The Latest from Iran (8 January): Karroubi Under Attack

2300 GMT: A slowish evening so we'll wish everyone good night and offer an early morning update on Saturday before I fly out of Beirut.

1725  GMT: Modifying Motahari. Amidst a rush of news, I was excessive in reporting that principlist Ali Motahari had declared in an interview (see 1140 GMT) that an Iranian can be against the concept of Supreme Leadership but remain within the framework of the Islamic Republic.

An EA reader offers this clarification, "Motahari, remarking that one of the roots of the post-election events is the lack of tolerance for opposition to the government and to fundamentalists, said, 'When the leaders of the protesters accept the system [of the Islamic Republic], we cannot call them the pawns of America and Israel. They also accept the Supreme Leadership. Now, while they may not accept a particular opinion of the Supreme Leader, that doesn\'t take them outside of the system.'"

1720 GMT: Apologies for the long break, which was due to conference duties here in Beirut.

1140 GMT: Another Principlist Move For Compromise? High-profile MP Ali Motahari has reportedly been speaking in the last 24 hours of the need for acceptance of criticism: "We have to accept that one can be against Supreme Leadership but within framework of regime."

Calling for honesty, justice, and integrity, Motahari asks why President Ahmadinejad cannot admit mistakes and ask for forgiveness. He blames post-election events on stubbornness of both sides, saying that all have their share of blame.

1130 GMT: Rah-e-Sabz claims that, in recent days, eye witnesses to the running-over of protestors by police cars during the Ashura demonstrations have been identified and arrested.

1045 GMT: The Karroubi Story. Saham News is updating....

As we reported last night, the reported group of 200 around the home of Hojetoleslam Ghavami, where Karroubi was staying for a mourning ceremony, attacked the residence with stones and bricks. City officials and even the provincial governor tried to stop the assault but were unsuccessful. After four hours and the advice of "special forces" (possibly his State-appointed security detail) and anti-riot police, Karoubi decided to leave Qazvin for Tehran.

As the car was leaving the complex, shots were fired at it, breaking the supposedly bullet-proof windows. Karroubi said that there was not much his protection team could do; firing back in defence would have led to their prosecution. He added that only God knows why the guns that are supposed to be used only to defend the nation and the country are used against the people.

1035 GMT: Gunfire at Karroubi. Associated Press, France 24, and the leading activist site A Street Journalist, all apparently drawing information from the website connected to Mehdi Karroubi, report that the cleric's motorcade was fired upon as it left Qazvin, northwest of Tehran, today.

Yesterday the home where Karroubi was staying was attacked by a group, reportedly 200 people in plainclothes.

0855 GMT: Where's Mahmoud? Still travelling --- after his visits to Tajikistan and Turkmenistan, President Ahmadinejad was in Bahrain yesterday, declaring, "Vigilance, unity and cooperation of the Muslim nations will foil the enemies' conspiracies and those who sow the seeds of discord among Muslims and Islamic states are either ignorant or traitors."

NEW Iran: Four Responses to the “Wrong Questions” of the Leveretts (Lucas)
NEW Iran: “What is This Opposition?” Right Answers to Wrong Questions (Shahryar)
Iran: The “10 Demands” Manifesto – Soroush Speaks
Iran & Twitter 101: Getting The Facts Right — A Response to Will Heaven
Iran & Twitter 101: Rereading A Tale of Two Twitterers
Latest from Iran (7 January): Radio Silence?

0840 GMT: Releases. The son of Ayatollah Jalaleddin Taheri and the brother and nephew of former minister Abdollah Nouri, both detained during the protests around the death of Grand Ayatollah Montazeri and Ashura, have been released.

0830 GMT: Illegitimate Prayers. Ayatollah Ali Mohammad Dastgheib has declared that any religious services in the Qoba Mosque of Shiraz are invalid. Dastgheib was effectively silenced by the regime at the end of his December when pro-Government groups took over the mosque and closed the cleric's offices.

0825 GMT: We've posted a second analysis, complement that of Josh Shahryar, responding to the recent challenge to name the "leader" and declare the objectives of the Iranian opposition movements.

0620 GMT: Trashing Neda. Iranian state media is making another push to turn the killing of Neda Agha Soltan into an act in a foreign plot for regime change.

