Enduring America’s Mr Smith, who has first-hand sources and knowledge of Professor Massoud Ali-Mohammadi, the physicist killed yesterday in the explosion of a booby-trapped motorcycle, assesses the consequences of the murder:
The murder of Massoud Ali-Mohammadi adds yet another mystery to the litany of violence, unexplained circumstances, and unpredictable twists that Iran has been witnessing since June 12.
Ali-Mohammadi was a mild-mannered academic who, like most of his colleagues, quietly supported reformist leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi in the run-up to the presidential vote and who became more vocal in its aftermath. However, his association with physics — he was among the very first scholars to emerge from the Islamic Republic’s universities with a Ph.D., made it easy for state media to link him to the nuclear field and for Western news organisations and Israeli analysts to quickly claim he was active in the nuclear programme of Iran. Read the rest of this entry »
I give you what I know. I today attended the protest in Esfahan. This was done on purpose cause I wanted to personally make sure there is protest in more than one city. Also because we used the cover of the 3-day vacation to demonstrate. So it worked.
There was a lot of people. My estimate is close to 3 to 4 thousand people, but only where I was, near Shams Abad. There was a lot of people near Tohid/Nazar square, also there was people near Char Bag and also Khajoo Bridge. It was strange compared to Tehran protests, but it was there and it was way bigger than I expected.
Esfahanis have funny slogans, and they were very very nice to me and my family, cause we looked like we were from out of town. asiji were early in the day hassling the young people, especially boys about their dress and hair. Anything to get under peoples skin early.
For what it is worth, I thought we would have 1 hour of protests before we were either arrested or gassed. It was going on for a good four hours and I say there was at least 10 to 15 thousand protesters all over the streets.
The Green Wave succeeded in its main objective yesterday. Ever since the start of Ramadan, the reformist opposition to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, led by Mehdi Karroubi, was striving to make Qods Day the focal point for anti-government demonstrations. The target was to “stand up and be counted”, and to prove that the Green Wave rank and file have not been cowed into silence by the litany of violence unleashed against it by pro-government security forces. Read the rest of this entry »
Qods Day is going to be a significant development in the post-June 12 election drama that has gripped Iran. It will probably be at least equivalent in significance to 17 July, when former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani delivered a strong sermon stressing the need to respect popular will within the confines of the Islamic Republic’s elite.
The reformists are chasing a few important goals in tomorrow’s demonstration. First and foremost, it gives an opportunity both for the leadership and the rank and file supporters of the Green Wave to “stand up and be counted”. It will be the possible setting for a morale-boosting strong presence. Protestors will be back in the streets of central Tehran, following month of retreat from the waning but ever-lively cycle of martyr commemorations and street demonstrations that proceeded unabated from 13 June to the end of July. It will also be an opportunity to indicate that the most recent tool of repression set loose by the regime, the indiscriminate raping of opposition supporters that joined baton attacks and occasional murder as methods of coercion, did not succeed in dampening the morale of the reformist supporters. Read the rest of this entry »
As you know, after the controversial presidential election and its painful, alarming aftermath, I wrote many letters to the officials to share with them certain points, critiques and objections and to give the necessary warnings. The last of these letters was addressed to you. You have just recently accepted responsibility [of the judiciary] and are chief justice. And now I will share with you the details of my meetings with your representatives and some of the marginal events that took place which led to my personal office and party being sealed. I do this as a religious and patriotic obligation. So that future generations do not say that Karoubi was frightened off by pressure and arrests. Even if you do not know, others do know that in the my past, pressure and threats and limitations not only did not deter me, but made me even more determined in the path I had chosen to follow.
2220 GMT: Did Sadegh Larijani Just Jump Behind the President (Continued)? Earlier today (1125 GMT) we noted that the head of judiciary seemed to be aiming at those who went “beyond the law” because of the “false claim” of electoral fraud. Another snippet of the interview is even more dramatic, as Larijani denounces those who have brought “great costs to the Islamic system” with their opposition.
