Islamic Republic's Domestic Terrorism

From Potkin's Blog:

Kidnapping of an 11 Year Old

I have never written anything about Fazad Kamangar, the Iranian Kurdish teacher who is due to be executed. This is because there has been much written about his plight in other websites and I have none of my reliable sources in Iran who can give me first hand information about him. The Islamic regime accuses him of having ties with the armed Kurdish separatist groups, but if I jott down how many times these representatives of the clerical regime have blatantly lied, I will never finish.

However when I read about the kidnap and torture of Kamangar's 11 year old nephew, in the website of Human Rights Activists in Iran, I was really shaken. I have a nephew of the same age myself. Islamic Republic has a horrific track record of killing teenagers during the eighties by madmen like Khalkhali and Lajevardi, even pregnant women were executed by this regime in the eighties. One of CIS members who now lives in Germany, spent the first five years of his life growing up in Islamic Republic prisons in the same cell with his mother and other female political prisoners, watching them being taken for interrogations, and then returned bruised, battered and bleeding. Believe me, you need nerves of steel to listen to or read about the accounts of these children whose misfortune was they were born to parents who were political dissidents during the eighties in Iran.

According to the Human Rights Activists in Iran website, Kamangar's 11 year old nephew who had popped out for some shopping errands, was forced into a white car belonging to the IRGC, taken to an unknown place, and beaten while the assailants hurled insults and threats at his family and at Kamangar in particular for several hours. At the end, this 11 year old boy was released 5 Kilometers outside the town at 21:00 hours, bleeding from his eyes and ears. It took him more than one hour to walk back and find his home. Naturally the kid is in shock and extremely frightened. His family have lodged a complaint with the authorities, who have postponed the hearings from witnesses to Saturday. I can not even imagine the rage this family must feel at the moment. Even if Kamangar is connected with a separatist Kurdish group, what on earth does that have to do with his 11 year old nephew?? Is there no limit to the barbarity of these neanderthals?

Of course according to groups like CASMII and now a newly formed group, 'Iranians for Peace', with the same old familiar faces [Haleh Afshar, Elaheh Rostami, Ziba Mir Hosseini and the rest of the usual IRI apologists and lackeys...], we must not talk about these things at the moment, while we face an external threat! The same external threat that we have been told we face constantly and continuously for the last 28 years. If the regime continues to treat people like this, there will come a time when people will even welcome the external threat, treat your people right however and no external threat can ever match the resolve and support of your people.

All dictatorships have always used the 'external threat' excuse for their human rights abuses. Talk to a brain washed North Korean and he or she will tell you that the Socialism led by their Dear Leader, Kim Il Jong, is so desirable and precious that the whole world is plotting against North Korea. Even the Dear Leader's bulging stomach is not because he stuffs himself while his people starve but because he constantly worries about his people!

Its funny, or perhaps revealing, how during the Pahlavis time, 'external threat' was never a consideration by these people who make up these CASMII and 'Iranians for Peace' type of groups. When Reza Shah came to power, Iran was on the brink of being torn to pieces by separatists like the British backed Sheikh Khaza'l in the oil rich Khuzestan and the Russian backed Mirza Kuchak Khan in the North. Reza Shah was forced to abdicate when the Allied forces of Britain and Russia invaded Iran in 1941. The Russian backed separatists even tried to separate Azerbijan from Iran, and during the second Pahlavi's rule, Iran was constantly under threat by the Soviets to the North and Saddam Hussein's Iraq to the West.

Yet the likes of these IRI apologists who make up CASMII and 'Iranians for Peace', they are old enough and most were political activists against the Shah at the time, were never heard saying 'We must not talk about Human Rights abuses, because we face external threats'. These people welcomed external threats, they saw Iraq's Saddam Hussein and the Soviet Union as liberators!
They went out of their way to exaggerate the human rights abuses under the Pahlavis.