A new documentary for Iranian television, summarised in a Press TV video, made Neda both a participant and then the sacrifice of the evil scheme: she allegedly threw imitation blood onto her face as part of a faked shoot to discredit the security forces, but she was later slain by the two men who claim to have saved her live: her music teacher and Dr Arash Hejazi.

Hejazi has responded in an interview that this is a "shameless and worthless" attempt to shift blame from security forces by a regime which "has been doing everything it can to distance itself from Neda's death and throw responsibility on others".

0515 GMT: We begin this morning with a special analysis by Josh Shahryar, taking care of the wrong questions about "the opposition". As that opposition considers next moves, bits and pieces are now emerging from the relative political quiet.

The Government continues to link the political, legal, and military efforts to crush the Green movement. Days after the head of Iran's judiciary, Sadegh Larijani, declared that all judges must be political, he reached out to the armed forces for his deputy, Brigadier General Mohammad Baqer Zolqadr.

An EA reader informs us that Dr. Yadollah Eslami, an ophtalmologist and editor-in-chief of the League of All-Term Majlis Deputies, was arrested last Monday by the Revolutionary Guard. His detention is a reminder of the answers that can be given to the "wrong questions" of those who desire to dismiss or distort the opposition; in October Eslami wrote:

The green movement is dynamic and growing. By not reacting immediately and prematurely to events and statements, the movement fosters deliberation and wisdom. Its decision-making on any given issue or occasion is an organized process, which seeks to share information and raise awareness. It has a specific goal in mind with every step it takes. It has spawned its own literature, poetry, and music. It has avoided blind violence and proved itself patient and deliberate. This movement’s dynamism and bold approach gave hope to all sectors of Iranian society. It has established a meaningful relationship with religious and ethnic minorities. It recognizes and respects all regional groups and their values. It creates and disseminates its slogans appropriately and in proportional response to prevalent needs.

Latest Iran Video: Mehdi Karroubi's Son on Today's Gunfire (8 January)

Hossein Karroubi speaking to Voice of America about the gunfire on Mehdi Karroubi's motorcade today as he left Qazvin, northwest of Tehran (see our updates). Radio Farda also has an audio version.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxB6bjlXvds[/youtube]

UPDATED Iran & Twitter 101: Getting The Facts Right --- A Response to Will Heaven

UPDATE 8 January: Will Heaven will not give up --- he has made another attempt, informed only by anecdote, distortion, and speculation, to justify his campaign for silence on Twitter about #IranElection.

I will break my own vow of silence (see comments below), regarding any discussion of and thus further publicity for the thoughtless and indefensible in Mr Heaven's "analysis", to say this:

@WillHeaven: You insult those of us who use #Twitter wisely and, hopefully, effectively. You insult @persiankiwi, & you insult the people of #Iran. If you have any decency, stop.

(P.S. Maybe you can be of use writing about #uksnow.)

---

Josh Shahryar writes:

Waking up every day and being a journalist is a very conflicting job. Sometimes, you read the work of other journalists who’ve written responsibly and with full knowledge of the subject matter and you feel proud of who you are. Other times, people write things that make you want to just sit there and mourn the fact that he or she belongs to the same profession as you.

Last week, in the online edition of Britain's Daily Telegraph, Will Heaven critiqued the people who have been active on Twitter for the cause of Iran --- some now for almost 200 days --- under the headline, “Iran and Twitter: the fatal folly of the online revolutionaries”.

Don’t get me wrong, Mr Heaven has freedom of speech on his side. But every now and then, I take the liberty to use the same right to point out where fellow journalists for filling the internet with assertions that misrepresent the truth and "analysis" that blatantly insults not only our intelligence but also our characters. I think Will Heaven fits that bill quite neatly.

I am simply going to reply to Mr Heaven's paragraphs one by one in order. I have not changed any of his words, and I will address him directly.

HEAVEN: As young men and women took to the streets of Tehran on Sunday to confront the Revolutionary Guard, another very different protest sprang to life all over the world. This one didn't face tear-gas or gunfire. And its participants didn't risk prison, torture or death. It took place on 2009's most trendy website: Twitter.com.

Well, now, how about the risk of having your family imprisoned, tortured or killed? Did you know that dozens of social media activists have families in Iran and dozens more have received e-mails from the Iranian government telling them to stop or else their families would face serious harm? Did you know that Fereshteh Ghazi (@iranbaan), another activist who writes about prisoners, has family in Iran? Did you know that Isa Saharkhiz, the father of the most active of the Twitterati, Mehdi Saharkhiz (@onlymehdi), is in prison and being tried in connection with the protests?

