Israel Matzav

Joined at the hip: New Iranian Defense Minister was behind Hezbullah's Beirut Marine baracks bombing

Thirty years ago last month, Hezbollah blew up the barracks of the U.S Marines and French paratroopers stationed at the Beirut airport, killing 241 U.S. servicemen and 58 Frenchmen. It wasn’t Hezbollah’s first terrorist operation, but this attack, the most memorable in Lebanon’s vicious and chaotic 15-year-long civil war, marked the Party of God’s entry onto the world stage.

Three decades later, thanks to the efforts of Israeli Hezbollah expert Shimon Shapira, we now know that one of the men responsible for the attack was an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander named Hossein Dehghan​—​the man Iranian president Hassan Rouhani recently tapped to be his defense minister. In other words, Hezbollah and the Islamic Republic of Iran have been joined at the hip from the very beginning, even before the 1979 Iranian revolution.

The big bang theory of Hezbollah that puts the Israeli occupation at the alpha point is based not in fact but in legend​—​it’s an Israel-centric myth that makes the Jewish state Hezbollah’s motivation and prime mover. In reality, the story of Hezbollah’s origins is a story about Iran, featuring the anti-shah revolutionaries active in Lebanon in the 1970s, years before Israel’s intervention. Thus, to uncover Hezbollah’s roots, it is necessary to mine the accounts of Iranian cadres operating in Lebanon a decade before Israel invaded. 

There we find that, contrary to the common wisdom, Hezbollah didn’t arise as a resistance movement to the Israeli occupation. Rather, it was born from the struggle between Iranian revolutionary factions opposed to the shah. Lebanon was a critical front for this rivalry between Hezbollah’s Iranian progenitors and their domestic adversaries. Accordingly, an accurate understanding of this history gives us not only the true story of Hezbollah’s beginnings, but also an insight into the origins of Iran’s Islamic Revolution. Those early internal conflicts and impulses, played out in Lebanon as well as Iran, also provide a roadmap for reading the nature of the current regime in Tehran, its motivations and concerns, its strategies and gambits as it moves toward acquiring a nuclear weapon and challenging the American order in the Middle East.

Labels: Ayatollah Khomeni, Hezbullah, Imad Mughniyah, Iranian revolution, PLO, Yasser Arafat

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:43 AM 1 comments

How the American Left allowed the Islamic revolution to thrive

One of the major phenomena that the author skillfully dissects is how disciples of the late Palestinian advocate Edward Said and the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) at large misunderstood and consequently misguided American policy-makers under the false belief of an "Islamic reformation" or democratization. In contrast, others, like Bernard Lewis, had serious reservations about Khomeini especially after finding a printing of the "Welayat el Faqih," the theory of the Absolute Guardianship of the Jurist notion, which included Khomeini's lectures from the 1970s and now forms the basis for the Iranian constitution.

Lewis alerted the Washington Post of Khomeini's theocratic aspirations, setting out to change the conventional wisdom that was coming out of Washington at the time. Anyone who held views that ran counter to MESA's, including Richard Perle — then an aide to Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson who supplied samples of Khomeini's writings to the CIA — and others, was categorized as "orientalist" (another way of saying conservative or anti-Said).

Moreover, this misreading of Iran was "ratified" by Columbia University professor Gary Sick, whose "October Surprise" conspiracy theory alleged that Ronald Reagan made a deal with the Iranians to delay the release of the hostages to prevent Carter from winning the 1980 presidential elections. Sick wrote an op-ed — later he expanded into a book entitled, "October Surprise: America's Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan" — in which he characterized the 1980 election as a "covert political coup." This simplistic reading did not consider the internal politics of Iran.

For MESAns, the Palestinians are the chosen people, and more so now than ever. More papers are devoted to Palestine than to any other country. There are ten times as many Egyptians as there are Palestinians, but they get less attention; there are ten times as many Iranians, but Iran gets less than half the attention. Even Iraq, America’s project in the Middle East, still inspires only half the papers that Palestine does. Papers dealing with Israel are only half as numerous as those on Palestine, and only three of these are about Israel per se, apart from the Arab-Israeli conflict. More than half of the Israel-related papers actually overlap the Palestine category. MESA’s Palestine obsession has reached new heights, suggesting this: academe is gearing up for its next intifada.