Iranian diaspora must not be fooled by their anti-war rhetoric and peace loving gestures. The best way to remove an external threat is to help establish a regime which respects human rights and allows all Iranians to participate in running of Iran. A democratic secular government which promotes citizens on their merits and not on their ties to the ruling clergy is the best defence against any 'external threats'."

And Obama wants to talk to this regime unconditionally...

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Return from Paradise in the Left Lane

This reads almost like a satire but of course, it is not. This is how many Americans are wined and dined in Iran to paint a rosy picture of the Islamic Republic upon their return. How pathetic.

Return from Paradise in the Left Lane
by Hassan Daisoleslam
Posted: 09/20/2007

Iranianlobby.com

In 2006, the Iran’s nuclear dossier was referred to the UN Security Council inaugurating a new era of confrontation between the clerical rulers and the international community. To counter the diplomatic pressure on Tehran, a new advocacy and PR group namely “Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran” (CASMII) was created.

CASMII’s “Mission Statement” says, “CASMII is an independent campaign organisation with the purpose of opposing sanctions, foreign state interference and military intervention in Iran.” In effect, its pronounced purpose is to conduct public relations campaigns defending the actions of the world’s largest and most dangerous terrorist regime. Through CASMII, segments of the left and the anti-war movement in the United States have channeled their critique of the war and the current US administration to support the most radical elements of the Iranian regime. These American personalities and groups have clearly crossed the line and have become ardent advocates of one of the most notorious dictatorships of the modern history, with no regards for the Iranian people, the prime victims of these dictators. CASMII, among other PR activities, regularly organizes trips for such groups in US to visit Iran. Upon their return, CASMII arranges orchestrated PR charades of the kind we often see from totalitarian regimes.

The lead figure in organizing these trips is CASMII’s president Rostam Pourzal. He is a radical anti-American and pro-mullahs regime individual, living in the United States. In an article, Pourzal invites the Americans to visit Iran:1“It is past midnight and the news is keeping me awake with joy. After a quarter century my country of birth, Iran, is easing (undeclared) travel restrictions this week for the citizens of my adopted home, the United States. The Iranian government has announced even a $20 incentive for any travel agent who books a tour to Iran for a U.S. citizen. The unprecedented public welcome extended to American tourists is only the latest in a series of overtures from Tehran. Earlier this year Iranian authorities quietly upgraded America from “the Great Satan” to the friendlier “Global Arrogance” in their rhetoric.”

Several groups have been handpicked and sent to Iran. Their trip diaries are both laughable and disgraceful. They remind me of one of the cold war era visits to the Soviet Union. The returned visitors praised Stalin and the joyful Gulags.

Recently, when the mullahs’ wave of public mass hangings was condemned by international community, Phil Wilayto, who led the latest “People's Peace Delegation to Iran” responded to “these falacious allegations against the Iranian regime”: 2

“Yes, Iran has the death penalty, and uses it. But not nearly so often as the United States government, which also now has the largest prison population in the world, both in terms of absolute numbers and as a percentage of the population. Neither did we see any evidence of deep, mass anger with the Iranian government. We talked with Iranians from a wide range of occupations and social classes. People grumble about their economic situation, but most seem to blame the U.S.-imposed sanctions. Not everyone is happy with the religious and social restrictions, but that discontent seems to be mainly among the middle class, a distinct minority in Iran.

The vast majority of the people are lower-income, and those are the ones who have benefited the most from the Revolution. For example, unlike in the U.S., health care is free, as is education. Women must cover their hair, arms and legs, but 60 percent of university students are now women, as are 30 percent of doctors. And most women we saw chose [ emphasis is mine!] to wear the more conservative chador, the tent-like black veil, as opposed to the more secular manteau and head scarf.” But what do we expect from the “intellectual” traveler admiring women’s ability to choose, when the tour guide (Rostam Pourzal) professes: 3

“Equal rights for women are actually not as popular in Iran as we wish … I was stunned during a recent visit to Iran to find that President Ahmadinejad is quite popular among women from all walks of life.”

