Iranian Alert -- February 10, 2004 -- IRAN LIVE THREAD --Americans for Regime Change in Iran

The Iranian Student Movement Up To The Minute Reports ^ | 2.10.2004 | DoctorZin

[DoctorZIn]

The US media almost entirely ignores news regarding the Islamic Republic of Iran. As Tony Snow of the Fox News Network has put it, “this is probably the most under-reported news story of the year.” But most American’s are unaware that the Islamic Republic of Iran is NOT supported by the masses of Iranians today. Modern Iranians are among the most pro-American in the Middle East.

There is a popular revolt against the Iranian regime brewing in Iran today. Starting June 10th of this year, Iranians have begun taking to the streets to express their desire for a regime change. Most want to replace the regime with a secular democracy. Many even want the US to over throw their government.

The regime is working hard to keep the news about the protest movement in Iran from being reported. Unfortunately, the regime has successfully prohibited western news reporters from covering the demonstrations. The voices of discontent within Iran are sometime murdered, more often imprisoned. Still the people continue to take to the streets to demonstrate against the regime.

In support of this revolt, Iranians in America have been broadcasting news stories by satellite into Iran. This 21st century news link has greatly encouraged these protests. The regime has been attempting to jam the signals, and locate the satellite dishes. Still the people violate the law and listen to these broadcasts. Iranians also use the Internet and the regime attempts to block their access to news against the regime. In spite of this, many Iranians inside of Iran read these posts daily to keep informed of the events in their own country.

This daily thread contains nearly all of the English news reports on Iran. It is thorough. If you follow this thread you will witness, I believe, the transformation of a nation. This daily thread provides a central place where those interested in the events in Iran can find the best news and commentary. The news stories and commentary will from time to time include material from the regime itself. But if you read the post you will discover for yourself, the real story of what is occurring in Iran and its effects on the war on terror.

I am not of Iranian heritage. I am an American committed to supporting the efforts of those in Iran seeking to replace their government with a secular democracy. I am in contact with leaders of the Iranian community here in the United States and in Iran itself.

If you read the daily posts you will gain a better understanding of the US war on terrorism, the Middle East and why we need to support a change of regime in Iran. Feel free to ask your questions and post news stories you discover in the weeks to come.

If all goes well Iran will be free soon and I am convinced become a major ally in the war on terrorism. The regime will fall. Iran will be free. It is just a matter of time.

DoctorZin

[DoctorZIn]

Join Us At Today's Iranian Alert Thread – The Most Underreported Story Of The Year!

"If you want on or off this Iran ping list, Freepmail DoctorZin”

[DoctorZIn]

Join Us At Today's Iranian Alert Thread – The Most Underreported Story Of The Year!

"If you want on or off this Iran ping list, Freepmail DoctorZin”

[DoctorZIn]

TEHRAN TYRANY'S 25TH

by Amir Taheri
New York Post
February 10, 2004

TEN Little Indians" is the title of a nursery rhyme that inspired one of Agatha Christie's best loved thrillers. In it, the "Indians" in question disappear one after another until we learn that "then there was none."

This could be a parable of Iran's Khomeinist revolution, which marks its 25th anniversary tomorrow. The revolution started with quite a few "Indians."

In 1978 it had forged a coalition of parties that had nothing in common except hatred for the Shah.

The heart of the coalition consisted of Khomeinist militants ready to kill, and to die, to install their "Imam" to head a system in which a single mullah, claiming to represent God on earth, is the absolute master of the nation.

Khomeinism, a form of fascism, was, and remains, a consistent political doctrine. Ayatollah Ruhallah Khomeini was honest enough never to promise a pluralist system. He raised the banner of revolt against the Shah not because Iranians did not have enough freedom, but because, he claimed, they had too much.

Nevertheless, many who described themselves as liberals, democrats, social democrats and supporters of a constitutional monarchy, rallied to Khomeini.

Each must have known that Khomeini, or for that matter any mullah from any religion, is unlikely and unable to offer democracy. They all believed that they could use Khomeini as a bridge over which to walk to power. They underestimated Khomeini's intelligence. Having planned to double-cross him, they ended up being double-crossed by him.

There were other "little Indians" around the ayatollah. They included a variety of mullahs - Iran had almost a quarter of a million of them in 1978 - who pursued different agendas. They, too, wanted to use Khomeini to win a bigger share of the pie, all along thinking that, once they had achieved their goals, they would double-cross him.

