Iranian Opposition & Solidarity - Paris Conference Updates (3)

Reprinted from Iranian Plateau:

Updated (2): I just found this article - June 15, 2007 - it mentions the names of a few people who were to attend the conference - here is an extract:
“What we want to do at this stage is to evaluate our potentials for continuing the struggle, set up two coordinating committees, one for Europe and another one for the United States to bring together all Iranians opposed to this regime and eventually, forming an Iranian government in exile”, one of the organizers told Iran Press Service.

Among the participants are well-known leftist activists, such as Kambiz Rousta and Dr. Hassan Massali, who opposed the former Shah and for years have been vilified by the monarchist camp.

Sitting next to them will be conservative former monarchists such as Mr. Shahriar Ahi, an advisor to Prince Reza Pahlavi, University Professor Dr. Shahin Fatemi, or Dr. Cyrus Amouzegar, a former government minister under the shah. Also at the table will be Mohsen Sazegara, a confidant of Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini who helped to found the dreaded Revolutionary Guards but who broke with the regime in the late 1980s and was jailed repeatedly and tortured because of his calls for change and Ali Afshari, a former students leader.

“Some groups can’t accept the new political realities that require reaching across party lines, and have said they will not come”, said Baqerzadeh. “But we are not closing the door”, he added.
However, some of the participants are skeptic: “Belief in factors like democracy, political and individual freedom in a country with huge and complicated problems like Iran is not enough. The present Iranian society, the young and women who makes 70 per cent of Iran’s population have a different interpretation for freedom, especially the freedom of the individual”, observed Ahmad Ra’fat, a journalist who often talks to Iranian students and women activists in Iran observed.

“What Iranians outside are fighting for is quite different from what Iranians inside the country wants”, he noted in an article posted by “Gooya”, the most popular Iranian internet website.

Addressing the Democracy and Security International Conference that was held in Prague on 5 and 6 June 2007 and at which appeared President George Bush, Mr. Pahlavi appealed to all democratic governments of the world, especially to the Europeans for solidarity with the people of Iran against a common enemy: Islamist preachers of intolerance who turn young men and women into walking bombs, shouting death to America, death to Israel, death to whosoever resists their murderous ideology.

“To the realpolitik cynics who say Islamist theocracy is a reality we have to live with, I respond: funny – they never said they can live with YOU! To those who say the theocrats can reform if we are nice to them, I say you do not know the difference between Islamist revolution and secular ones. Those who believe they speak with the absolute authority of Allah demand absolute submission”. SOURCE HERE

Updated (3): June 18, 2007 - For those who are able to read Persian (Farsi) - please visit this website for more detailed information & recommendations regarding Paris Solidarity Conference - Neshast-e London
You can also read the latest round up of this historic 3 day conference in English by Kenneth R. Timmerman - Iranian Opposition Vows to Step Up Fight Against Tehran
Key parts of Timmerman’s round up:
One of those former opponents of the shah, Kambiz Roosta, helped to organize the Paris conference. A prominent socialist in his youth, Roosta helped devise the Solidarity Iran formula of connecting domestic opposition groups and social groups to their counterparts outside Iran.
Solidarity Iran is different from other Iranian opposition groups in that it is not a political party, nor does it represent a particular ideology.

“It allows the various groups and political parties to keep their identity, with individual leaders joining Solidarity Iran in a personal capacity,” said Iman Foroutan, another member of the newly-elected coordinating council.

Foroutan, who runs the California-based Iran of Tomorrow Movement, has been recruiting cells of activists inside Iran. “The idea is to come up with a grand plan of civil disobedience and economic action that will allow people to go out and do their own thing, while coordinating all these actions,” he said.

Messages of support for the new movement came pouring in over the weekend from activists inside Iran.

Ibrahimi read a letter sent by more than a dozen political prisoners in Iranian jails, who asked that their names be read aloud, even though they knew they would be punished for it.
Mohsen Zarafzadeh, who fled Iran after he was released from jail a few years ago, read a similar letter of support from jailed student leader Hesmatollah Tabarzadeh.

A prominent women’s activist inside Iran connected to a friend at the conference through a special computer program that allows users to talk over the Internet without detection. “She said she was willing to serve on the newly-elected Coordinating committee,” the friend said.

Kian Sanjari, a well-known Iranian blogger who was forced to flee Iran recently and is currently hiding in a neighboring country, called on a cellphone to see if he could connect as well, to post portions of the speeches on his blog.

The 20-member coordinating council, elected this Sunday, will meet in the near future to select a seven-member Executive Committee, as well as a working group to hammer out a new national compact with Iran’s ethnic minorities.

