Free Republic

While Britons celebrated the royal wedding last Friday, one of Iran’s greatest intellectuals willingly fell to his death from the sixth-floor balcony of his Tehran apartment. Siamak Pourzand, aged 80, had held out long enough against the Islamic Republic..... Pourzand was an already prominent cultural commentator and foreign correspondent long before Ayatollah Khomeini boarded a plane from Paris, full of big ideas, in 1979.... Secular and cosmopolitan to the core, Pourzand had no time for the guardianship of the sadists and made a point of saying so, especially in the late 1990s when he began writing for various opposition newspapers...

One year ago Sunday, a single, violent death captivated the world. 27-year-old Neda Agha Soltan was shot during an anti-government protest in Tehran on June 20, 2009 – her death caught on camera and broadcast around the world on YouTube. Neda quickly become a symbol of the protest movement in Iran. But one year later, the movement is suffering under the weight of a brutal crackdown. We recently returned from a rare visit inside Iran -- the first by American television reporters since the protests. Though the government banned us from any contact with opposition leaders, we met them in...

The MPG party, active in promoting international sanctions against the current anti-Iranian clerical dictatorship in Iran, strongly believes that weakening the financial capabilities of the IRI is a key factor in leveling the field in favor of the democratic movement of the Iranian people. On the other hand, we need to remind the oppressed people of Iran that without a capable, strong and unified struggle for a secular and democratic alternative to the existing regime, in time, the IRI will overcome its difficulties and recover from its weakening and isolated position once again. Sanctions alone will not solve our problems....