I think everyone would agree that even if these people aren’t personally facing imprisonment, torture and death, they might deserve a moment of recognition for persisting in their reporting when their families facing the same peril. If you don't choose to join recognition of them, at least pause and include these facts before you wag your finger at their supposed security.

For Twitter enthusiasts, this has been a bumper year. With a new online tool at their chubby fingertips, they've helped to change the world. Or at least, that's what they think: the so-called Iranian Twitter Revolution recently won a Webby award for being "one of the top 10 internet moments of the decade".”

Chubby fingertips? Nice use of the stereotype that portrays all geeks as being overweight. This here is just a direct and far from original insult. I’m not sure how you manage to call yourself a journalist and use such degrading language to get your fictitious points across.

As for the Iranian "Twitter Revolution", that is a creation of the mainstream media who are ignorant of what is going on inside and outside Iran.

If the protests in Iran are turning into a revolution, social networking websites had very little to do with it. The reason why the site are getting kudos is because they helped people bypass the failure of the mainstream media to cover the events in Iran and get informed about what was really happening on the streets of Tehran as well as shore up outside support for the cause.

Get this straight; it was the failure to provide timely and accurate news regarding the events in Iran that forced the citizens of the world to step up and help educate people about the courage and perseverance of the Iranian people and the brutality and inhumanity of the Iranian government. You can whine all you want, but you, if you are representing a responsible "traditional" media vs. a supposedly tangential and irresponsible social media, have failed. And the fact that you failed does not give you the right to attempt and devalue the work of others.

Let me tell you why I find that deeply troubling. There has been no revolution in Iran. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has held on to power after a rigged election. Meanwhile, protests continue to be violently suppressed by government forces and unregulated militias, with human rights groups saying that at least 400 demonstrators have been killed since June. Dozens of those arrested remain unaccounted for, and many of those set free tell of rape and vicious beatings in Iran's most notorious prisons.

So don't tell me that Twitter and other online networks have improved the situation in Iran. It's deluded to think that "hashtags", "Tweets" and "Twibbons" have threatened the regime for a second. If all the internet could muster in a decade was smug armchair activists and pontificating techies, we may as well all log off in the New Year.

Again, Twitter has not improved the situation in Iran; it has improved the flow of news about that situation to the outside world. It has helped mobilize activists outside Iran, protesting across the world, to pressure the international community into taking action against the Iranian government.

If you had followed the news or understood what you have read, you would have known about the 25 July protests where thousands of people gathered in more than 100 cities around the globe in support of the Iranian people’s struggle for human rights. There have been dozens of protests in dozens of other cities since then; I attended one just a week ago. These protests have served to both inform the public and to pressure governments to deal with Iran’s repression of its citizens more harshly then they might have otherwise would have.

This would not have been possible if social networking websites had not connected people and informed them about what was going on inside Iran since, frankly, I see the mainstream media's primary interest in Iran as the nuclear energy program.

Your ignorance does not change the facts on the ground.

Here's the other thing "social media experts" will forget to tell you: dictatorships across the world now use their own tools to hunt down online protesters. In Iran, for instance, the government controls the internet with a nationalised communications company. Using a state-of-the-art method called "Deep Packet Inspection", data packages sent between protesters are now automatically broken down, checked for keywords, and reconstructed within milliseconds. Every Tweet and Facebook message, in other words, is firmly on the regime's radar.

As a result, the crackdown in Iran has been easier than ever before. Once the Revolutionary Guard intercept a suspect message, they are able to pinpoint the location of a guilty protester using their computer's IP address. Then it's just a question of knocking on doors – and confiscating laptops and PCs for hard evidence.
Sadly, when this happens, those outside Iran cannot always absolve themselves of responsibility. If you're an internet user in Britain who communicates with an Iranian protester online, or encourages them to send anti-regime messages over the internet, you could be putting their life in danger.

Here’s a bit of education in anti-filtering software. There’s a software called Tor –-- similar to Freegate --- that allows people to connect to the internet without fear of Deep Pocket Inspection tools. You can figure out that someone is using Tor with DPI, but you can never find out what they’re sending. Our "chubby-fingered" friends were intelligent and passionate enough to get that into Iranian hands as early as June. And that’s not all. Net activists have already created several new anti-DPI softwares that have already reached Iranians and are being skillfully used by a select few to get information out. With these, the government can’t even figure out if someone is using anti-filtering software or is connected straight up.