Hamza Bayezid, the representative of Congress of Nationalities for a Federal Iran, said his 16 member organizations will wait until the details of the national compact can be negotiated before formally joining the new movement.
In an exclusive interview just after the conference ended, the deputy secretary general the Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran told NewsMax that the Congress was hopeful the negotiations would be successful.

While some Iranian nationalist organizations feared the ethnic Kurds and other minorities wanted to separate from Iran, Dr. Hassan Sharafi told NewsMax that his party and the Congress of Nationalities were dedicated to a united Iran.
“We are Iranian nationalists,” he said. “We want our rights within a federal Iran. Splitting apart Iran is to nobody’s benefit.”

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A Sad Day for the Theofascists in Iran and the Socialists!

photo: Parisparfait

Sarkozy Wins

According to exit polls, Nicolas Sarkozy, the candidate of the right-wing, has been elected President of France by a margin of 53 or 54 to 46 or 47 for Segolene Royal, the socialist candidate. Royal is the first woman to make it this far in a French presidential elect. Her run was hobbled by some early gaffes from which she seemed unable to recover her footing. Sarkozy plans to pursue close ties with the U.S. and a hyper-neoliberal economic program (he has this in common with the mullahs).

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La France prepares to elect new president

From Paris Parfait:

French voters go to the polls Sunday in the first round of voting for a new president. Center-right candidate Nicolas Sarkozy and Socialist Segelene Royal are expected to make it through to the second round.

But the "third man," centrist candidate Francois Bayrou could throw a spanner into the works. If Sarkozy and Royal make it through the first round, Bayrou will be courted to throw his support - and that of his followers - behind one leading contender.
French media reports that a day before the election, approximately 16 million voters remain undecided. More than one million newly-registered voters are expected to cast their vote. The second round of voting is May 6. Read the rest.

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Déjà vu

The latest hostage crisis continues to unfold as I expected.

After the failure to secure UN condemnation of Iran’s action, the Times reports that the EU has refused to impose sanctions on Iran. As I've indicated many times in my posts, Iran is EU's client state. The EU is single-handedly responsible for survival and prolongation of the Islamist Iran reign of terror. Germany is Iran's largest trading partner. According to Spiegel online, forty-eight percent of Germans think that the United States is more dangerous than Iran with only 31 percent believing the opposite.

France, Iran's second-largest trading partner wants more pathetic dialogue with a bunch of politically and emotionally immature thugs who can only think of short-term solutions to hold on to power by engineering crisis after crisis since their usurpation of power in 1979.

Contrast this with the confrontational chutzpah of the Islamist Iranians (aka TAZI meaning Raiders in English; this is name given to Isamo/arabs after wiping out Iranian civilization and imposing Islam on Iranians by the sword). As the BBC reports today, Iran's ambassador to Russia has said that the British servicemen could face trial for violating international law. "It is possible that the British soldiers who entered into Iranian waters will go on trial for taking this illegal action," Gholamreza Ansari told Russian television channel Vesti-24.

Given the state of popular opinion (manufactured by disinformation and propaganda) in Iran, what do we think the outcome of such a show trial might be? As that Times piece says: "In Iran tens of thousands of football fans reportedly chanted “Death to England” while tourists burnt an effigy of Mr Blair dressed as a pirate."

In other words, our lack of will has emboldened our enemies beyond the point of considering the release of their hostages. They are now hinting at the possibility of keeping them a lot longer. Sound familiar?! They've done this in 1979 and have gotten away with it absolutely unpunished, so why stop now.

Ahmad Khatami, one of Iran's theocrats views this fiasco this way:

Today, Britain is a failed, isolated power who acts as a middleman for America. If they continue their bullying they will pay a high price. This Iran is a great Islamic and powerful Iran who is standing against America, who is the master of Britain.

Anyone still think the Iranians are intimidated by our (non-existent) "ratcheting up" of rhetoric?

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Iran: The Clash of Ambitions

Read the FP Magazine interview with the author of the book, "Iran, The Clash of Ambitions", here. He exposes Khomeinis as a fraud and a fabrication of the French Left . The title "imam" was given to him by two French Journalists,where as in shiism this title belongs only to the twelve direct descendants of the Prophet. Here are some excerpts:

FP : Let's go back to Khomeini for a moment. Tell us a bit about who he was as a person and the evil he perpetrated.

Nahavandi: Unfortunately. many of the different works published about Khomeini's life are wrong and inaccurate. His Indian origins were ignored when he was in Paris. There is nothing wrong with being of a different origin than Persian but even now it is forbidden to talk about it in Iran.

