Despite the brutal crackdown by Khamenei, Ahmadinejad and their fascist thugs, the reform movement is united in opposition to the Iranian government.
Iran’s reformist opposition on Wednesday delivered a co-ordinated message to Iranians, declaring the government of Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad illegitimate and encouraging supporters to challenge it.
A statement by Mir Hossein Moussavi, the opposition leader who says the June 12 election was rigged in favour of the hardline Mr Ahmadi-Nejad, followed similarly defiant calls by Mosharekat, Iran’s largest reformist party, and Mehdi Karroubi, the second reformist candidate.
Mohammad Khatami, the former reformist president and a strong supporter of Mr Moussavi, also joined the chorus warning that the regime, with its “poisonous propaganda” against protesters and its security crackdown, was waging a “velvet revolution” against the “people and the system’s republicanism”.
The concerted effort came two days after the Guardian Council, the constitutional watchdog dominated by hardliners, confirmed the election result. It underlines the determination of the opposition to undermine Mr Ahmadi-Nejad’s presidency.
A huge security crackdown has restricted the opposition’s ability to organise protests, but the refusal of reformist leaders to accept the election result could discourage western governments from dealing with Mr Ahmadi-Nejad.
“From now on we have a government which will be in the worst conditions in terms of its relations with people because the majority of society – and I am one of them – will not accept its political legitimacy,” Mr Moussavi said.
Hopefully their courage and determination will be rewarded.
Roger Cohen has a stunning piece about the fighting in Iran, and the bravery or ordinary Iranians fighting their brutal regime.
The Iranian police commander, in green uniform, walked up Komak Hospital Alley with arms raised and his small unit at his side. “I swear to God,” he shouted at the protesters facing him, “I have children, I have a wife, I don’t want to beat people. Please go home.”
A man at my side threw a rock at him. The commander, unflinching, continued to plead. There were chants of “Join us! Join us!” The unit retreated toward Revolution Street, where vast crowds eddied back and forth confronted by baton-wielding Basij militia and black-clad riot police officers on motorbikes.
Dark smoke billowed over this vast city in the late afternoon. Motorbikes were set on fire, sending bursts of bright flame skyward. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, had used his Friday sermon to declare high noon in Tehran, warning of “bloodshed and chaos” if protests over a disputed election persisted.
He got both on Saturday — and saw the hitherto sacrosanct authority of his office challenged as never before since the 1979 revolution birthed the Islamic Republic and conceived for it a leadership post standing at the very flank of the Prophet. A multitude of Iranians took their fight through a holy breach on Saturday from which there appears to be scant turning back.
Cohen believes that the momentum is with the protesters.
The war for the future of Iran has begun, and the Iranian dictatorship and the Basiji thugs have tried to stop the protesters. The Iranian people are fighting back, and many are chanting, “Death to the Dictator!”
If you want to follow the minute-by-minute updates, the best sources are Andrew Sullivan at his blog and Nico Pitney at The Huffington Post. Both have been live-blogging updates, and both have been passing along Twitter messages as well.
Here’s Barack Obama’s statement about today’s violent attacks on the Iranian people:
The Iranian government must understand that the world is watching. We mourn each and every innocent life that is lost. We call on the Iranian government to stop all violent and unjust actions against its own people. The universal rights to assembly and free speech must be respected, and the United States stands with all who seek to exercise those rights.
As I said in Cairo, suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away. The Iranian people will ultimately judge the actions of their own government. If the Iranian government seeks the respect of the international community, it must respect the dignity of its own people and govern through consent, not coercion.
Martin Luther King once said - “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I believe that. The international community believes that. And right now, we are bearing witness to the Iranian peoples’ belief in that truth, and we will continue to bear witness.
The thought of this brings a smile to my face. The Basiji are the thugs who have been attacking defenseless protesters, including women and children. Their actions have help to rally even conservative Iranians to the cause of the protesters.
The Basij (literally “Mobilization”) — also Bassij or Baseej, or Persian: بسيج; also Baseej-e Mostaz’afin, (literally “Mobilization of the Oppressed);” and officially Nirouye Moqavemate Basij (”Basij Resistance Force”)[1] Persian: نیروی مقاومت بسیج — is a volunteer-based Iranian paramilitary force founded by the order of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini on November 1979. The Basij are subordinate to, and receive their orders from, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.