Again, Khomeini proved too clever for them.

But the strangest of all "little Indians" of the time were the leftist parties whose leaders suddenly grew beards, bought rosaries and started going to the mosques for prayers.

The members of the Soviet-created Communists of the Tudeh (Masses) Party replaced their portraits of Marx and Lenin with those of Ali Ibn Abi-Talib and Hussein Ibn Ali, the first and third imams of Shiism.

Their chief ideologist, the octogenarian Ihsan Tabari, even wrote a book to prove that Ali had been the true founder of "Socialism." Then there were the People's Mujahedin, a Marxist-Islamist terrorist organization that specialized in robbing banks and killing policemen. Alongside them were two versions of another terror group, the so-called People's Fedayeen Guerrillas, one pro-Moscow, the other pro-Peking.

There were, as well, the Trotskyites, the Spartacists, the Guevarists and countless other leftist terrorist gangs with names like "Storm," "Thunder," "Workers' Banner" and "Red Star." They, too, secretly hoped that once the Shah was gone they could stab Khomeini in the back and seize power for themselves. Khomeini, however, was not as gullible as the "little Indians" imagined.

Once in power he began destroying his former allies one by one, starting with the weakest.

Within months, Khomeini had put Grand Ayatollah Kazem Shariatmadari under house arrest and disbanded his People's Republican Party. All the other "little Indians" applauded, naively hoping that they would escape a similar fate.

Next to disappear were the Musaddeqists, fans of Muhammad Mussaddeq who had served as prime minister for a couple of years in the 1950s.the "Islamist-Nationalists" were next to go. Their leader Mahdi Bazargan was used by Khomeini as prime minister for a few months, before being disposed of like a used napkin.

Then came the crackdown against the Mujahedin, followed by a campaign to annihilate the leftist guerrilla groups.

By 1983 most of the "little Indians" who had hoped to double-cross Khomeini had been liquidated.

According to Amnesty International, between 1981 and 1983, the ayatollah executed some 25,000 people, almost all of them his former supporters. Also, dozens of prominent politicians and mullahs were assassinated by hit-squads set up by Khomeini.

Khomeini destroyed virtually the entire opposition to the Shah's regime, from the extreme right to the extreme left - something the Shah had failed to do.

The "little Indians" took years to understand what had happened. They complained about having been "duped" by Khomeini. Even today remnants of the "little Indians" do not realize that they only have themselves to blame. They lied to Khomeini, lied to the Iranian people and, above all, lied to themselves.

Logically, a communist, a Mussadeqist, a socialist, a liberal, a nationalist, or a democrat cannot vote for "Walayat Faqih," the Khomeinist system under which power is concentrated in the hands of a single mullah. And yet, in the constitutional referendum that Khomeini organized within months of coming to power, they voted for that system.

Twenty-five years after the victory of the Khomeinist revolution, only two "little Indians" remain standing. One represents the genuine Khomeinists who believe that theocracy is the best system not only for Iran but for all nations.

These Khomeinists sincerely believe that a woman is half as valuable as a man and that she should cover her hair because it emanates rays that drive men wild with lust. They genuinely believe that men who shave their beards will go to hell. They regard the West as a civilization in decline, and its values, including human rights and democracy, as decadent.

Their strategic goal is to destroy Western-dominated civilization and replace it with a better, Islamic, one. They dream of wiping Israel off the map and, one day, hoisting their flag of faith atop the White House.

At the same time they are realistic enough to know that the current balance of power is not in their favor and that they should not become involved in a direct clash with the West. Thus they are ready to offer concessions, including some humiliating retreats, which may be required in foreign policy, provided their power inside Iran is not threatened.

The second group are the ersatz Khomeinists who suffer from split personality. They are fascinated by the West and would die to be accepted by it as "reformists" and/or "democrats." At the same time they are unable to cut their ties to Khomeinism. Outside Iran, they talk of democracy and pluralism. In Tehran they go on pilgrimage to Khomeini's tomb and light candles so that the Imam will save them from annihilation. These fake Khomeinists are the latest "little Indians" to be seen off by the revolution. The next general election, on Feb. 20, could seal their fate.