Such paradisiacal land is naturally guarded by peaceful soldiers like those in Switzerland as reported by another visitor: 4“Both our delegation members and the (Revolutionary) Guards were visiting one of the famous wind towers in the ancient desert oasis city of Yazd. One of the guards asked us where we were from. When we said "USA," the whole crowd broke into smiles, waved their hands and began saying "Welcome!" and "friends!" … On the other hand, the administration of President George W. Bush is escalating its campaign to demonize Iran, its government and now its soldiers.” Ardeshir Ommani, one of the CASMII’s main collaborators was so excited that he held several meetings to talk about his return from Iran. He wrote an article summarizing his experience titled “Iran today is a work in progress”: 5

“The same with electricity: the streets of all cities and the main roads are brightly lit. The light poles of the electric lines run everywhere. Traveling along the highway between Esfahan and Shiraz, we were surprised to see workers with water trucks busily cleaning the dust and soot off the road signs and light reflectors to ensure safety of the travelers. What a change from 25 years ago!Each family in the smaller rural farming village of Saman has a refrigerator. Some have clothes washers and dryers. Almost all have televisions.

The living space per person seemed greater than in some New York apartments. Healthcare is provided to all children, pre-natal care to pregnant women and care to senior citizens, all at no cost.

Teams of nurses and doctors and primary healthcare personnel regularly visit the rural clinics, ensuring that the local municipalities properly provide services.”Returning from such a wonderful land of prosperity could be very painful. Another visitor explains her erotically agonizing goodbye: 6“..by the time of my departure back home I was in love with the culture (both public and private worlds I witnessed) that I wept on the plane.

The Japanese woman sitting next to me rolled her eyes and assumed that I was leaving behind a sexily spicy hot Iranian man. Perhaps this is true. I was dragged apart from a realm so attractive, unique! Iran was hotter than Casanova for me.”The essence of CASMII’s campaign is probably best expressed by another visitor: 7“We were treated to the best lamb briyani dinner by the mayor of Isfahan who reminded us that public relations begins and ends with people”.


Notes:
1. http://www.campaigniran.org/casmii/index.php?q=node/384
2. http://www.campaigniran.org/casmii/index.php?q=node/2791
3. http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/pourzal180606.html
4. http://www.campaigniran.org/casmii/index.php?q=node/2772
5. http://www.workers.org/2006/world/iran-0427/
6. http://www.campaigniran.org/casmii/index.php?q=node/2626
7. http://www.campaigniran.org/casmii/index.php?q=node/673

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Congratulations to Mr. Mohammad Navab on Leaving CASMII

This is great news. One down, many more to go.

Check out VF's expose of NIAC, too.

Vigilante Freedom:

Back in July we wrote about The National Iranian American Council Mr. Mohammad Navab, a member of NIAC, (see here,here, and here) and indicating that he was also a board member of the Campaign Against Sanctions And Military Action In Iran (CASMII). Today, we received a comment from Mr. Navab: (see here):

Dear allThank you for your efforts towards the well being of this great nation. I, like you wish to see the best continuing for this phenomenal country (the most interesting in human history) and the people of other countries. One clarification that needs to be made though is that I am not a member of CASMII and I would highly appreciate this correction to be made in your analyses.With thanks and best wishes,Mohamad Navab

The IP and Email address both trace back to UCLA, where Mr. Navab teaches, so I’m relatively comfortable saying its him. Thinking that perhaps we had made a mistake when we identified Mr. Navab as a CASMII board member, and wishing to correct, I returned to the link we had provided to the CASMII site where Mr. Navab’s name was found, and found this: Access Denied.
Well, I thought, that’s odd. With a little help I found A google cache here:(captured as .PDF here, with additional pages here and here). Mr. Navab had served as a board member of CASMII when our article was written. Mr. Navab has now been removed from CASMII’s website and is no longer listed as a Board member. It seems that Mr. Navab has chosen to distance himself from CASMII, and he picked a good time to do it. From CASMII this week, “Friendly American Encounter with Revolutionary Guard“.

