Iranian Presidency poses a dilema to Blair and Bush. the mayor of Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was democraticaly elected campaiging on a platform reminiscent of the early days of 1979 Islamic revolution.
Mahmoud is very conservative: he has made his distaste for all things western, ordering the removal of advertising billboards featuring David Beckham, the only foreign face to appear in Iranian advertising sinec the Shah's days. His slogan during the campaign: 'We did not make the revolution to have a democracy.' An article following his election noted that 'the Iranian middle class and wealthier elemens were dourly anticipating the change... Their opinions could be encompassed by one office worker, who declared: 'we're going back 20 years in history' another said more simply: 'Tomorrow I start growing a beard.'
Here is an article covering his determination to pursue a Nuclear programme regardless of European and American pressure.
And another covering the public execution of two gay teenagers.
Here's a quote: 'Homosexuality is a crime in Iran, but the death penalty is normally reserved for murder, rape, armed robbery, adultery, drug trafficking and apostasy.'
BTW - looked up apostasy it means the abandonment of one's faith.
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Peter Hitchens has written an excellent account of his undercover trip to Iran. The article is a challenge to some commonly held views (mine among them) on Iran. Also, you don't have to read far into the piece to realise that Peter Hitchen holds very different views to his brother, Christopher, on the war in Iraq (and many other things I'd imagine). Below is a sample of the article, which is quite long but worth following the link and reading in full.
Iran: a Nation of nose jobs, not nuclear war
Peter Hitchens
Mail on Sunday
'For years we in the West have been looking for a new Evil Empire to fill the gap left when Russia - a genuine threat - retired from the job and deprived us of an enemy. What were all those spies to do? How could we justify those missiles and bombs? What should we be scared of now?
At one stage we were reduced to pretending that Panama's General Noriega was a menace to our way of life. Then it was Slobodan Milosevic. Finally, we inflated the piffling Saddam Hussein into a looming Hitler.
Now the same experts think they have found something to be afraid of in Iran. It is tempting to believe them. This is the land of the glowering ayatollahs, the book-burning mobs, the fatwas of death and the black chador. And Iran has just become even more frightening because in its secret vaults Islamic scientists are fumbling with atoms and testing long-range rockets.
Such is our terror of this mysterious land that Navy bluejackets and Royal Marines seem to have thought they were in the hands of cannibal dervishes when they were captured by them, quailing at the thought of rape, torture and death. Even now, having been subtly humiliated instead of butchered, they do not seem to have grasped that things might not be as they seem. Nor have many of us.
When I told my friends and family I was going to Tehran, they looked at me as if I were taking a short break in Mordor, and expected that the next time they saw me I would be being paraded by Revolutionary Guards after confessing to espionage, and then publicly hanged from a large crane at a busy traffic intersection.
Well, not quite. The people of Iran are probably the most pro-Western in the world, though that will not stop them fighting like hell if we are foolish enough to attack them. Not that they will do so with nuclear weapons any time soon. Iran is rather bad at grand projects. Its sole nuclear power station has never produced a watt of electricity in more than three decades, the capital's TV tower is unfinished after 20 years of work and Tehran's airport took 30 years to build.
By bringing this information back to you I expect to annoy the frowning mullahs, who want their people to fear us as much as George W. Bush and Anthony Blair want us to fear Iran. That is why they constantly tease us about their inadequate nuclear programme. They long for our rage and threats.
Again and again, Iranians told me Western hostility was the main force that could push them into the arms of a regime they did not much like. The last thing the ayatollahs need is for the peoples of Europe and America to know much about their country and its people, or to realise the truth - that Iran is our natural ally in the Middle East, a European civilisation trapped by history and geography in the midst of Arabia. It does not belong there, culturally or religiously.
We treat Turkey like a brother, when it is a militant Islamic state kept secular only by a disguised military dictatorship. And we treat Iran like a pariah, when it's a largely secular nation kept Islamic only by an ageing and discredited, but open, despotism.
In the past ten days I have travelled across beautiful, hospitable Persia and talked to many of its people, unsupervised, unmonitored and unofficially. I have been inside private homes and found out what Iranian people think and why. I have met citizens who voted for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, citizens who now wish they hadn't and those who think he is a sick joke.'
[...]
In a bustling restaurant in north Tehran, where Iran's wealthy middle classes live, it is obvious that Islamic dress has been forced on the many women present and that they are determined to let everyone know it is not their choice. Personally, I found Tehran much less oppressively Islamic than Kensington High Street in London, where an ever-growing number of women voluntarily go about in black shrouds, masks and veils.
This is not some medieval theocracy where females are hidden away or forced to do the will of their menfolk. Men and women sit in animated mixed groups at the lunch tables, conversing as equals. Headscarves are worn. It is still the absolute law. But they are worn in such a way as to make a fool of that law. They are pushed back as far as they can go without actually falling off, held in place by no more than a blast of hairspray, revealing the front parts of elaborate and often vertical hairstyles - frequently blonde.
In a park by a lake, some teenage girls are splashing each other. Incredibly, several of them have illegally taken off their headscarves. Even more incredibly, their teachers pretend not to notice. This would have been unthinkable a year ago. What unthinkable things will be happening a year hence?