Once these double-fakers are out of the way Iran will be left with the last group of "little Indians," the hard-core, real McCoy Khomeinists. And then we can look forward to the day when they, too, will disappear.

And then there will be none.

http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/17543.htm

[DoctorZIn]

TEHRAN TYRANY'S 25TH

by Amir Taheri
New York Post
February 10, 2004

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1074964/posts?page=3#3

[DoctorZIn]

DoctorZin Note: Story about the regime's "Rent a Anti-American Demonstration". The regime has to ship in demonstrators from the rural areas and pay them to create a crowd.

Mass transfers of "celebrators" and future "voters" start again
SMCCDI (Information Service)
Feb 10, 2004

Confirming reports from main Iranian cities and especially the Capital are stating about the start of mass transfers of paid "celebrators" and future "voters" to these cities.

These transfers managed and supervised by the Offices of Islamic Propagation and the Pasdaran Intelligence are made in preparation of the "celebration" of the 25th anniversary of the 1979 Islamic revolution, on Wednesday, and the regime's sham parliamentary elections of Feb. 20th.

Full buses are reaching the cities of Tehran, Esfahan, Shiraz, tabriz, Mashad, Hamadan and Oroomiah (former Rezai-e) by delivering their load of paid rural people who are receiving money, gifts, promises and free full paid travel to cities.

Most of the state's foundations' hotels and dorm places, Bassij centers, mosques and even part of the regime's military facilities, such as in Lavizan (NE of Tehran) are receiving these guests.

The regime intends by this way to boost its "popular legitimacy" and avoid empty streets on these days while each of the ministries have received the order to gather groups of employees, school students and plainclothes militaries and to send them for the two events ahead.

[windchime]

Bump!

[F14 Pilot]

Iranian Plane Crashes in UAE, Officials Say

10 Feb 04
Yahoo! News

SHARJAH, United Arab Emirates (Reuters) - An Iranian plane with at least 40 passengers on board crashed Tuesday during take-off from Sharjah airport in the United Arab Emirates.
Witnesses said only flaming bits and pieces remained of the Kish Airlines plane. Ambulances were rushing to and from the scene. There was no immediate word on the number of casualties in the incident.

"Only a bit of the tail remained. It doesn't look like many people survived. Rescue teams are still looking for people," one witness said.

"The plane crashed near the tarmac. Police have sealed off the area to allow rescue operations," she added.

The official UAE news agency WAM said the plane was carrying 40 passengers. A UAE officials had earlier said the plane was carrying 60 passengers.

A Kish Airlines official in Iran confirmed that one of the company's planes had been involved in an accident but said the company was still seeking further information.

Earlier, security sources had said the plane was a Russian cargo jet with 35 passengers on board. The type of plane was not clear.

Iran's airlines have difficulty maintaing their aging fleet of Boeing aircraft, many of them bought before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, due to U.S. sanctions. Instead, they have turned to Russian made-aircraft often leased from former Soviet countries.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=586&e=1&u=/nm/20040210/wl_nm/airline_emirate_crash_dc

[F14 Pilot]

Iran now a land of theocrats and cynics

Tuesday, February 10, 2004
BY BORZOU DARAGAHI
For the Star-Ledger

TEHRAN, Iran -- In a narrow alleyway, the Refah School, incubator of Iran's revolution 25 years ago, continues to pulse with life.

The Refah School is where Shi'a Muslim clerics secretly met for years to prepare for the arrival of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who commanded a revolution that introduced Islamic fundamentalism as a force in the world.

Today Refah is an elementary school for girls. They have festooned its walls with drawings and poems decrying America, Israel and the shah who had ruled Iran before Khomeini, and praising the leader of the revolution.

The slogans remain the same, but Iran is far different from when Khomeini seized power, 25 years ago tomorrow.

Months of street protests against the rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi had paved the way for Khomeini's return from 15 years in exile. He arrived in Tehran Feb. 1, 1979, on an Air France plane from Paris. The U.S.-backed shah had already fled, and Khomeini was received by throngs of millions in the streets.

Ten days later, he took control of the government and declared the birth of the Islamic Republic, sending the country on a collision course with the Western world.

Contemporary Iran is younger, busier, more complex, modern and secular. It is also more cynical and outspoken.

"The revolution put us at least two decades ahead of other Arab and Muslim countries. People in those countries now want religious government," said Hamidreza Jalaipour, a University of Tehran social scientist.