To appreciate that, you have to go beyond the numbers, to the content of this “scholarship.” There you discover that many of the presentations, if not most of them, are blatant attempts to academize anti-Israel agitprop.

Labels: Edward Said, Iranian revolution, Jimmy Carter, Middle East Studies Association, Red-Green alliance

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 1:40 PM 0 comments

Protest videos from Iran

Several amateur videos, said to be from the protest in Tehran, show hundreds of people walking in the city center. RFE/RL is not able to fully confirm the authenticity of the videos.

In this video recorded with a cell phone, protesters are apparently expressing anger over Iran's support for the Syrian regime.

"Leave Syria alone, think about us," they chant.

In this video, protesters call on Tehran's bazaar merchants to support them: "Dear prideful bazaaris, support, support."

They also demand the closure of the shops and businesses: "Close down, close down."

The opposition Kalame website reports that "Death to Syria," "Death to the dictator," "Allah Akbar," and "The dollar should be halved" were among other slogans that were chanted in the Iranian capital on October 3.

Some chants also reportedly targeted President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, who has been accused of massive economic mismanagement and inefficiency in dealing with the current crisis.  Ahmadinejad said on October 2 that the devaluation of the rial was in part caused by the sanctions Iran is facing over its sensitive nuclear work.

Labels: Iran sanctions regime, Iranian nuclear threat, Iranian revolution

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:10 AM 0 comments

Soccer Dad's Middle East Media Sampler

1) I knew he couldn't do it twice in a row

Thomas Friedman's previous column, Look in your mirror was an excellent must-read.
His latest, Hard Lines, Red Lines and Green Lines is not.
Friedman gave examples of leadership and lack of leadership. (In short, leadership is demonstrated by adopting policies Friedman approves of.) Among those leaders he found lacking - no surprise here - was PM Netanyahu.

Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu of Israel has been loudly demanding that America publicly draw a “red line” in respect to Iran’s nuclear program that would delineate exactly when the U.S. would launch a strike against Tehran. Bibi is Winston Churchill when it comes to demanding that the U.S. draw red lines, but he is a local party boss when America asks him to draw a “green line” delineating where Jewish settlements in the West Bank will stop and a Palestinian state might start. Oh, no! Can’t do that, Bibi tells American officials. “I would lose my coalition.” So America is supposed to risk a war with Iran, but Bibi won’t risk anything to advance a deal with the Palestinians that might create a little more global legitimacy and sympathy for Israel, and America, in the event of a war with Iran. Thanks a lot.

Netanyahu didn't exactly not risk anything to make peace. He froze settlement expansion for nine months. And got nothing from Abbas.

More generally, as a recent Washington Post editorial put it:

During this time Mr. Abbas has mostly refused negotiations with Israel, citing as a pretext the continued construction in Israel’s West Bank settlements. Israel has offered the Palestinian Authority a number of concessions in exchange for renewing the peace process, including prisoner releases and a potentially lucrative natural gas concession. But Mr. Abbas has not agreed.

The other problem with this paragraph is Friedman's line about  "America is supposed to risk a war with Iran." This is a misrepresentation common to the New York Times. Netanyahu isn't asking the United States to risk war with Iran, but rather to be clear about its "red lines" to make war with Iran less likely.

Following a column which he researched and presented straight unadorned facts, Friedman reverted to type: use a series of pithy, but empty word associations to masquerade as analysis. So for those who were worried that Thomas Friedman had been abducted by aliens and replaced with a logical, look-alike android, you have nothing to fear.

Israel Matzav critiques the column from a wider view.

2) The Romney Middle East "gaffe"

In remarks Romney made back in May that were secretly recorded, he told potential donors:

“The idea of pushing on the Israelis to give something up to get the Palestinians to act is the worst idea in the world,” Romney said.
“I’m torn by two perspectives in this regard,” he said at a $50,000-per-plate fund-raising dinner in Boca Raton, Florida, on May 17. “One is the one which I’ve had for some time, which is that the Palestinians have no interest whatsoever in establishing peace, and that the pathway to peace is almost unthinkable to accomplish.”