Originally consisting of those males “either too young or old for regular military service,” the Basij are perhaps most famous for providing the volunteers that made up the human wave attacks against the Iraqis during the Iran–Iraq War, particularly around Basra. Currently Basij serve as an auxiliary force engaged in activities such as law enforcement, emergency management, the providing of social service, organizing of public religious ceremonies, and more controversially morals policing and the suppression of dissident gatherings. They have a local organization in almost every city in Iran.
I commend the protesters and the opposition leaders for stressing nonviolence in the demonstrations. That strategy is critical. But, at some point, fire must be met with fire, and many young Iranians are now going after the Basij thugs, in what is now being referred to as Basiji hunting.
By the way, two nights ago I went out to see a few things … as the general crowds spread into their homes militia style Mousavi supporters were out on the streets ‘Basiji hunting’.
Their resolve is no less than these thugs — they after hunting them down. They use their phones, their childhood friends, their intimate knowledge of their districts and neighbours to plan their attacks — they’re organised and they’re supported by their community so they have little fear. They create the havoc they’re after, ambush the thugs, use their Cocktail Molotovs, disperse and re-assemble elsewhere and then start again - and the door of every house is open to them as safe harbour — they’re community-connected.
The Basiji’s are not.
These are not the students in the dorms, they’re the street young — they know the ways better than most thugs - and these young, a surprising number of them girls, are becoming more agile in their ways as each night passes on.
Also, with $10K every local police station lock can be broken and guns taken out…the police too are crowd friendly…for sure put a gun in their hands and these young become a serious counter-balance to the Basij…call them 10% of 18-22 year olds - that makes circa 10 million around the country versus max 4 million Basijis.
I think Khamenei has miscalculated, and that any attempt to end this through the use of force may very well topple this despicable regime.
Khamenei will not back down, and he basically told the protesters in Iran that they will be dealt with harshly if they do not put a stop to the movement.
This is the moment of truth for the opposition, and I suspect that they will not back down. There will be bloodshed, unfortunately, but tyrants like Khamenei will not go without a fight.
Hopefully, many in the army and in the leadership will break from Khamenei and Ahmadinejad if they try to crush the rebellion with violence.
The Boston Globe has compiled a host of compelling photos from Iran.
This may be wishful thinking, but I’m starting to believe that there’s no way that the thugs in power can stop this movement in Iran. The numbers are too great.
Rumours are still swirling about the shooting in Azadi Square. Some claim four demonstrators were killed with “many more” wounded; others claim that the assailant, a Basiji (unofficial “religious” police), was then beaten to death by the crowd. There is also an unconfirmed report of gunfire in three districts in north Tehran. French media put the number at the rally at up to 2 million.
Reports are sketchy as the Iranian dictators have tried to block Twitter and email, but it seems clear that the protesters are becoming bolder and more determined. The leadership is panicking as the chief Mullah has ordered an “investigation” in an effort to appease the Iranian people, but that doesn’t seem to be working.
Hopefully we’ve reached a tipping point in Iran. The protests are intensifying, and it’s clear many Iranians will never see their “government” as legitimate in the future.
It is difficult to get any reliable picture of the scale of the protests in Tehran, let alone the whole country.
But they spread rapidly during the evening. The cheers and chanting echoed even in customarily quiet middle-class neighbourhoods.
Many Iranians came out on to their roofs to shout “down with the dictator”.
It has become a challenge not just of an election result, not just to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but to the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei himself.
That means it is, in effect, a challenge to the whole basis of the Islamic Republic.
For two years I have watched as young, ambitious Iranians go about their lives with growing frustration.
They feel the system stifles their aspirations. Now they feel that their intelligence and their pride has been insulted by an election result many Iranians believe is blatantly fraudulent.
And President Ahmadinejad’s almost casual dismissal of their complaints just adds to the anger.
The thugs who stole this election didn’t count on the Iranian people rising up against this farce.
It’s stunning to see young and old people in Iran saying “Enough!” Many people there realize that Ahmadinejad is a disgrace to their country, and his bigoted, divisive and incompetent leadership must come to an end.
Whatever happens with the green revolution, nothing will ever be the same in Iran.
Andrew Sullivan has some of the best coverage of this unfolding story. He’s also reporting how most of the mainstream media has been AWOL for most of the weekend as this story developed. No wonder more people are turning to blogs and the Internet for their news.
“I wanted to prove it wasn’t torture,” Mancow said. “They cut off our heads, we put water on their face…I got voted to do this but I really thought ‘I’m going to laugh this off.’ ”
The upshot? “It is way worse than I thought it would be, and that’s no joke,” Mancow told listeners. “It is such an odd feeling to have water poured down your nose with your head back…It was instantaneous…and I don’t want to say this: absolutely torture.”
