Free Republic

When anti-regime protests spread like wildfire throughout Iran in mid-October of 2022, the regime’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was quick to lay the blame on the usual foreign suspects. “I say explicitly that these riots and this insecurity were a design by the U.S. and the occupying, fake Zionist regime and those who are paid by them,” he told a class of cadets at a police college in Tehran. He suggested that the ultimate goal of the U.S. and Israel was regime change in Iran. This elicited a response on Twitter from Iranian rapper Hichkas, who defended foreign support for...

Egypt: Activists Detained for Advocating for Shi`a Minority Human Rights Watch (press release) - Oct 6, 2007 The two men were arrested after also criticizing the prevalence of torture in Egyptian prisons. The charges equate defending Shi`ism with an attack on Islam ...http://hrw.org/english/docs/2007/10/06/egypt17042.htm

THE IRANIAN HERESY By AMIR TAHERI NY Post June 1, 2004 -- RECENT actions by Tehran have led to questions about whether Iran was trying to play the Shiite card in Iraq's post-Saddam power game. Tehran's state-controlled media have launched a campaign to incite Shiites in Bahrain against the kingdom's reform process. And Iran has ordered its clients, notably the Iraqi branch of Hezbollah, to step up disruptive activities to make the transition from occupation to Iraqi sovereignty as difficult as possible. All this has led to suspicions against Shiites in several Arab countries. That is unfortunate. The present Iranian...

An American rocket killed a 13-year-old boy. A second injured three people; a third struck an empty Oil Ministry depot. These were not precision strikes in Iraq. They were rockets gone astray, landing in Iran. Yet Iran's Islamic Republic has chosen to ignore the attacks. Despite its troubled history with the United States, it has shown no inclination to provoke it militarily. During the war next door, in fact, the official policy has been one of "active neutrality," which allowed the United States to prosecute the war even as Iran's officials denounced it. But last week, as the war appeared...