The New York Times has since published three responses to those statements. One, a news story, Middle East comments could vex a Romney administration was a news story written by David Sanger.

But if he is elected president in November and finds himself in negotiations over a future Palestine on Israel’s borders, Mr. Romney may find that his comment at a campaign fund-raiser — captured on video — that “there’s just no way” a separate state can be workable could undermine his effectiveness in bringing the two sides together. And any dealings with the mullahs of Iran may not be facilitated by his description of them, in the same video, as “crazy people.”

To prove the difficulty a President Romney would have with the Palestinians, Sanger provided a quote from a Hamas spokesman.

The Palestinians, not surprising, had a different view. Yehia Moussa, a Hamas official in Gaza, argued that the United States had “never been suitable” as an arbiter in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute because it instinctively sided with Israel.
“We are sensing a new pattern of alliances among the Zionist lobby and the rightist Americans who believe in Zionist legends and predictions,” Mr. Moussa said. “Romney is part of this.”

 Hamas, of course, doesn't believe in peace with Israel, but for the New York Times, Hamas is a credible interlocutor for the Palestinians. But note that Moussa's statement is categorical. In other words he doesn't believe that President Obama, either, has been a "suitable arbiter" either.

Pro-Hamas activist, Robert Mackey, wrote at The Lede blog, Mitt Romney's No-State Solution:

Mr. Romney’s frank remarks, which undercut even Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s public endorsement of “a solution of two states for two peoples: a Palestinian state alongside the Jewish state,” seemed to break from decades of official American foreign policy. Since before the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, Republican and Democratic presidents have thrown their weight behind the effort to secure Israel’s future as a democratic state with a Jewish majority by creating a second state for up 2.5 million Palestinians who have lived under Israeli military rule for more than four decades.
Critics of the two-state solution, however, have argued in recent years that Israel’s determination to hold on to large settlement blocks in the West Bank has made the creation of a viable Palestinian state there almost impossible.

The vast majority of Palestinians, of course, haven't lived under Israeli military rule since late in 1995. It's the failure of the Palestinians to build a sustainable infrastructure - preferring instead to seek international pressure on Israel - that makes the creation of a viable Palestinian state nonviable.

In the course of his post, Mackey quotes Edward Said, Yousef Munayyer, Ali Abunimah and the "news blog" +972. In other words Mackey's sources are almost exclusively those who believe that Israel is illegitimate.

Finally, Shmuel Rosner weighed in with Romney and His Palestinian Problem. Even after allowing that Romney's statements reflect the majority views among Israelis and Palestinians and ...

But that is treading into slightly different territory than just gauging the prospects for peace; it’s about guessing, much as Romney has done, at the Palestinians’ intentions. And those, like the intentions of any vast group, can be difficult to assess. According to one poll last year, Palestinians support negotiations with Israel, but by a “2-to-1 margin they also oppose the two-state solution that’s been the stated goal of negotiations,” with most preferring “ending up with a single state” instead. Given many Israelis’ objection to that outcome, to some people, the Palestinians’ preference hardly seems compatible with peace.

Another way of interpreting this data (no matter how much Rosner seeks to explain it away) is that currently the Palestinians as a whole are not much interested in peace - certainly not the kind of peace that is said to be the goal of the American government, meaning two states for two peoples. That being the case, isn't Romney just stating a truism? Still Rosner manages to fault Romney for that too.

Romney’s take on the Palestinian problem is far from extraordinary. But by stating his views so bluntly — and before a bunch of Jewish voters in Florida — he has seriously harmed his ability to talk to the Palestinians. Should he be elected an unlikely peace would become even more unlikely.

The bluntness is the problem?

Did the friendliness of President Obama to Palestinian nationalism make a difference? In an article (oddly seeking to absolve Abbas of responsibility for the failure to make peace, blaming President Obama instead) Mark Landler of the New York Times wrote last year:

But Mr. Abbas has lost faith in Mr. Obama, Palestinian officials said, and after four face-to-face meetings and many regular telephone calls, there is now little contact between them.
...
Among Palestinians, the disappointment is all the more acute because their hopes for Mr. Obama were so high. Judging by Mr. Obama’s background, temperament and worldview, Palestinians expected him to bring a new focus to the peace process and a greater sympathy for the Palestinian cause. It did not go unnoticed that he is friends with a prominent Palestinian-American scholar, Rashid Khalidi.