The title 'Imam' was given to him by two French journalists, where as in shiism this title belongs only to the twelve direct descendants of the Prophet.

He was not a cultured man. Most probably you have read in some papers that he gave the order to the Iranian Air Force to destroy American satellites, and to the Ministry of Agriculture, to flood the American market with Iranian wheat so as to make the economy of the ‘Great Satan’ become totally dependent.

Khomeini was presented to world opinion as a “brilliant philosopher and theologian” who was some kind of “example for all” that even supposedly his worst enemies could never contest. The various mandates he made especially dealt with “the way to urinate and to defecate,” “purity and impurity,” and “women and their periods.” In the others, one could here and there find a few thoughts of a philosophical, religious or political order, such as:

“It is proven that the Western physicians are totally ignorant,” “Women from the Prophet of Islam’s lineage have their menopause at the age of sixty. The others at over the age of fifty.”

As for political issues:

“Islam alone is to govern.”

“Those who want to set up democracy want to drag our country into corruption and perdition. They are worse than the Jews. They must be hanged. They are not men. They have the blood of animals. Be they damned’.

“All the laws in the world, except those of the Islamic republic, come from a handful of idiotic syphilitics. They are null and void. Islam does not recognize any other law but its own in the world.”

Finally, here are a few examples from the culture of the “great theologian and philosopher’:

“Socrates, a great theologian. He learnt philosophy from Pythagoras and devoted himself totally to theology and ethic. He discarded worldly pleasures, took refuge in a cave in the mountains where he fully dedicated himself to the only God. He tried to convince people of other gods than the real one. After what he had said, the people demanded from the Sultan that he should be put to death. The latter was forced into it and poisoned him.”

“Aristotle was the son of Nikomachos from Stagira, one of the greatest philosophers in the world. Avicenna said that nobody was ever able to contradict his theories. Yet, the French Descartes thought he had discovered flaws in them later on; specialists, however, can easily realize how childish and groundless Descartes’s claims in philosophical and theological matters were. Woe betide us Muslims for being intimidated by the West, for taking our own level of knowledge lightly when the Westerners will not be able to reach it before a thousand years.”

Other words, on the contrary, did not make people smile:

“We must give rise to repeated crises, and give a new and better value to the idea of death and martyrdom... If Iran disappears in the future, it is not important; what is important is to drown the whole world in a situation of crisis.”

“All the existing forms of corruption are the products of the nation and of nationalism.”

“Those who think they are Iranian and who believe they must work for Iran are wrong.”

“Blood must be spilled, for the more Iran bleeds, the more the revolution will triumph.”

“Blood must flow.”

“The mother who reported her son so that he would be tried and hanged is an example for the people. It is a model of Islam. If your children, brothers and sisters do not follow the given advice, report them so that they can be chastised.”

“Our dear pupils must keep a close watch on their teachers. The teachers must keep a close watch on themselves. The pupils, my dear children must keep a close watch on one another and report any deviation.”

“Israel must burn to ashes.”

Hundreds of other sentences could be quoted. The regime that originated in the revolution applied Ayatollah Khomeini’s ‘real discourse’ with a frightening zeal. The people with a good conscience who had shown enthusiasm for the man looked away, kept quiet and let things happen, as had been the case long ago with so many other bloodthirsty dictators.

In his interviews, Khomeini was presented as a democrat and liberal man, but the public ignored that the interviews were written by experts who just said what had to be said.

In France, all was prepared for his arrival, including transmitters in his residence. His anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist writings are even stronger than Hitler's.

When he finally arrived in Tehran from Paris with two hundred journalists in an Air France aeroplane which had been named Liberté (‘Liberty’) on the occasion. He granted an interview to the representatives of the Iranian national Radio and Television while he was on the aeroplane. The journalist asked him, among other things:

“What are Your Holiness’s feelings on finding His way back home after so many years?”

“Hitshi” (“Zilch”) “His Holiness” answered.

Everything had just been said, in substance and form. The future was to prove it.

There is much more to be said about Khomeini, and you will find lots more on him, with documents and references, in my last book "Iran, the Clash of Ambitions".

The aim of the mystification of Khomeini was to bring down the previous regime. But time has come for the truth to be revealed to history.

FP : Why do you think the Left, which is supposedly dedicated to democratic ideals, venerated this despot and leader of a death cult? It appears the Left has followed in that tradition by siding with radical Islam in our terror war. How would you explain this morbid pathology of the Left?

Nahavandi: The leftists, especially in France, had always shown sympathy to the revolutionary regimes. Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault were leaders of Khomeini's support committees.