2020 GMT: More on Ayatollahs Take a Stand? (1540 GMT) Some interesting developments from the Sunday meeting of senior clerics in Qom that we have been following. Ayatollah Golpaygani wrote a letter criticising the Ahmadinejad Cabinet; the Supreme Leader replied sharply, effectively prohibiting the Ayatollah from “interfering” in Government issues. Meanwhile, the Qom meeting has asked Grand Ayatollah Sistani, based in Najaf in Iraq, to travel to Iran for discussions and Grand Ayatollah Nouri-Hamedani has expressed regret for congratulating Ahmadinejad on his election victory.
2010 GMT: Report that Sadegh Noroozi, head of political council of the Mojahedin-Enghelab party, has been released.
1840 GMT: Remember our emerging assessment that the biggest challenge for President Ahmadinejad may be governing Iran, especially handling the economy, rather than confronting the opposition? This from Press TV: “The value of Iran’s oil products exports has plunged by 51 percentage points in the first half of the current Iranian year due to the global economic downturn.”
An admission: for the first time in three months, I feel very uncertain about an analysis. Up to this point, with the immense help of colleagues and readers, I could read and analyse the move of various participants in the post-election conflict, watching them act and react against each other. Even in mid-August, when we tried to figure out the manoeuvres of Hashemi Rafsanjani, I think we came to a secure conclusion about his complex, cautious steps.
Yesterday afternoon changed all this. We were in the midst of reading yet another turn of the kaleidoscope: an apparent alignment between the Supreme Leader and other elements in the Iranian Establishment to find a compromise that would contain the reformists by offering a limited “compromise”, thus securing the system. This would have entailed a loudly-proclaimed but strictly-defined enquiry into detentions and abuses, public but relatively gentle criticism of the President’s handling of the crisis, and perhaps the “Ramadan present” of a release of high-profile prisoners.
It seemed this was the latest but one of the most important chess moves in the conflict. Then at 3 p.m. Tehran time yesterday, 24 hours after security forces raided an office run by the staff of Mir Hossein Mousavi, someone — most likely, the President, working with the Revolutionary Guard — ordered the seizure of the main office of Mehdi Karroubi and the Etemade Melli political party and website, arresting the editor-in-chief of etemademelli.ir and perhaps shutting the site down. And a few hours after that, Mir Hossein Mousavi’s chief advisor, Alireza Beheshti, was arrested.
I think the difficulty in evaluating these steps is that Ahmadinejad is not playing chess. Dismissing our once-favourite cliche for a new analogy, with the attack on the Mousavi and Karroubi camps, the President and the Revolutionary Guards are palying cards, and they just put all their chips in the middle. Read the rest of this entry »
We’re not sure we expected, when we began rolling coverage of the post-election crisis in Iran, that we would still be going two months later. Well, the crisis continues, and so do we. We’ve amassed a huge collection of videos, including speeches, TV appearances, and many, many protests. Below are links to all of our video posts from the past two months, in chronological order. (Please note: some videos may be unavailable in your country, and some may no longer be available at all.)
If we’ve missed a video you think is important, do let us know. And thanks to all of you for reading and working with us.
Enduring America’s Mr Smith, who has first-hand sources and knowledge of Professor Massoud Ali-Mohammadi, the physicist killed yesterday in the explosion of a booby-trapped motorcycle, assesses the consequences of the murder:
A long-time Enduring America reader writes:
Enduring America’s Mr Smith prepares for today:
Translation by Pedestrian
I do this as a religious and patriotic obligation. So that future generations do not say that Karoubi was frightened off by pressure and arrests. Even if you do not know, others do know that in the my past, pressure and threats and limitations not only did not deter me, but made me even more determined in the path I had chosen to follow.
An admission: for the first time in three months, I feel very uncertain about an analysis. Up to this point, with the immense help of colleagues and readers, I could read and analyse the move of various participants in the post-election conflict, watching them act and react against each other. Even in mid-August, when we tried to figure out the manoeuvres of Hashemi Rafsanjani, I think we came to a secure conclusion about his complex, cautious steps.
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