Rosner can speculate that Romney's stance, if he's elected President, will make it harder for him to get the Palestinians to make peace, but experience shows that even with a President willing to engages the Palestinians on their own terms, there is little willingness for them to make peace.

But why not turn this around? Why not ask why Abbas, knowing that he may not have as much sympathy from the White House come January 21, won't be more forthcoming in making peace with Israel now? Clearly, the current situation doesn't seem to concern Abbas much.

The subtext of all three of these articles is telling. All three effectively give the Palestinians the veto over what is an acceptable offer from Israel.

Barry Rubin has more on Romney's comments and Israel Matzav brings up questions about the recording.

3) Ajami x 2 on the Muslim riots

Fouad Ajami explained in Why is the Arab world so easily offended?

The ambivalence toward modernity that torments Muslims is unlikely to abate. The temptations of the West have alienated a younger generation from its elders. Men and women insist that they revere the faith as they seek to break out of its restrictions. Freedom of speech, granting license and protection to the irreverent, is cherished, protected and canonical in the Western tradition. Now Muslims who quarrel with offensive art are using their newfound freedoms to lash out against it.
These cultural contradictions do not lend themselves to the touch of outsiders. President George W. Bush believed that America’s proximity to Arab dictatorships had begotten us the jihadists’ enmity. His military campaign in Iraq became an attempt to reform that country and beyond. But Arabs rejected his interventionism and dismissed his “freedom agenda” as a cover for an unpopular war and for domination.
President Obama has taken a different approach. He was sure that his biography — the years he spent in Indonesia and his sympathy for the aspirations of Muslim lands — would help repair relations between America and the Islamic world. But he’s been caught in the middle, conciliating the rulers while making grand promises to ordinary people. The revolt of the Iranian opposition in the summer of 2009 exposed the flaws of his approach. Then the Arab Spring played havoc with American policy. Since then, the Obama administration has not been able to decide whether it defends the status quo or the young people hell-bent on toppling the old order.

About a week later he wrote in more detail about President Obama's conceits in Muslim Rage and the Obama retreat:

The embattled "liberals" in the region were awakened to the truth of Mr. Obama. He was a man of the status quo, with a superficial knowledge of lands beyond. In Cairo, he had described himself as a "student of history." But in his first foreign television interview, he declared his intention to restore U.S. relations with the Islamic world to "the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago."
This coincided, almost to the day, with the 30th anniversary of the Ayatollah Khomeini's rise to power in Iran. That "golden age" he sought to restore covered the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the fall of Beirut to the forces of terror, deadly attacks on our embassies, the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, and more. A trail of terror had shadowed the American presence.
Yet here was a president who would end this history, who would withdraw from both the "good war" in Afghanistan and the bad one in Iraq. Here was a president who would target America's real enemy—al Qaeda. "Osama bin Laden is dead," we've been told time and again, and good riddance to him. But those attacking our embassies last week had a disturbing rebuttal: "Obama, we are Osama!" they chanted, some brandishing al Qaeda flags. 

4) At last Zion - again

The editors of Jewish Ideas Daily have reprinted a 14 year old Charles Krauthammer article, At Last Zion with the following introduction:

Nearly 15 years ago in the Weekly Standard, Charles Krauthammer wrote that “the end of Israel means the end of the Jewish people.” His reasons are perhaps even more relevant in today’s atmosphere of nuclear threat than they were when the article was first published. The essay is reprinted here by permission of the author. —The Editors 

Krauthammer's central thesis was this:

Whatever identity or identities are ultimately adopted by Israelis, the fact remains that for them the central problem of Diaspora Jewry—suicide by assimilation—simply does not exist. Blessed with this security of identity, Israel is growing. As a result, Israel is not just the cultural center of the Jewish world, it is rapidly becoming its demographic center as well. The relatively high birth rate yields a natural increase in population. Add a steady net rate of immigration (nearly a million since the late 1980s), and Israel's numbers rise inexorably even as the Diaspora declines.
...
A century ago, Europe was the center of Jewish life. More than 80 percent of world Jewry lived there. The Second World War destroyed European Jewry and dispersed the survivors to the New World (mainly the United States) and to Israel. Today, 80 percent of world Jewry lives either in the United States or in Israel. Today we have a bipolar Jewish universe with two centers of gravity of approximately equal size. It is a transitional stage, however. One star is gradually dimming, the other brightening.
Soon an inevitably the cosmology of the Jewish people will have been transformed again, turned into a single-star system with a dwindling Diaspora orbiting around. It will be a return to the ancient norm: The Jewish people will be centered—not just spiritually but physically—in their ancient homeland.

Labels: Arab spring, Barack Hussein Obama, Charles Krauthammer, Iranian revolution, Islam, Middle East Media Sampler, Mitt Romney, Soccer Dad, Tom Friedman, two-state solution, Zionism

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 6:48 PM 1 comments

White House advisor honors Ayatollah Khomeini

It has come to our attention that in December 2004, Mr. Elibiary spoke at a tribute to Ayatollah Khomeini titled “A Tribute To The Great Islamic Visionary” sponsored by the Metroplex Organization of Muslims in North Texas in Irving, TX. When the event was criticized in an editorial carried by a local newspaper, Mr. Elibiary offered the following explanation claiming that he hadn’t realized that “the event honored Imam Khomeini”:

I have been asked whether, if I had realized before I spoke that the event honored Imam Khomeini, I would have left immediately. I don’t know. My activism, which is designed to bring Muslims into the mainstream, calls upon me not to cede any territory to radical views without presenting a moderating counterpoint. I have learned that, to his supporters, Imam Khomeini is not the hostage crisis, or the one who hated America as the “Great Satan,” but a liberator from the shah’s hated dictatorship. As Natan Sharansky correctly points out in his book The Case for Democracy, people flock to promises of freedom, because all human beings desire to be free. I have been asked what I would say to someone who believes that there is no good reason to attend a tribute to Imam Khomeini. If their concerns revolved around the American experience of him, I would say that I echo their feelings. But if anyone wishes to learn about their opponent, they must listen, or they’ll remain ignorant and make mistakes that cost them in their struggle to defend their values and views. Just because I listen to Osama bin Laden’s tapes and agree that the West routinely insults Muslim dignity, that doesn’t make me al-Qaeda. By listening I gain a better understanding of a philosophy I wish to counter. Just because I agree with Che Guevara that nonregulated capitalism is exploitive of the poorest in a society, that doesn’t make me a communist – just one who sees the benefit of Teddy Roosevelt’s crusade against business monopolies.

It is to at all clear to the GMBDR how Mr. Elibiary could have failed to recognize that the event was a tribute to Khomeini given the name of the event and the associated flyer. It is also not clear why Mr. Elibiary agreed to share a podium with Mohammad Asi given what his own characterization of Mr. Asi:

Imam Mohammad Asi, who also spoke at the MOMIN event, is more troubling than Khomeini, in my opinion, because his views are a direct threat, not just a historical one, to our American way of life. He does believe that America is the “Great Satan” and opposes the reformers in Iran who are calling for a dialogue between Islam and the West. He sees “Zionist Jews” as controlling the entire world (outside Iran, of course) and strongly ridicules full political participation by Western Muslims. I don’t know what to say about all this other than that it’s diametrically opposed to the views of the invited speakers – Imam Kavakci, Iyas Maleh and myself. Mohammad Asi’s beliefs run counter to the very existence of our organizations, decades of activism, everything we said and saw from the leadership at the MOMIN Center.

Labels: Ayatollah Khomeni, Barack Hussein Obama, Iranian revolution, militant Islam, Muslim Brotherhood

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:44 PM 0 comments

Obama celebrates Iranian new year again

Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Iranian revolution

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 1:55 PM 3 comments

Very black pot calls kettle black

Some 200 students held a demonstration outside the British embassy in Tehran on Sunday to protest at what President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called the "savage" police treatment of people involved in street unrest in London last week.