Michel Foucault went to Iran twice – in September and in November 1978 – and wrote a series of eulogistic articles on Ruhollah Khomeini in the quality Western press, notably in Le Monde. He met him at least once in Neauphle-le-Château, and analysed his philosophical stands. Simone de Beauvoir also went to Iran to support the Islamic revolution. Jean-Paul Sartre contented himself with Parisian stands.

The socialist Party led by François Mitterrand proclaimed its “resolute support” to the movement. The French Socialist Party organized a public demonstration in its support and its executive office saluted the victory of the Islamic revolution on February 14, 1979: “a popular movement of an exceptional dimension in contemporary history.” Many European leftist movements sent their delegations to the international conference held in Tehran in favour of the hostage-taking operation of November 4th 1979.

Khomeini was not “a sort of social-democratic saint, a religious figure who was to be fundamentally admired,” as the American ambassador to the UNO had said [Ambassador Andrew Young]. Professor Richard Falk, who was very a popular academic from the highest spheres of Carter's power circles said: “Imam Khomeini is a miracle in the whole history of human kind, there has never been a leader who could compare, and I do not think there will be another one,” before adding that “he had made the most beautiful moment in the history of Islam come true, the model of a peaceful revolution without a bloodshed, the example of a humanist government.” These individuals’ words represented blindness, insincerity or simply hatred for their own country.

There was not the slightest regret shown on the other side of the Atlantic either. When things went wrong and when the truth broke out, none of these good souls, with the exception of one or two, expressed any regret. They looked away. They forgot everything, but they did not learn anything.

It seems that the Left, "democratic" epigone of the bloody French Revolution (600,000 dead peoples with children, women and old peoples atrociously massacred) has shed into the world and among the Nations a real mob fuelled by a sort of hysterical rage against the any idea, concept, expression related to harmony, beauty, balance, liberty, order. There is an inner principle of death that moves their "souls". One could even think that the leftists feel vaguely or precisely something already corrupted in their roots, deep into their souls. They just don't want to fall "alone", but to bring down with them the whole world into their dedicated chaos. That would then be a "transcendental" pathology. To destroy or to subvert is for the Left a challenge similar to a chess party...

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Complicity of France in Manufacturing the Iranian Revolution and Jimmy Carter's betrayal of the Iranian People

Aryamehr posted a very good article from The Brussels Journal about the French's involvement in creating the Iranian coup d'etat in 1979. His post also links to a previous post of his about Jimmy Carter's involvement in the sickening affair. I've posted some excerpts below fyi, but the whole thing (not very long) is definitely worth a read when you have a minute.

...The inaction and general incompetence displayed by former US President Jimmy Carter, today an apologist for the Islamic Jihad against Israel, certainly contributed, but we mustn’t forget former French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.

The irony is that while the Ayatollah Khomeini could establish an Islamic state directed from the suburbs of Paris, the French 30 years later have hundreds of Islamic mini-states on French soil. Khomeini and his cronies used this window of opportunity at a critical stage of the uprising against the Shah to consolidate their power and establish their lead over the direction of which the Revolution was heading

As Ambassador Freddy Eytan says:
President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing had invited the Shah of Iran as his first official foreign guest, in view of France’s interest in Iranian oil. In 1978, Giscard and his Interior Minister Michel Poniatowski foresaw the collapse of the Shah’s government, which would damage France’s commercial interests.
The proposal was then raised to bring the Ayatollah Khomeini to Algeria. Before, he had been chased from one place to the other. The DST, the French secret service, opposed his entry but Giscard overruled them and granted Khomeini political asylum in France. He stayed in Neauphle le Chateau near Paris. From there, he distributed cassettes to Iran inciting against democracy, peace in the Middle East, the Jews and Israelis. He also called for jihad, a violent holy war. The PLO distributed Khomeini’s cassettes to Iran. When the American embassy in Teheran was attacked in November 1979, PLO members were among the perpetrators. Yasser Arafat was the first official guest in Teheran. He received a popular welcome as a great hero for supporting the Islamic revolution.

Today, we know that Khomeini’s concepts of the Islamic Republic have led to a major expansion of militant Islam. Both Hizbollah and Al Qaeda have their origins in the revolutionary ideas developed in Khomeini’s Iran. The violent speeches in the Iranian mosques and international Islamist terror would not have developed without Khomeini’s stay in France and the publicity he received there. Without Giscard’s hospitality, Khomeini would not have been able to take power in Iran and develop an infrastructure for international propaganda and terrorism.

