylum in Britain, but my dad never thought it would be long before we returned to Iran. For much of my childhood being here felt temporary as he always said we'd soon be going home."

However, even though Shappi and her family were granted asylum in Britain, they still were far from safe. The family would often receive threatening phone calls and MI5 uncovered a plot to assassinate them in 1984. Shappi remembers: "I used to pick up the phone and hear, 'I will kill you, I will kill your father, I will kill everyone'.

"Then, one day, my older brother and I were brought home from school early. There were two smartly dressed men from Scotland Yard in the house. They said a hit squad had been to dad's office in London and found out where he lived. They were planning to shoot him between 8.15am and 8.30am as he drove us to school." The police arranged for the family to be whisked away to a bed and breakfast in Windsor.

"I was 11 years old and terrified," says Shappi. "Everywhere I looked I imagined I saw the Ayatollah's head floating, waiting to kill us. I was scared for my dad and my brother. I was terrified when my dad took him to football or scouts that the car would suddenly blow up. I just thought, 'Why did he have to make them so angry?' I thought that I could write a letter to the Ayatollah saying that Dad didn't mean to upset him and if he met him he'd never want to kill him."

Despite everything, Hadi continued to attack the Iranian regime through his writing and poems, and even published his own antigovernment newspaper. Shappi says: "Only now do I realise how brave my dad has been. He could have shut up and stayed. But instead he forfeited his own country, the country he loved, because he wanted to speak out for freedom. But he never got depressed, and often joked about it. Even when we were hiding in the B&B, he called his friends and had a picnic by the river where he said 'cheers' to the terrorists for giving us a nice holiday."

Like her father, one of the ways Shappi dealt with the trauma of her childhood was to crack jokes. She says: "I always loved making people laugh - it was a bit of an addiction for me. But I only saw it as an actual job when Ben Elton started doing Saturday Night Live. I did the comedy clubs, and there weren't very many women on the circuit. I was a bag of nerves at first, and one of the first things I had to learn was to not preach. I might hold strong views but people come to hear you because they want to laugh, not because they want to hear your opinions."

Despite all the turmoil in her homeland, Shappi, who is married with an 18-month old son, hasn't given up hope of change despite the crushing defeat of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi. She says: "This isn't about Mousavi anymore. It's about a people who have been oppressed for 30 years standing up for themselves. The Iranians are a diverse, intelligent, forward-thinking people who have a high sense of self-esteem. You can't keep a people like that down for long."

--------------------

If you've got a family then baiting a regime who are wanting to kill you isn't brave - it's fucking selfish.

[luke]

thats crazy that bbc headline 'Obama refuses to 'meddle' in Iran' - back when bush the dumber was in office the 'CIA received secret presidential approval to mount a covert "black" operation to destabilize the Iranian government' and 'the Democratic-controlled Congress approved up to $400 million to fund the destabilization campaign'. since obama came to office 'Obama remains wedded to the Bush-Cheney-Abrams destabilization of Iran'.

obama refuses to meddle in iran ...

another mad thing, the united states had been 'supporting and encouraging an Iranian militant group, Jundullah, that has conducted deadly raids inside Iran from bases on the rugged Iran-Pakistan-Afghanistan "tri-border region' - this is the same group that now 'The United States State Department is considering placing on its terrorism list'!!

what was it bush said about those that support or harbor terrorists ... does this mean america now has to regard itself as a 'hostile regime' and attack itself?!

you couldn't make it up

[luke]

chomksy interview

http://www.worldstreams.org/audio/guest-noam-chomsky.mp3

[luke]

whilst the western governments are condemning iran and the media are giving us wall to wall coverage, in other parts of the world Honduras nears Chaos as Military Units Circle Presidential Palace

its an interesting little comparison of western governments interests and media coverage - if western governments and the medias aim were noble and all about democracy, why the lack of coverage of this story? of course, its just one of numerous examples of western hypocrisy.

if the vote had gone the other way in iran, and the guy the west wanted to win had won, and we had the same allegations of election fraud, we wouldn't hear shit about it, just like we don't hear about movements for reform in saudi arabia, egypt and numerous of countries where the west is quite happy to turn its head the other way ( and in some cases helping, militarily and financially ) over exactly they same things they're bitching about now

[modern]

[luke]

Demonising Iran conveniently hides uncomfortable truths for the West

THE MAINSTREAM media narrative of events unfolding in Iran has been set out for us as clear as a fairytale: an evil dictatorship has rigged elections and now violently suppresses its country's democrats, hysterically blaming foreign saboteurs the while. But the Twitter generation is on the right side of history (in Obama's words), and could bring Iran back within the regional circle of moderation. If only Iran becomes moderate, a whole set of regional conflicts will be solved.

I don't mean to minimise the importance of the Iranian protests or the brutality of their suppression, but I take issue with the West's selective blindness when it gazes at the Middle East. The "Iran narrative" contains a dangerous set of simplicities which bode ill for Obama's promised engagement, and which will be recognised beyond the West as rotten with hypocrisy.

Iran's claims of Western incitement for the protests are roundly scorned in our media, and of course Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei's scapegoating of foreigners and "terrorist groups" demonstrates an unhealthy denial of the very real polarisation within Iranian society.