Watched by around 50 riot police, some students threw eggs towards the embassy compound and at the end of the protest they held up masks of Mark Duggan, the man whose shooting by police sparked the protests and riots in Britain.

Some protesters carried anti-British placards. One read: "London 2011, Tehran 1979, throw off your shah!" a reference to Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution which overthrew a Western-backed king.

For many years Iran has been on the receiving end of criticism from Western countries over its human rights record, especially the crushing of demonstrations after the re-election of Ahmadinejad in June 2009 [pictured. CiJ].

Iranian politicians have called on the United Nations to condemn Britain. The leader of the Basij militia, which battled anti-Ahmadinejad protesters in 2009, offered to send his forces to London, Liverpool and Birmingham "to act as a peacekeeping force and a buffer between repressive forces of the royal regime and the British people".

Labels: Iran, Iranian revolution, London riots

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:54 AM 0 comments

Flotilla hypocrisy

Now don't bet the family farm that the flotilla folk will show up anytime soon in Egypt, Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, or anywhere else outside Gaza. The reason? Simple and obvious. If it doesn't have an Israeli connection, they're just not interested.

Why? Good question. Their single-minded obsession with Israel and all its alleged sins is worthy of in-depth psychological studies, just like their neglect of truly egregious examples of human suffering that don't involve the world's one and only Jewish state.

The predictable response of the flotilla folk and their ardent defenders will be that "two wrongs don't make a right," or that this is all a diversion from what's going on in Gaza.

Well, no, two wrongs don't make a right, but how to explain the thunderous silence of the flotilla folk -- self-defined, modern civil-rights torchbearers -- as basic freedoms are trampled on before their eyes in country after country, only to be met with telling indifference?

Just imagine how empowering it would be for those at grave risk to themselves, from Tripoli to Tehran, to know they have a lifeline of caring people prepared to risk their own life and limb in brotherly and sisterly solidarity!

But then again, life and limb would literally be on the line. The flotilla folk, even if they gave a fig for what's going on in Syria or Iran, know full well that they wouldn't stand a chance against regimes that have shown no respect whatsoever for the sanctity of human life. For all the demonization of Israel, they know they can count on the conscience of a democratic society that uses force -- yes, according to a strict code of conduct -- only as a last resort. If there are, however, flotilla folk who truly seek martyrdom, their chances, they should take note, do rise dramatically with an attempted protest at Assad's office or Iran's prisons.

And then there's the diversion charge -- all this being just a smoke screen to distract from what's going on in Gaza.

And what exactly is going on in Gaza? Last I looked, Hamas was in charge. And last I checked, Hamas was a genocidal group, with the stated aim of killing Jews and destroying Israel. (And to the flotilla folk, a friendly warning -- if you yourselves ever fell under Hamas' rule, at a bare minimum, say goodbye to the freedoms you purport to cherish.) It's been labeled a terrorist organization by the U.S. and EU. Even so, aid is arriving across two land borders -- Israel and Egypt -- and the UN is present in force.

Labels: Egyptian Revolution, flotilla of fools, Gaza plenty, Iranian revolution, Syrian uprising

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 1:23 PM 2 comments

Iranian regime murders daughter at father's funeral

Dr. Haleh Sahabi, daughter of Ezatollah Sahabi, who passed away on Monday, died when security forces attacked the funeral of her father. According to Mizan Press, a website close to nationalist-religious groups, when Ezatollah Sahabi's body was brought out of his home to be taken to the cemetery, security forces attacked Haleh Sahabi to prevent her from overseeing the funeral. A heated argument began, and the security forces forcefully took the elder Sahabi's body away. According to Yahya Shamekhi, Haleh Sahabi's son, that moment his mother collapsed. Doctors said that she died from cardiac arrest.

Haleh Sahabi was 57 years old. Convicted of anti-state charges after participating in the protests that followed the disputed 2009 presidential election, she was serving a two-year prison sentence and had been released temporarily to participate in her father's funeral. She was a researcher of Qur'anic verses and a member of the Mothers of Peace Society.