An American peace delegation which visited Iran recently has described a striking friendly encounter with some three hundred members of the Revolutionary Guards. In a statement, the head of the delegation has strongly debunked the US administration’s decision to label these soldiers as terrorist and has called on Americans to oppose a new war of aggression.

Of course the evidence that IRGC has assisted in the killing of American soldiers is overwhelming. So we were pleased to hear that Mr. Navab has chosen to no longer be with the CASMII Board of Directors, and we congratulate him on that decision.

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Conundrum

Economist has an exceptional piece on Iran, weighing all options at our disposal to change the regime's "behavior". The Economist doubts that strong sanctions will have any discernible impact to change the political dynamic within Iran enough to change the Islamic Republic's behavior, in part, due to their high threshold of tolerating austere conditions(8 years of Iran-Iraq war). It also asserts that all options are equally bad, including overt military action, and will have the adverse effect of strengthening the regime rather than weakening it:

Nonetheless, it is not clear that sanctions are even close to imposing the sort of pain needed to alter the government's nuclear behaviour. They have pushed down living standards, but war and revolution have taught Iranians how to muddle through. An economy like Iran's, dominated by the government budget, is better able than most to take the travails of the private sector in its stride. And since energy exports make up almost half the government's revenues, high world prices (kept high in part by the tension over Iran) have compensated nicely for much of the damage sanctions have inflicted. Besides, many powerful Iranians prosper through their control of a relatively closed economy. The openness the world proffers as an “incentive” to give up the bomb strikes at some of this group's vested interests.

The fundamental problem here is that so far all notions of "sanctions" are based on western notions of what will hurt rather than trying to get into the mullah's minds and figure out what will actually move them.

The second problem with Iran is that we have not confronted an unbroken string of Iranian aggressions over 28 years: from killing the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan to Khobar Towers, Buenos Aires, Beirut, Embassy take-over/hostages. What our inactions have resulted in is nothing more than a nightmarish convoluted mix of threats all over the ME. All the current threats facing the Middle East and the West - the Hamas takeover in the Gaza Strip, Hizballah’s bid for power in Lebanon, political turmoil in Iraq, and imminent nuclear weapons in the hands of a radical dictatorship share the Islamic Republic as their main financier and instigator.

The third and the most important and, often entirely overlooked, problem is the fact that we have not been able to identify a cohesive picture of who the enemy is and what it has been up to for the past 28 years? The vast, well-funded highly organized and strategically well-placed *lobby of the Islamic Republic (with the help of our socialist useful idiots)--starting well over 10 years ago--in Washington D.C. is mainly responsible for this confusion among our policy makers.

By nearly 30 years of retreat/surrender we have taught every rabid Islamists in Iran (though a minority but holding all the financial and military power) that we will do nothing in the face of aggression and it might be too complicated now to start. We need tink tanks to stop listening to biased lobbyist and do their own investigation and analysis.

*NIAC, CASMII, etc.

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The Bankruptcy of External Threat Argument

The External Threat Argument

By Potkin Azarmerh

I don't envy the Islamic regime's apologists and lobbyists, for although they have a lot of funds at their disposal, from Iranian government or the oil giants, they have a tall order. Islamic Republic is a religious dictatorship, where the rights of a citizen are determined by their religion or more accurately by their adherence to the state's interpretation of Shiite theology. Pure and simple, Islamic Republic is evil and wrong.

So how do these lobbyists and apologists cope with such a difficult task of window dressing the Islamic Republic? First of all they rely on the 'useful idiots' in the West. The same ones who tried to glamorise the tyrannies of Stalin and Mao.

'Useful idiots' are very active, and they seem to have a lot of time for activism. They are also experts in getting grants and funding. The army of 'useful idiots' as well as the funds at their disposal is their strength.