"We've already experienced that. We thought religious government could solve all our problems. But religion didn't become more popular, the mosques didn't become more full and the state didn't become more efficient."

Twenty-five years later, the revolution that started at the Refah School casts a long shadow on Iran.

There was the 444-day hostage crisis at the U.S. Embassy, just blocks away, that destroyed ties with Washington and led to a quarter-century of economic isolation. There was the eight-year Iran- Iraq War that left hundreds of thousands of Iranians dead or wounded.

The clerics' shock troops enforced Islamic rules against liquor, dancing and pop music -- bans that continue today.

There was the clerical takeover of the courts, intelligence services and military, the stifling of dissident voices, the jailings, the executions, the creation of a police state that forces women to cover their heads.

There were the militants dispatched overseas, the masters of terror who frayed Iran's relations with nearly every country in the world.

But today, with U.S. troops occupying Iraq to the west and guarding Afghanistan to the east, Iran's clerical leaders are under pressure to establish some sort of relations with the country they consider the Great Satan.

Europeans are demanding Iran make concessions on terrorism and weapons proliferation in exchange for foreign investment badly needed to help curb Iran's unemployment, estimated as high as 20 percent.

Europeans, Americans and Iranian dissidents also have demanded that Iran be more accountable for its human rights record, which only worsened from the time of the shah and the first few years of the clerical regime that succeeded him.

Most agree human rights have steadily improved since the late 1980s. But the government has shut down scores of newspapers over the past few years and continues to jail dissidents.

"The reality is our situation is like a nightmare," said a prominent intellectual released from jail last year, who asked that his name not be used for fear of retribution. "I'm waiting to wake up ... and be able to comfortably think and write without worrying that my phone calls are being monitored and that my activities are being watched."

Over the past few years, a group of people within the regime has tried to change Iran, a group led by President Mohammad Khatami, the cleric who was elected with huge majorities in 1997 and 2001. These reformists were recently barred from running in the Feb. 20 legislative elections by the hard-line judiciary, setting off a political crisis that has yet to abate.

But increasingly, politicians aren't the only driving force for change in Iran. Two-thirds of Iranians are under 30, a generation of well-educated discontents pushing for good jobs and opportunities.

Women, especially, are a force of change. The revolution at first reinforced patriarchy, giving men custody rights and keeping women and girls at home. But restrictive childhoods made them academic superstars. Now 60 percent of university students are women, a confident generation entering previously taboo arenas.

Jalaipour, the social scientist, calls the stronger role of women in Iran one of the positive results of the revolution. "It brought women into the streets," he said. "Before the revolution, religious women were stuck in the house. Now their life is outside -- in the schools, in the universities, in the workplace, in the gym."

Internet service, lackadaisically filtered, and satellite television, banned but tolerated, have opened the world for Iranians.

"You can't open a magazine or look at a billboard or look at a business card these days without seeing the company's Web address," said Majid Imami, vice president of Pars Online, Iran's largest Internet service provider.

Khomeini, who died in 1989, once said he hadn't led the revolution to improve people's material lives. But sensing people's needs, even Khomeini's ideological heirs have adjusted their message.

Though he continues to disparage America and Israel and to cite many of the revolution's spiritual successes, conservative historian and cleric Mohsen Alviri admits the regime needs to do more to address people's earthly needs.

"Domestically in terms of management and solving economics, we haven't been successful," he said.

Even a man called simply Bashir, who as a member of the Basiji militia would spend weekends harassing women showing too much hair or boys playing pop music, says he no longer has the heart to do it.

"People have such big problems and they're out trying to enjoy themselves a little bit," he said. "Either the guy has economic problems and can't get married, or he's got difficulties at work. Who am I to bother him?"

Not everyone in Iran complains of poverty. Late-model Mercedes-Benzes roll through streets lined with expensive jewelry shops. Tehran's stock market has risen an average of 50 percent a year over the past five years, enriching some in a country where many live in dire poverty.

Critics complain that the economy remains in the hands of conservative clerics and their allies who seized businesses at the beginning of the revolution. More than half of all stock market volume is owned by organizations or individuals with ties to the government, says Fariborz Raissdana, an economist barred from teaching for his outspoken views.

"There's no accountability," he said. "You have no idea whether they're well-run or where the money's going. You just know they're making money for someone."