The security forces put tremendous pressure on the Sahabi family to immediately bury Haleh Sahabi as well. According to the website Melli Mazhabi -- the official site of the Religious-Nationalist Coalition, which Ezatollah Sahabi headed -- the family relented and took her body to the Lavasan cemetery, where her father had just been interred. Shamekhi told the pro-Green Movement website Rahe Sabz that his mother will be buried at night in the dark.

Ahmad Montazeri, son of the late Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, told Rahe Sabz, "I was only a few meters away from her. The security forces tried to take away a large poster of Ezatollah Sahabi that his daughter was carrying. After she resisted it, the security agent hit her with his elbow, causing her to fall down and faint. She was taken to a hospital, but unfortunately she passed away there." Montazeri added, "There were a number of security and plainclothes officers that were shouting, laughing loudly, and trying to disturb the funeral. In particularly, their commander insulted the people. They were set on inciting chaos and violence. I was present while they were washing the late Sahabi. The security forces entered there and began shouting, insulting and provoking the people. But because no one was interested, they became angrier." He said that at least 11 people were arrested, including his own son.

Mansoor Sahabi, Haleh's uncle, told Rahe Sabz that the reason she passed away was that she was hit in her chest and abdomen, which caused her to have a heart attack. When told that the pro-government media have claimed that she was not attacked, Mansoor Sahabi responded that they attacked her with great force. He added that a well-known security agent was involved and that there are photographs that show the attack. He said that Dr. Habibollah Peyman, who heads the Movement of Militant Muslims and is a member of the Religious-Nationalist Coalition, was with her when they took her to a hospital, but apparently he has been arrested. According to Mansoor Sahabi, 30 people were arrested. IRNA, the state news agency, claimed that the figure was only five people.

Mansoor Sahabi also said that, to people's astonishment, the security forces grabbed Ezatollah Sahabi's corpse and threw it into a pickup truck. If they treated the deceased in that manner in the presence of the mourners, he observed, who knows what they did elsewhere. He added that the security forces prevented the mourners from saying the prayer for the dead, which was supposed to have been led by Ahmad Montazeri. He described how his own sister, already in tears, was attacked and thrown onto the sidewalk. According to him, up to ten people would attack a single person. Fereydoon Sahabi, Ezatollah's brother, confirmed that the security forces attacked the people.

Labels: Ezzatollah Sahabi, Green Movement, Haleh Sahabi, Iranian revolution

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:28 PM 0 comments

There's an insurrection in Iran

–Iranian Arabs in the Ahwaz oil region have risen up, first on Friday’s “Day of Rage” in which at least nine protesters were killed by the regime’s security forces, and then again on Saturday, about which there are only very early reports as I write on Saturday afternoon. The regime doesn’t want the world to know about these protests, both because it suggests the vulnerability of the country’s major source of income, and because it shows once again that Khamenei and Ahmadinejad have failed to impose their will on a population that wants an end to the regime itself. Thus foreign “observers” have been forbidden to travel to Ahwaz, and the disinformation mavens in Tehran staged their own “demonstrations,” claiming that the population was protesting the treatment of Shi’ites in Bahrain. Nobody was fooled, least of all the (mostly Sunni) Ahwaz Arabs.

–The systematic sabotage of the petrochemical industry and the nation’s vital pipelines — to which I have so often referred — continues apace. On March 15th, the Azerbaijan Movement for Democracy and Integrity in Iran claimed credit for the fiery conflagration of the big Tabriz refinery. The facility was totally shut down for three days, and more than 100 fire-fighting vehicles took 11 hours to get the blaze under control. The government declared a state of emergency and the security forces sealed off the area in a massive manhunt. But no arrests were made.

–Strikes, of varying duration, in the oil sector, ranging from the big petrochemical plant at Bandar Imam to the Abadan refinery and oil fields.

–The relentless destruction of the country’s gas pipelines, which run from the southern refineries to the Turkish border. Three major pipelines come together south of Tehran, just outside the holy city of Qom, and they were all blown up on February 11th. After they were patched up, there was another blast on April 8th, which was branded a “terrorist attack” (nobody was prepared to believe the fairy tale about yet another accidental explosion, even though the regime’s capacity for failure and self-destruction is incomparable in the modern world).