The Achilles heel of the IR apologists and lobbyists is their bankrupt arguments. One really has to scrape the bottom of the barrel to come up with a viable argument to defend the Islamic Republic.

One of the pivotal arguments they have been posing is that while Iran is under external threat, the human rights abuses and all the other wrongs in the Islamic Republic should not be highlighted and we should all concentrate on fighting this external threat first and foremost. See CASMII's protest at a mild petition put up by Znet that mildly criticised the human rights abuses in Iran. Now lets examine one of CASMII's leading members, Abbas Edalat.

He was educated in the US after having received a scholarship from the Pahlavi Foundation, i.e. from the Shah's regime. Yet this receiver of the scholarship from the Pahlavi Foundation did not hesitate to campaign against the Shah's regime as a student.

Under the Shah, Iran was definitely under the external threat from two of its immediate neighbours, the Soviet Union and Iraq. The Russian ambitions to reach the warm waters of the Persian Gulf go back to Peter the Great's will and after the second World War, the Soviets tried to break up Iran by supporting and promoting a separatist movement in Azerbijan, North West Iran.After their failure in Azerbijan, the Soviets continued their desires to turn Iran into a Russian satellite by supporting and funding the puppet pro-Soviet Tudeh Party and other insurgencies.Programs by the Peyk Radio of the Tudeh Party, broadcast from Eastern Europe, continued to disseminate Soviet propaganda against the Shah’s regime.

Iraq's ambition on breaking away Khuzestan province from Iran was aided by Egypt's other Pan-Arab leader, Gamal Abdul-Nasser, who referred to Iranian Khuzestan as Arabestan. Iraq also disputed the river borders of Arvand-rood, and on several occasions Saddam's forces attacked Iranian border posts only to be pushed back by the well organised Iranian army at the time.

So Iran was definitely under external threat at the time, yet students like Abbas Edalat studying abroad on a government grant, never considered that they should stop their activities against the Shah to combat the external threats. In fact many of them directly collaborated with the governments that posed that very external threat.

These students would be educated in US and Western European countries but for some peculiar reason then wanted an Albanian, Chinese, Algerian or some other tin-pot dictatorship styles for Iran! Patriotism to them was either a dirty word and just was not found in their vocabulary.But all of a sudden now, their 'patriotism' is preventing them from criticising the Islamic Republic.

The fact is that the Islamic Republic feels threatened even by its own shadow, and will always create an 'external threat' and an 'external enemy'. Islamic Republic craves and lives on crisis as a way of extending its shelf life. After 28 years however, most Iranian people are seeing through these gimmicks and bluffs of the clerical state.

They rightly demand their rights to a decent standard of living, their right to have a say in how they are governed, and their right to personal freedoms. I can not imagine how for example, Iranian teachers, who only demand the enactment of the Islamic Assembly bill for public workers, and nothing more, can be regarded as colluding with the 'external threat'?!

Nor indeed how Iranian women who want justice in state gender laws, nor the workers who demand their unpaid wages, nor any other stream of the Iranian pro-democracy movement, in any way are colluding with any external threats. The argument to suppress home grown dissent because of external threats has been used by just about all dictatorships. If such an argument had any shred of consistency, Israel should be the most brutal dictatorship against its own citizens because of all the external threats it faces.

Yet even during the missile attacks on Israel by the Hezbollah, some Israeli citizens felt free enough to demonstrate against the war and criticise their government. Imagine what would have happened if a group of Iranians protested in Iran, during the war with Iraq, and demanded that the Islamic Republic accepted the peace treaty that was on offer after the Iraqi aggressors had retreated from our borders.

Demanding justice at home not only does not promote external threats, but a perception of being able to campaign freely for justice and bring one's government to accountability actually strengthens one's resolve to defend the system against external threats.

The 'external threat' argument is so old, repetitive, bankrupt and baseless that only 'useful idiots' will be convinced by it. Any sane person can realise that the motivation for such arguments is more suspect than it appears on the surface and there is another agenda behind it.

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