Such corruption has disgusted many Iranians, including those in the spiritual center of Qom, the city 75 miles south of Tehran where Khomeini studied religion for years.

Liberal clerics there say the revolution has strayed far from its original purposes. "We were looking for freedom and social justice," said one of those clerics, Fazel Maibadi. "We wanted to eliminate poverty and corruption. We wanted real freedom. We're still a long way from that."

http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/index.ssf?/base/news-13/107639704979190.xml

[F14 Pilot]

Failure Of Political Islam in Iran

Feb 9, 2004
Iranian.ws

The political crisis in Iran grows more complicated by the day. With the resignation Sunday of more than a third of the country's parliament, Iran is in such turmoil now that the possibility of another major upheaval in the Middle East cannot be ruled out.

National legislative elections are scheduled for Feb. 20. But the unelected religious extremists who control much of the Iranian government have used an agency called the Guardian Council to disqualify more than a third of the 8,200 candidates running. Nearly all of those disqualified are reformers — including more than 80 current members of the Majlis, or parliament.

Iran's president, Mohammad Khatami, leads the reformers but has disappointed much of the electorate by his inability to institute change. He threatened to quit if the Guardian Council, guided by Iran's "supreme leader," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, refused to reverse itself on the political candidates it has disqualified.

Since then hundreds of candidates have been reinstated, but that hasn't been enough to satisfy most of the nation — nor should it.

On Tuesday, Khameini was insisting the elections be held as scheduled.

Any vote taken in these circumstances will lack legitimacy. Iran's leaders should understand that their actions are further isolating their country, which already is viewed as a pariah by the international community.

http://www.iranian.ws

[F14 Pilot]

A failed regime

February 10, 2004
San Diego Union Tribune

Iran celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Islamic Republic by demonstrating its government has become nonfunctional.

The power struggle between reformers and Islamists that has marked the republic since its inception has become no contest. Asserting their power, the clerics have decided that they – not the people – will determine who sits in parliament, the body that putatively makes laws.

The decision by the so-called Guardian Council to ban some 4,000 people from standing for Feb. 20 elections – including more than 80 reformist incumbents – makes the elections a farce. Recognizing this, 125 parliamentarians resigned, urged that elections be postponed and appealed to President Mohammad Khatami to seek a compromise with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Khatami, popularly elected twice by overwhelming margins, urged Khamenei, Iran's "supreme leader," to intervene with the council to reinstate the banned candidates. Khatami failed.

If ever there were an example of why Islam and democracy have problems, it is Iran. For years, experts on Iran have predicted that reformers in parliament plus a growing student democracy movement would tip the balance toward reform. Modern Iran demanded it.

Instead, the balance has tipped the other way. As reformers have gained in popular strength, the clerics have slammed the door.

The Guardian Council gives fiction to Iranian democracy. Composed of appointed clerics and Islamic lawyers, set up originally to supervise elections, it has turned into a kind of Islamic politburo, deciding who is and is not faithful enough to stand for election.

Reformers have finally recognized that the council makes voting meaningless. In resigning and boycotting elections, they are raising the stakes. They are refusing to give the council and Khamenei more democratic cover. Elections should be called off.

Iranians need to work out these differences before the reform pressures explode. They need to work them out before the lesson that democracy and Islam are incompatible spreads next door to Iraq, which hopes soon to have elections of its own.

It doesn't have to be this way. Turkey's new president is proof that a Muslim can be a democrat. The hybrid that Iran has created is a democratic monster.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/op-ed/editorial2/20040209-9999_mz1ed9bottom.html

[Pan_Yans Wife]

Maybe this?

[Pan_Yans Wife]

Update at 8 AM, 43 passengers killed, 3 survivors.

[nuconvert]

"Any vote taken in these circumstances will lack legitimacy. Iran's leaders should understand that their actions are further isolating their country, which already is viewed as a pariah by the international community."

They've lacked legitimacy for a long time, but it's nice to know their plans are backfiring this year.

[nuconvert]

Like Taheri's take............and the sooner the better.

[DoctorZIn]

The Jihadis' Primal Scream

February 10, 2004
National Review Online
Michael Ledeen

Zarkawi's "Yaarrrhhh!"