If this had not occurred, you would not get all the videos, pictures and information readily available within minutes of protests in Iran.

Just because you do not know about these things does not mean they do not exist or they do not work.

And contrary to what you claim, no one actually has to encourage Iranians to communicate information about their country to the outside world. They do it themselves. They feel a need to help the world understand what is going on in their country and not have to read fear-mongering articles on the mainstream media about how Iran is going to bomb Israel and there would be World War III and such. What the techies have done is help them access the software that allows them to do it without fear of getting arrested.

There's nothing wrong with spreading awareness outside Iran, but it's horribly naive to think that supporting illegal activity in a foreign country has no ethical dimension. It's equally foolish, of course, to kid yourself that you're on the front line.
For the Iranian authorities, the detective work often doesn't have to be remotely hi-tech. As Evgeny Morozov recently noted, it is now possible to calculate a person's sexual orientation by analysing who their Facebook friends are. Sure, it's a quirky news story in Britain, but terrifying for gay people living in countries such as Iran, where homosexuality is outlawed.

Illegal activity? What illegal activity? Iranians are granted the right to take to streets and peacefully protest by the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Just because the government is overstepping Iranian law does not mean you have to go out of your way to accommodate their will to hammer home your fallacious arguments. As for your assertion that helping Iranians spread the word about the situation is wrong, well, maybe you should know that freedom of expression is a universal human right. No country’s laws can infringe upon that. None.

I’m not sure you know that Facebook and Twitter are officially banned in Iran right now. People in Iran who are using the two applications have created accounts specifically to disseminate news and information, not for dating. Even if the government finds those accounts, it will not be able to trace them back to their owners because of new software.

Perhaps Barack Obama was one of the first world leaders to realise that social media have their limits. In March, on the feast of Nowruz (the Farsi New Year), he posted an online video in which he addressed the Iranian people and their leaders directly.

It signaled the launch of "YouTube diplomacy", one commentator gushed. But, like the Twitter Revolution, it has achieved very little – Iran remains determined to become a nuclear power, and America is still described by the regime as "the Great Satan".

The jab at YouTube diplomacy is another creation of those in the media who know little about what is going on during protests on the streets in daylight, even with video evidence at hand, but who are more than ready to scare the hell out of everyone by proclaiming that Iran will get the ability to make a nuclear bomb soon. Your own retreat into that nuclear shelter, under cover of the ludicrous and unfounded accusations about the movement inside as well as outside Iran, is only an addition to that evasion.

So what can we do? Well, perhaps that’s a question for 2010, because the internet, combined with “offline” networks, probably can encourage openness in dictatorships. But before we work out how, let’s first drop the self-congratulation.

What can you do? You can actually report after researching the subject you are about to write on. You can find sources inside Iran to get some real news out. And you can stop hurling insults like poisoned candy.

Finally, we don’t need to self-congratulate ourselves. The media does it for us quite neatly. I will point you to just one article about the Twitter Revolution published a few days ago in one of Sweden’s largest tabloid newspapers, Expressen:

Today Mousavi's Facebook page [a page run by activists from outside Iran] is a more secure source of news than Al-Jazeera and the BBC, while micro-blogs and websites like the dailyniteowl.com and rahesabz.net [both websites that use direct information from tweets and Facebook] offer sympathizers as well as media consumers, fast, reliable news [about Iran] that traditional newsrooms cannot provide.

That is just one out of hundreds of articles that have been published about the worldwide effort to help get the reality on Iran’s streets to people around the globe through social networking websites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube and through microblogs.

I understand your frustration at having to keep up with citizen reporting. But that does not give you the right to so flagrantly distort facts and insult a mass of people that have devoted their own time without any monetary compensation to helping their brothers and sisters in Iran.

Next time, if you’re going to write on this subject, please, inform yourself about the many terms you used and try to show the real picture.