See my earlier post on Carter's involvement in the coup of 1979 which brought the demonic mullahs and the father of militant Islam, Khomeini to power. Here are some excerpts:

"The coup against the Shah, like that against Mossadegh in 1953, was run by British and American intelligence, with the bombastic American, Brzezinski, taking public 'credit' for getting rid of the 'corrupt' Shah, while the British characteristically remained safely in the background.During 1978, negotiations were under way between the Shah's government and British Petroleum for renewal of the 25-year old extraction agreement. By October 1978, the talks had collapsed over a British 'offer' which demanded exclusive rights to Iran's future oil output, while refusing to guarantee purchase of the oil. With their dependence on British-controlled export apparently at an end, Iran appeared on the verge of independence in its oil sales policy for the first time since 1953, with eager prospective buyers in Germany, France, Japan and elsewhere.In its lead editorial that September, Iran's Kayhan International stated: In retrospect, the 25-year partnership with the [British Petroleum] consortium and the 50-year relationship with British Petroleum which preceded it, have not been satisfactory ones for Iran … Looking to the future, NIOC [National Iranian Oil Company] should plan to handle all operations by itself. London was blackmailing and putting enormous economic pressure on the Shah's regime by refusing to buy Iranian oil production, taking only 3 million or so barrels daily of an agreed minimum of 5 million barrels per day...

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Europe and the mullahs

1979 Khomeini's Return from Exile Courtesy of France


I had argued a few month ago that EU is duplictious on the issue of nuclear standoff with Iran because they have no incentive in stopping their client state being a threat to the US and use that as a leverage in trade and economic negotiations. We should have never outsourced one of the most important National Security and Strategic issues we face today to the Europeans. Finally, Wall Street Journal agrees with me.

The Wall Street Journal:

Europe claims to be as concerned as America about a nuclear-armed Iran. The record also shows, however, that Europe's biggest countries do a booming business with the Islamic Republic. And so far for the Continentals, manna trumps security.

The European Union -- led by Germany, France and Italy -- has long been Iran's largest trading partner. Its share of Iran's total imports is about 35%. Even more notable: Its trade with Tehran has expanded since Iran's secret nuclear program was exposed. Between 2003 and 2005, Europe's exports rose 29% to €12.9 billion; machinery, transport equipment and chemicals make up the bulk of the sales. Imports from Iran, predominantly oil, increased 62% to €11.4 billion in that period.In the absence of an official embargo against Tehran, private EU companies have sought commercial opportunities in Iran. But the real story here is that these businesses are subsidized by European taxpayers. Government-backed export guarantees have fueled the expansion in trade. That, in turn, has boosted Iran's economy and -- indirectly by filling government coffers with revenues -- its nuclear program. The German record stands out.

In its 2004 annual report on export guarantees, Berlin's Economics Ministry dedicated a special section to Iran that captures its giddy excitement about business with Tehran."Federal Government export credit guarantees played a crucial role for German exports to Iran; the volume of coverage of Iranian buyers rose by a factor of almost 3.5 to some €2.3 billion compared to the previous year," the report said. "The Federal Government thus insured something like 65% of total German exports to the country. Iran lies second in the league of countries with the highest coverage in 2004, hot on the heels of China."Iran tops Germany's list of countries with the largest outstanding export guarantees, totaling €5.5 billion.

France's export guarantees to Iran amount to about €1 billion. Italy's come to €4.5 billion, accounting for 20% of Rome's overall guarantee portfolio. Little Austria had, at the end of 2005, €800 million of its exports to Iran covered by guarantees.The Europeans aren't simply facilitating business between private companies. The vast majority of Iranian industry is state-controlled, while even private companies have been known to act as fronts for the country's nuclear program. EU taxpayers underwrite trade and investment that would otherwise be deterred by the risks of doing business with a rogue regime.It's also hard not to see a connection between Europe's commercial interests and its lenient diplomacy.

The U.N.'s December sanctions resolution orders countries to freeze the assets of only 10 specific companies and 12 individuals with ties to Iran's nuclear program. Europe's governments continue to resist U.S. calls for financial sanctions, and the German Chamber of Commerce recently estimated that tougher economic sanctions would cost 10,000 German jobs.As if on cue, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier last week detected in Tehran a "new ambition" to resume talks. The last time the Europeans promoted such diplomatic negotiations, Iran won two more years to get closer to its goal of becoming a nuclear power. In 2004, according to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung daily, then-Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer told Iranians to consider Europe a "protective shield" against U.S. pressure. The EU continues to provide a shield for its business interests in Iran, and thus a lifeline to a regime that is unpopular at home and sponsors terror abroad.

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