A few humorists in the Parliament suggested that the regime might devote some attention to security.

–In case you were wondering, not everyone in the opposition subscribes to Ghandian non-violence, even though the two main figures in the Greeen Movement — Mehdi Karroubi and Mir Hossein Mousavi — have always insisted on it. Some Kurdish groups seem unconvinced, and in recent weeks more than a dozen Revolutionary Guards have been killed by gunfire in Kurdistan. Kurdish casualties are less than half; the Ahwazis have been shooting back as well, but it’s hard to get casualty figures. Just today, a big bomb went off in a central square in Sanandaz, apparently aimed at the Guards.

Labels: Ayatollah Ali Khameni, Barack Obama, Iranian revolution, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Mehdi Karroubi, Mir Hossein Mousavi

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 1:20 AM 0 comments

Michael Rubin's boundless optimism

Qaddafi’s exile or death will be the last nail in the coffin of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Egyptians thought, “If Tunisians can do it, why not us.” When Mubarak fled, Libyans concluded that it was their turn. If people power can topple Qaddafi, not even the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps will be able to contain the rage of the Iranian people. And if the Islamic Republic collapses, then suddenly the threats from Hezbollah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad will decline as their state support evaporates.

Labels: Iranian revolution, Libyan regime change, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Muammar Gaddafi

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 3:41 PM 2 comments

More eerie similarities between Iran 1979 and Egypt 2011

MJT: So why, when you published a piece in The New Republic a few days ago, did you compare the upheaval in Egypt to the Iranian Revolution 31 years ago rather than to Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution that toppled Ben Ali less than 31 days ago?

Abbas Milani: Iran and Egypt are very similar. They have been, along with Turkey, the key bellwether states in the region. What happens in these three places has shaped what happens in the Middle East for a hundred years.

Tunisia—in terms of size, history, and trajectory—is far less like Iran than Egypt is. Egypt is the most important center of Sunni learning while Iran is the most important center of Shia learning. And the two countries have been very much in competition with each other for hegemony over the Islamic world. The Shah spent his last days in Egypt. There is a fifty year connection between the Pahlavi dynasty and Egypt.

Look also at the events themselves and the way the United States has tried to position itself. What’s going on right now in Egypt is eerily reminiscent of the events in Iran in 1979. The United States supported Pahlavi and Mubarak overtly. In both cases there was behind-the-scenes pressure to democratize and open the system. The Shah resisted, claiming a communist threat. Mubarak resisted, claiming a Muslim Brotherhood threat.

After a while the Shah became impervious to American pressure because he had oil money. He had more money than he knew what to do with. During those very crucial years the Iranian middle class mushroomed. The educated class was increasing. These were the years when pressure for democracy was most urgent, but the Shah was impervious to it.

MJT: How big was the middle class in 1979?

Abbas Milani: It depends on how you define it. If you look at the income, the amount of urbanization, the number of educated people, the number of people who lived in their own domicile, the number of people who could travel outside the country—all these grew rapidly in the 1960s and 1970s thanks to the push for industrialization that began in the early 1960s. It began before the oil money came in.

We had a class of brilliant Iranian technocrats, many of them educated in the United States, including right here at Stanford. They put into effect a remarkable process of industrialization that by 1970 was bearing fruit. These people demanded political rights, and the Shah, instead of opening the country, clamped down with the one-party system.

I am absolutely convinced that in 1975, when he was at the height of his power, if the Shah had made just a third of the concessions he later made in 1978, we would be looking at a very different Iran today.

MJT: It was too late in 1978.

Abbas Milani: What Mubarak and the Shah both failed to understand is that if you make concessions when you’re weak it just increases the appetite for more concessions. If they would have made concessions when they were in a position of power, they could have negotiated a smooth transition to a less authoritarian government.

In Egypt, when the US pressured Mubarak to announce that he would not run again, that he should come out publicly and say he has cancer and that there will be a free election soon, he instead tried to create a monarchy.

Labels: Ayatollah Khomeni, Egyptian regime change, Hosni Mubarak, Iranian revolution, Muslim Brotherhood, Shah Reza Pahlavi

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:17 AM 1 comments