Advice to US & Britain: How Not to Approach Yemen

Amidst the escalation of the "War on Terror" at home and abroad not only in the aftermath of the failed attempt at an explosion on a US-bound airliner but also in President Obama's escalation in Afghanistan (see his 2 December speech, which mentions Yemen), the small country on the Arabian Peninsula has become the next projected theatre for American and British intervention. Rami Khouri, one of the sharpest observers and analysts of Middle Eastern affairs, offers a caution:

When British Prime Minister Gordon Brown declared a few days ago that the United Kingdom and the United States would soon convene a special summit on “stabilizing” Yemen in order to reduce the threat of terrorismemanating from there, I cried in my heart for Yemen. My fears were exacerbated when I read the following day that the US’ top military commander in the region had visited Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh to offer support, and pledged more financial and military assistance to defeat the growing presence of Al-Qaeda’s operation in the Arabian Peninsula that is domiciled in Yemen.

The idea that Yemen has suddenly become a “terror problem” country and that the US and UK can lead it to greener pastures is symptomatic of the collective policy failures that have seen the world today suffer so widely from problems of political violence and terrorism. Conferences in London and shipments of American arms and money will not solve the problem. The Anglo-Americans clearly lack the ability or will to come to terms with the full dimensions of terrorism and its genesis. A starting point in that direction would be to grasp that terrorism traumatizes and harms four primary actors.

The first is the terrorist himself. Most terrorists are reasonably smart and educated young men who have become crazy due to the circumstances of their lives and their societies’ political, economic and social conditions, including interactions with foreign armies.

The second is the society that breeds terrorists, including many in the Middle East. The disequilibria, disparities and distortions that plague those societies ultimately generate a handful of crazed men who become terrorists. Terrorists do not emerge from a vacuum. They emerge from terrorized societies.

The third target of terrorism comprises those innocent civilians who are attacked by terrorists, whether in Arab hotels, Pakistani markets, New York City skyscrapers, or London buses. The attacked societies are terrorized and traumatized by the criminality that assaults them, and they usually have no idea why they were attacked or what to do in response. They are truly the innocent victims who pay the highest price.

The fourth madness that often haunts the world of terrorism is the response of governments whose countries or citizens have been subjected to terror attacks. Terrorized, then crazed with anger and driven to seek revenge, governments in turn unleash their own immense military and police power to fight the terrorists and bring them to justice. This approach only rarely succeeds, and more often intensifies the first two problems above: local traditional societies around the developing world that are at the receiving end of Western powers’ might eventually become crazed, distorted, ravaged lands full of tyranny, corruption, instability, abuse of power, and violence, and those traumatized societies in turn eventually breed more of their own criminal terrorists who attack at home and abroad.

If we do not address these four dimensions of terrorism and its traumas, we will never resolve the problem.

Medieval Arabs used to say that “In Yemen, there is wisdom.” There is also much wisdom to be gleaned from Yemen today -- in particular by Anglo-American and other leaders who should understand more honestly how and why a country like Yemen comes to play a role in the global terrorism world. This starts with an integrated, honest analysis of the above four victims of terrorism, rather than by isolating only one of them -- Yemeni society -- and using the wrong tools to address it.

The network of Al-Qaeda terrorists in Yemen is structurally linked with and organically emerges from the experience of militants, resistance fighters, terrorists and others who trained and fought in Afghanistan and Iraq --- sometimes fighting with Anglo-American assistance against a common foe, but sometimes fighting against the Anglo-Americans who were seen as foreign occupiers. This network has been building up in Yemen since the mid-1990s, but in fact Yemen’s instability and its emergence as a terrorists’ base goes much further back.

The British with their colonial history in the southern part of Yemen, along with other parts of the Arabian Peninsula, bear some historical responsibility for how things have turned out in our region in the past century. The wrecks that often masquerade as Arab modern states are fragile in many cases because they emerged from colonial rule (mostly French and British) in wildly unsustainable conditions, due to the double constraints of European colonialism and post-colonial policies: The combination of national boundaries that were highly artificial and thus created structurally unstable states, and then the advent of local rulers who were put in place by the retreating colonial powers, often lacked any serious indigenous legitimacy, and ultimately developed into, or gave way to, today‘s security states.

For the British now to convene a global summit to fix Yemen is akin to Tiger Woods offering an executive course in marriage fidelity. It is not a serious proposition. Fighting the modern scourge of political terrorism with the kind of intellectual terrorism that Gordon Brown offers will not work. If this is a joke, it is not funny. If this is serious, we are all in much deeper trouble than any of us could ever have imagined.