“Absolutely. I mean that’s drowning,” he added later. “It is the feeling of drowning.”
“If I knew it was gonna be this bad, I would not have done it,” he said.
I recently got into a somewhat heated argument with a conservative friend of mine about Fox News and whether it was more or less misleading than the other mainstream media outlets. I pointed to the two or three Pew polls that show that Fox News viewers on average were the least likely of all the major news outlets to have a clear understanding of the facts. I argued that MSNBC may on the whole be liberal, but at least they “deal in facts” (i.e. they cite their sources and don’t just make stuff up as they go along, like Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity do). The following video is a great example. Bill O’Reilly attempts to debunk Obama’s assertion that Winston Churchill was anti-torture, even when he was under the most dire of circumstances. Notice how O’Reilly makes statements as if they were fact, with no supporting documentation, and how he distracts his audience by going on tangents that have nothing to do with the torture question. Then watch as Olbermann counters Bill O’s argument with facts and actually cites his sources.
It’s amazing to me that anyone still believes that Fox News is “fair and balanced.” What’s even more amazing is that the same conservative friend watched the documentary “Outfoxed” on my suggestion and agreed with much of what it had to say. Three or four years later, now that Obama is in the White House, that objectivity has vanished.
I have a couple of conservative friends who say that they find “The Colbert Report” funny, which always struck me as odd since his whole shtick is that he’s an uneducated, close-minded conservative pundit. (The show started off as a bit spoof of Bill O’Reilly that Colbert put together for “The Daily Show.”) I never pursued the issue with them, but it’s apparent now with the release of a study conducted by Ohio State University that many conservatives think that Colbert is actually conservative. They realize that his show utilizes satire, but while the rest of us realize that 80-90% of his time is spent making Republicans and Republican policy look foolish, conservatives think that there is sincerity beneath his satire. Here is a segment on “Countdown,” where Keith Olbermann interviews the lead writer of the study.
I always wondered who was dumb enough to schedule Colbert to speak at the White House Press Corps Dinner a few years ago, but I guess if conservatives really think he’s a conservative, then it makes sense. If you haven’t watched his roast of George W. Bush, it’s definitely worth a look.
It’s amazing how much damage the Club for Growth has done to the Republican Party. Susan Demas looks at the fallout.
No group has done more for the party than Club for Growth, the Washington-based anti-tax group dedicated to weeding out RINOs (Republicans in Name Only).
I mean, of course, the Democratic Party, which has been the chief beneficiary of this strategy blessed by the GOP to become even more conservative. Mission accomplished.
Recently, CFG President Pat Toomey stepped down from his job to rid Pennsylvania of the scourge known as Sen. Arlen Specter. In doing so, Toomey’s bludgeoned the Republican Party far more than a few conscience votes by the moderate Republican. Because Specter just switched parties and will almost certainly coast to re-election in 2010. But not before casting critical votes on budgets, health care and cap and trade.
Now the Dems have 60 seats in the Senate, just as soon as the courts finally rule for Al Franken in Minnesota. He’s had a consistent lead and it only looks to be a matter of the GOP running out the clock. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if there’s a resolution introduced by a Democrat in the Senate for “Pat Toomey Day.”
The GOP may be “pure” but it has also become far smaller — with only 21 percent identifying as Republicans in the latest Washington Post poll.
Four years ago, when over-confident Republicans thought they would be in the majority forever, the idea of purging the party of moderate Republicans had significant support on the right. How do they feel now?
When you’re in the minority, you need to expand support. Driving away Republicans like Arlen Specter just doesn’t make sense. Listening to many Republicans, however, I don’t expect this to change any time soon. The prevailing sentiment on the right at the moment is seething anger, so don’t wait for cooler heads to prevail.
All this is great news for Barack Obama and anyone who supports his agenda.
I’m watching “Hardball” and of course Chris and his guests are discussing the Arlen Specter situation. One talking point involved the possibility that former governor Tom Ridge might run for the Senate and take on Spector in the general election. Lindsey Graham also floated this idea.
Specter was going to have a tough time beating Pat Toomey in the Republican primary, but he would crush Toomey in a general election should Spector run as a Democrat and get the Democratic nomination.
Ridge is still popular in Pennsylvania, but he’s a moderate as well so he might have a tough time beating Toomey in the Republican primary. If he got past Toomey, he would at least have a shot against Spector.
In any event, this is pretty good news for Democrats, though Specter will not always be a reliable vote. Just as the GOP.