Everyone knows next month there will be the annual ritual crackdown, when the police will reprimand thousands of women for defying the official code. And everyone knows that, once it is over, scarves will creep back a little further and heels will get a little higher.
On the streets the women walk and stand like Parisians. Somehow, with a belt here and an adjustment there, they manage to make the modest 'manteau' jackets look chic. They laugh and chatter. The days when public laughter was a criminal offence are long gone.
About one in 50 seems to have had recent plastic surgery on her nose. They wear their bandages with pride and some even stick plaster on their faces to pretend that they have undergone this subversive surgery.
The desire among lovely Persian women to look like Snow White is strange but it is a direct reaction to authority's attempts to make them look like bats and crows.
The fashionable cafes are full of painted, un-Islamic butterflies, sipping milkshakes or coffee. The upstairs rooms are reserved - by common consent - for couples to meet away from the intrusive eyes of their families.
[...]
The more the Islamic Republic tells them to loathe the Shah or America, the more they yearn to have the Shah back, and to live in America. In this country, America is probably more popular, even now, than in any other country on the planet.'
Hey Joe,
Have you even read the article? His basic point is summed up in this quote:
'We treat Turkey like a brother, when it is a militant Islamic state kept secular only by a disguised military dictatorship. And we treat Iran like a pariah, when it's a largely secular nation kept Islamic only by an ageing and discredited, but open, despotism.'
Hitchen is asking people to look beyond the Iranian Government towards their people, the type of point you wouldn't be surprised to find the Guardian making.
And anyway who cares what fashionable media circles say!
Here's a piece from 'The Guardian' by Simon Tisdall on the 30th April which supports my view that Hitchen's observations about Iran could have been made by the Guardian. In the article, Tisdall reports that the Islamic Government in Iran, and Ahmadinejad in particular, have become increasingly isolated from the country as a whole, just as Peter Hitchens does in his article.
'Inside the struggle for Iran
A grand coalition of anti-government forces is planning a second Iranian revolution via the ballot box to deny President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad another term in office and break the grip of what they call the "militia state" on public life and personal freedom.
Encouraged by recent successes in local elections, opposition factions, democracy activists, and pro-reform clerics say they will bring together progressive parties loyal to former president Mohammad Khatami with so-called pragmatic conservatives led by Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani.
The alliance aims to exploit the president's deepening unpopularity, borne of high unemployment, rising inflation and a looming crisis over petrol prices and possible rationing to win control of the Majlis in general elections which are due within 10 months.
Parliament last week voted to curtail Mr Ahmadinejad's term by holding presidential and parliamentary elections simultaneously next year.
Though the move is likely to be vetoed by the hardline Guardian Council, it served notice of mounting disaffection in parliament.
But opposition spokesmen say their broader objective is to bring down the fundamentalist regime by democratic means, transform Iran into a "normal country", and obviate the need for any military or other US and western intervention. Rightwing political and religious forces, divided and dismayed by Mr Ahmadinejad's much-criticised performance, are already mobilising to meet the threat.
The movement amounts to the clearest sign yet within Iran that the country is by no means unified behind a president who has led it into confrontation with the west over the nuclear issue, while presiding over economic decline at home.'
The Hitchens article is interesting, though I'm not fully convinced by his main argument.
A couple of quotes, one funny, the other less so:
Reza recalls wryly: 'When I was four, Ayatollah Khomeini came to my school and blessed me. It's been downhill ever since - everything just gets worse. I've even gone prematurely bald where the old man put his hand on my head.'
...
The only Shia beloved in the Sunni world is President Ahmadinejad, whose noisy, disreputable hostility to Israel and whose support for Holocaust denial has made him the taxi-drivers' favourite in every Sunni Muslim country from Indonesia to Morocco.
Interesting article.
News Review: Inside the real Iran
Telegraph
07/04/2007
Iran's leaders seem intent on picking fights with the West. But, say David Blair and Damien McElroy, behind the poverty and paranoia of this fundamentalist regime is a young, educated and quietly rebellious population that is desperate to join the rest of the world
Iran condemns Rushdie knighthood
BBC
17/06/07
Iran has criticised the British government for its decision to give a knighthood to author Salman Rushdie.
His book The Satanic Verses offended Muslims worldwide and led to Iran issuing a fatwa in 1989, ordering Sir Salman's execution.
Iran Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini said the decision to praise the "apostate" showed Islamophobia among British officials. Mr Hosseini told a press conference: "Giving a medal to someone who is among the most detested figures in the Islamic community is... a blatant example of the anti-Islamism of senior British officials.
"The measure that has taken place for paying tribute to this apostate and detested figure will definitely put British statesmen and officials at odds with Islamic societies, the emotions and sentiments of which have again been provoked."
He added that the knighthood showed that the process of insulting Islamic sanctities was not accidental but was being supported by some Western countries.
Coincidentally both Andy & I have contributed to door-to-door canvassers for the MEK (Mujahedeen-e Khalq), and were both invited to this Paris shindig, commented on here by Pipes (neither of us could make it). But at least it sounds like we're giving our money to a worthy cause.
Unleash the Iranian Opposition
by Daniel Pipes
New York Sun
July 10, 2007
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