Iran: Four Responses to the "Wrong Questions" of the Leveretts (Lucas)

On Wednesday, I read the analysis of Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett in The New York Times of the Iranian Government and the opposition and responded: "All of the Leveretts' purported 'facts' and challenges to the Green Movement are mere props for their 'default' option that the regime (whose political, religious, economic, and ideological position is not examined beyond that claim of a million protesters on its behalf on 30 December) must not only be accepted but embraced in talks."

I did not intend to write more, for the Leveretts, rather than starting from evidence and working towards a conclusion, have started from a fixed objective and worked backwards to find or construct the desired "information". They have done so since they wrote with Tehran University's Seyed Mohammad Marandi on 24 June, "The protests that broke out in Tehran following Iran’s presidential election on June 12 are, predictably, dwindling....To this day, there is no hard evidence of electoral fraud." The Ahmadinejad Government is legitimate, and any challenge to that assertion must be minimised and/or caricatured.

Iran: “What is This Opposition?” Right Answers to Wrong Questions (Shahryar)
The Latest from Iran (8 January): Defeating the Wrong Questions

I did not intend to write more, but Kevin Sullivan of Real Clear Politics e-mailed me with his thoughtful reminder that the Leveretts' questions about the opposition (what does this opposition want? who leads it? through what process will this opposition displace the government in Tehran?) --- whatever their motives and however dubious their "facts" and argument --- still need to be addressed. Josh Shahryar has taken on this challenge in a separate entry, but I did want to put three points both as an appendix to his analysis and my original reaction.

1. It is deliberate blindness to assume that people inside Iran, as well as those outside the country with an interest in events, have not been discussing, debating, evaluating, and sometimes agonising over those three questions in the last seven months. Even in the small outpost of EA, my colleagues and our readers have had intense conversations about the evolution of the Green movement, the response of the Iranian regime, and the dynamics of political change. The role of Mousavi and Karroubi in the movement, tactics of resistance and non-violence, revolution or reform of the current system: these and many other issues have and continue to be considered and re-evaluated. I have no doubt that this discussion is taking place, despite the efforts of the Iranian regime to prevent it, in many locations beyond the limited sight of the Leveretts.

2. It is arrogance to command, "Take Me to Your Leader" and "Your Objectives, Please, in 25 Words or Less". Political change is not a simple, quick-fix process (the Leveretts, who showed courage in opposing the Bush Administration's attempt to "liberate" Iraq with a short, sharp military invasion, should know that all too well).

As soon as the issues became more than the remedy of a fair election in place of the disputed outcome of 12 June, this conflict expanded to take on wider, more complex questions over the religious and political future of the Islamic Republic. The limited vision is not that of the opposition --- with all of its different elements, groups, and factions seeking a way forward that does not divide but unites --- but of the Leveretts setting an artificial timer for Tell Me, Tell Me Now.

3. In a small way, I hope both the value and the complexity of that process of reflection, analysis, and debate comes out in Josh Shahryar's response this morning and my own comments.

For I have a different perspective from Josh when he says that the movement is beyond an individual like Mir Hossein Mousavi. I agree that many of those protesting are now beyond Mousavi's proposals for change, as expressed in the five points of his 1 January statement. Nor can the hopes and objectives of the groups inside Iran cannot be contained in the 10 Demands of the five expatriate Iranian intellectuals, which followed two days after Mousavi's declaration.

However, I think Mousavi, Karroubi, the senior clerics expressing their criticisms of the regime are all important in opening up space for the continuing challenge. Their pressure on the Government to listen and act, even and especially as the Government fails to do so, contributes to an environment for further protests. Conversely, those protests may ensure that the regime cannot carry out its ultimate sanction of removing Mousavi, Karroubi, the troublesome clerics through arrests or a complete silencing of their voices.

4. But, you know, the answer to the Leveretts does not and should not come from Josh Shahryar or me. The answer has come from inside Iran over the last seven months.

The Leveretts may be wilfullly blind to the demonstrations of far more than "2000 to 4000", but those protests occur, not only in the streets on particular days but in actions taken on every single day by those who will not surrender their concerns and hopes. They may be deaf to the discussion in Iran of what can and must be done to remedy injustices, inequalities, and denial of rights, but that discussion takes place.

It is not for me to direct that discussion. And it is not for two defenders of a "legitimate" Iranian Government to deny it.