Unless you depend on CNN for information — CNN totally and stunningly transformed the story, Instapundit informed us yesterday — by now you have heard of the New York Times story about the discovery of a 17-page letter from Abu Musab al Zarkawi, written from Iraq in the middle of last month to the leaders of al Qaeda. It's an extremely explosive story.

According to the Times — whose correspondent, Dexter Filkins, saw both the Arabic original and a military translation, and "wrote down large parts of the translation" — the letter is a sort of jihadist primal scream. It says that the jihad against the Americans in Iraq is going badly. The Iraqis are not signing up for martyrdom or jihad, they do not even permit the jihadis to organize their terrorist attacks from local houses, and, worst of all, the Americans are not afraid of the terrorists. With that charming neglect of logic that seems to define much of the radical terrorist "mind," Zarkawi says both that the Americans "are the biggest cowards that God has created," and that "America...has no intention of leaving, no matter how many wounded nor how bloody it becomes."

And he adds, "we can pack up and leave and look for another land, just like what has happened in so many lands of jihad. Our enemy is growing stronger day after day, and its intelligence information increases."

If we had a government capable of advancing its case to the world at large, those phrases would be broadcast around the world, because they constitute an admission of defeat by a man in the forefront of the campaign against us in Iraq.

If that were all it said, it would be sensational for most Americans, although certainly not for NRO readers. I pointed out a couple of months ago that the terror masters in Damascus, Tehran, and Riyadh were undoubtedly gnashing their teeth, because their grand design for mass slaughter of Americans and bigtime insurrections all over Iraq, had failed. They had expected a bloodbath of epic proportions, and the same sort of "revolutionary" demonstrations that they had used so effectively against us in Lebanon in the 1980s and against the Israelis a decade later. But instead, they have discovered that the Iraqis don't like them (can we all finally put a nail in the coffin of that idiotic "they're all Shiites so they will all work together" myth?), and that the country is, indeed, headed toward democracy. Zarkawi even uses the word, as he gasps, "by God, this is suffocation!"

But there is more. He says the only chance for victory in Iraq is to provoke a Sunni/Shiite civil war, and the best way to do that is to unleash jihad against the Iraqi Shiites — referred to as "the perverse sects" — expecting that they will blame the Sunnis for it. The civil war would then "awaken the sleepy Sunnis..."

I have said for some time that the strategy of terror masters — above all, the mullahs in Tehran — was to foster civil strife in Iraq. They have been trying very hard to foment Kurdish/Turkamen, Sunni/Shiite and intertribal conflict for at least the past few months. But they greatly underestimated both the savvy of the Iraqis — who have seen the hundreds of Iranian Revolutionary Guards officers and their al Qaeda allies swarming all over the country, guiding the suicide bombers, organizing the radio and television broadcasts, and intimidating the locals whenever possible — and the slow but deliberate progress of the American armed forces. We aren't nearly as stupid as we look, and, as Zarkawi has discovered to his dismay, we don't run from a fight. At least not so long as this president is confidently in charge.

At the same time they underestimated us and the Iraqis, they overestimated their own capabilities. Iranian leaders have been told for months by their operatives in Iraq that large-scale destruction and major political action was just around the corner. But with every passing week, they realize they've been the victims of their own fantasies.

Although Zarkawi has often operated from Iran — as proven by court documents in Italy and Germany, and by information gathered by both our military and our intelligence folks in Europe and the Middle East — he is not Iranian. He's a Jordanian Palestinian, whose basic mission is the overthrow of the Hashemites in his native land. To judge by this letter, he is not particularly sophisticated about the requirements of the mullahcracy back in Tehran. They cannot "pack up and leave and look for another land," for, as President Bush rightly said in his Sunday session with Tim Russert, they are mortally threatened by the spread of democracy in the Middle East. They will have to play every card they have to drive us out, and, as Zarkawi's letter shows, they realize they are on a tight schedule: Once an Iraqi government is in place in June, "the sons of this land will be the authority...This is the democracy. We will have no pretexts."

So we can expect to see a desperate campaign against us and against the Shiites in the next several weeks.