Yet Iranians still have good reason to fear outside interference. It was, after all, British and American-orchestrated riots that brought down the elected Mossadeq government in 1953. And in 2007, Bush administration neocon John Bolton told the Telegraph that a US attack on Iran would be "a last option after economic sanctions and attempts to foment a popular revolution had failed".

According to veteran journalist Seymour Hersh, ongoing US special operations in Iran include funding ethnic-separatist terrorist groups such as the al-Qaeda-linked Jundallah in Baluchistan. With some honourable exceptions, this dimension has not been touched by the mainstream media.

And Mir Hossein Mousavi's vote-rigging allegations are accepted without scrutiny, despite there not yet being any hard evidence of organised cheating. The official result is similar to that in the second round of the 2005 elections, when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad received 61.7 % to former president Rafsanjani's 35.9%.

A few weeks before the latest elections, a poll commissioned by the BBC and ABC News predicted a nationwide advantage of two-to-one for Ahmadinejad over Mousavi. Even Israel's Mossad chief Meir Dagan reported that there were no more irregularities in the Iranian vote than in elections in liberal democracies.

I visited Iran in 2006, with a backpack and guidebook-standard Farsi. I noticed two things. First, Iran is far freer, fairer, less littered, and more literate than any of its neighbours. Second, very many Iranians are unhappy with their corrupt rulers and, unlike people in nearby Arab states, they are not afraid to say so openly. To an extent, the revolution has been a victim of its own success, having transformed a largely feudal land into a highly educated urban society, creating along the way a swollen middle class and an idealistic youth which chafes against the petty oppression of dress codes and state-enforced morality. But everyone I spoke to favoured evolution of the existing system over counter-revolution.

The Islamic Republic has been a great - if seriously flawed - experiment in economic and strategic independence, its engines oiled by class consciousness and national pride as much as by religion. Iran is at least a semi-democracy, and has held 10 presidential elections in 30 years. Iranian women are obliged to cover their hair, true, but women in US-client Saudi Arabia are obliged to cover their faces. In Saudi Arabia of course there are never any elections to dispute - but there are US military bases, so we don't dwell on the issue.

Here's the nub of it. Iran opposes the US military presence in the region, and vigorously supports resistance to Israeli expansionism. On these two points, the Iranian regime is closer than any other to the true sentiments of Middle Easterners.

And this, fundamentally, is why Iran is imagined to be such a problem in the West: because it's a Venezuela or a Cuba of a country. Iran is troublesome not because it's any more obscurantist or dictatorial than its neighbours, but because it is less submissive.

The world worries about Iran's nuclear energy programme while keeping quiet about Israel's 200 nuclear weapons. Israel occupies Syrian, Lebanese and Palestinian territory. Iran has not attacked another country in its modern history.

Iran is accused of backing terrorism because it helps to arm Hizbullah and Hamas, grassroots anti-occupation groups with a legitimate, even legal, cause. Both groups have targeted civilians (rarely, in Hizbullah's case) but not on as grand a scale as Israel, which is armed and funded by the United States. And Iran doesn't export Wahhabi-nihilist terrorists of the Taliban or al-Qaeda-in-Iraq variety. Again, that would be our ally Saudi Arabia.

President Obama recently chose to address the Muslim world from Cairo, seat of a client regime which has "pre-emptively" arrested hundreds of democrats in recent months, fearing they may demonstrate.

Commenting on Iran, Obama called the "democratic process" a "universal value". But obviously not quite universal enough to cover Egypt, or the elected Hamas government, what remains of it, in besieged Palestine.

Silences can be more significant than words. Is Obama also "deeply troubled" when Israel shoots unarmed protesters or arrests children as young as 12? Does he mourn "each and every innocent life that is lost" in Gaza as well as in the plusher streets of Tehran? If so, he still hasn't told us.

At present our opinion-formers are blithely simplifying and demonising a complex culture, allowing illusions and half-truths to become shining certainties in our minds. This is how we arrived in Iraq.

from http://www.sundayherald.com/oped/opinion/display.var.2516867.0.0.php

i thought this was a good article from the sunday herald in light of the crap faceless posted from them the other day

[luke]

theres another interview in the metro with shappi khorsandi, the most interesting bit is this;

A lot of people might think Iran’s an austere, fundamentalist country. Is it?
Iranians are very tuned in and clued up on their history and world history. There are so many races and religions, so Iranians can’t help being very broad-minded. This is what many people haven’t seen since 1979 when there was a revolution hijacked by extremists. A lot of people also don’t know we had a fledgling democracy in the 1950s.

Why didn’t it take off?
Because of oil. Because our democratically elected prime minister nationalised Iranian oil and took it out of the hands of the British, they [the British] organised a coup and destroyed our democracy. This is why many Iranians feel great bitterness, thinking where would our country have been if that hadn’t happened, if our democracy had thrived. I met Jon Snow once and he told me about the time he met Tony Blair during the whole Iraq thing. They were talking about Iran and Tony Blair said: ‘Why do they hate us so much?’ and Jon said: ‘Well, you know, because of Mossadeq (the overthrown Iranian prime minister).’ Blair said: ‘Who?’ The prime minister of Britain, who took us to war with the Middle East, doesn’t even know about his own country’s history with the region.

thats quite incredible blair didn't know who mossadeq was or our role in overthrowing their democracy!

[faceless]

And you try telling that to the kids these days and they won't believe you...

Was it Anthony Eden who was prime minister at the time?