Meanwhile, back in Iran, the natives are reading the various auguries, wondering what the primal forces of world history have in store for them. On the one hand, the parade of appeasers added a distinguished figure from the country that coined the word itself. Britain's very own Prince Charles sneaked off to Tehran to meet with the impotent President Khatami in yet another effort to make a deal that would save the tyrants from their doom. On the other hand, a handful of parliamentarians, mostly those rejected by the regime and thus denied high status and a guaranteed monthly wage, went to the universities to join in the boycott of the February 20 general elections. Their support is hardly necessary — a government poll in Tehran a week ago produced a truly amazing statistic: More than 90 percent do not intend to vote — but they deserve high marks for personal and political courage. Most Iranians expect that the regime will install a new Stalinism once the elections have been held, leading judicial figures have publicly scolded the parliamentarians to expect punishment, and the regime's thugs have launched a preemptive war on student leaders all over the country.

Nonetheless, demonstrations continue all over the country. Demonstrations in Kerman a couple of weeks ago were so large that the regime was forced to bring in helicopter gunships to mow down the protesters, and the usual thugs were unleashed on student demonstrators in Tehran and Shiraz in the last few days. Despite the calls for appeasement from the State Department and a handful of our elected representatives, the Iranian people can see what is going on in Iraq, and they must take a measure of comfort from it. And the regime was so upset by President Bush's passing reference to Middle Eastern tyrants who feel threatened by the liberation of Iraq (this weekend), that on Monday the official news service reported that Bush had threatened Iran with the same treatment he had delivered to Iraq. I can hear the Iranians sighing, "oh, if only it is true."

We do not need to fight a war to liberate Iran, but we must liberate Iran in order to win the terror war in Iraq. Zarkawi is part of a terror network that is based in Iran, and receives enormous support from the mullahs. If Iran were a free country, Iraq would be immeasurably more peaceful. It is time for Secretary Powell to call an end to the shameful efforts at appeasement, and throw his enormous personal prestige behind the just cause of the Iranian people. He disappointed them last summer, when he proclaimed that we did not wish to get engaged in the Iranian "family squabble." But it is not that; it is part of the life-and-death struggle in which we are now engaged. The longer we wait to support freedom in Iran, the more Americans, Italians, Poles, Japanese, Dutch, Romanians, Spaniards, and others, will be killed in Iraq.

Faster, please.

http://www.nationalreview.com/ledeen/ledeen200402100835.asp

[DoctorZIn]

This just in from a student inside of Iran...

"I would like our Freeper friends to know that the Rallies in Tehran, on the anniversary of the IRI victory in 1979 revolution, that they may watch on TV, or read on papers are not showing the popularity of the regime.

They import poor people from Suburb and order Military Servicemen to join the rallies.

I strongly ask the people in the US not to believe what they might see tomorrow and please keep supporting us in order to liberate Iran sooner.

Thank You! "

[DoctorZIn]

"Celebration" ornaments and posters destroyed

SMCCDI (Information Service)
Feb 10, 2004

Many "Celebration" ornaments and posters praising the 25th anniversary of the 1979 Islamic revolution have been destroyed by groups of opponents working during night time.

The popular move is in reaction to the official propaganda praising the legacy of what is qualified by the majority of Iranians as the "Holocaust".

The regime which has spent millions of dollars for these materials, shows which will take place on Wednesday and transfers of paid celebrators in order to fill the streets has a hard time to control the popular reaction despite the heavy presence of its forces.

Tracts are distributed calling for empty streets.

http://www.daneshjoo.org/generalnews/article/publish/article_4843.shtml

[Pan_Yans Wife]

As usual, there are so many different angles to the Iranian story. But, when Ledeen frames it in terms of the future of Iraq, the picture becomes clearer. (That's why he is so good.)

I posted the initial report from Reuters mentioning an assassination attempt on Sistani. My first thought was the ripples such an event would cause in the entire region, not just Iraq. Again, the war in Iraq is much bigger than the media wants us to believe.

The dominoes are set to fall.

[Pan_Yans Wife]

I cannot speak for all who follow your thread, but I will say that standing firm today, can only help strengthen the resolve of those in Iran. It can't hurt. And I think we all know about watching propaganda in the media.

Without your thread and Freerepublic, how many would even begin to understand the bigger story in Iran?

[piasa]

Looks like the regime took a page out of the Democrat playbook- I encountered paid Democrat protesters in election 2000 down in South Florida. I spoke with some of them. They paid one homeless lady I spoke with ten bucks just to chant and hold a sign. Others were hired up north by a transit union and bussed in. And of course, we're all familiar with Jessie Jackson's traveling snake oil show.