10:20 pm: Hamid Maddah, activist & member of the Mousavi campaign, who was arrested & tortured in Mashhad, has died of injuries! Families of recent detainees gather in front of Evin prison & security forces are trying to disperse! Despite official reports, initial counts by medical personnel show more than 92 people dead in & around Tehran alone. 6 young men found dead, shot in the neck in Shahriar (outside Tehran). (hat tip Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi )
4:55 pm: Update Iran: Executions Accelerate as General Srike Looms; Protesters Plead to West!
2:36 pm: Robert Tracinski of TIA Daily, The Intellectual Activist (PAID only), has written a seminal piece on the revolution.
Backing the mullahcracy exposes the inhumanity and cruelty of the international community, and worse, an American president. It is a disaster, but it certainly shines a light on the brutality of the Islamic regime and the world's complicity. If the Muslim regime will do this to their own people, surely they will enjoy taking out free nations once they are up to nuclear speed. And yet the world is turning a blind eye to their weapons program and the brutality committed against those marching for one man, one vote. We have entered a dark age.
The Fundamentalist Apostates Robert Tracinski, TIA Daily
The big news over the weekend is that the revolution is still on.
No, I am not talking about the July 4 tea parties, which I will cover tomorrow. (In the meantime, if you attended one of the tea party events, please send me your observations, if you have not done so already.)
I am talking about the revolution in Iran. When last we checked, the regime had crushed the street protests by force, and a hard-line cleric was advocating death sentences for protest leaders.
Since then, the regime has continued its crackdown. It has arrested and threatened to put on trial Iranian employees of the British embassy, and it is broadcasting forced confessions from protesters and reformist leaders, coerced through methods such as these:
In 2001, Ali Afshari was arrested for his work as a student leader. He said he was held in solitary confinement for 335 days and resisted confessing for the first two months. But after two mock executions and a five-day stretch where his interrogators would not let him sleep, he said he eventually caved in.
"They tortured me, some beatings, sleep deprivation, insults, psychological torture, standing me for several hours in front of a wall, keeping me in solitary confinement for one year," Mr. Afshari said in an interview from his home in Washington. "They eventually broke my resistance."
So a government that styles itself as a Shiite Islamic theocracy is now opposed by a growing number of actual Shiite religious leaders—and it has banned wearing the color that symbolizes Islam and attacks people for shouting that "God is great."
The very people who claim to be religious "fundamentalists" are now turning into apostates. I don't know how you can maintain a theocracy for very long at all when it has so thoroughly lost its religious legitimacy.
Unfortunately, our own leaders in the United States are not doing all that they could to capitalize on this unprecedented opportunity to deal a lethal blow to radical Islam. The only action the Obama administration is taking is to sell out Honduras to socialist dictatorship. As for Iran, both President Obama and Vice-President Biden declare that they are still seeking an "engagement" with the blood-soaked military junta in Tehran.
In an interview with The New York Times, a day before his scheduled departure for Moscow on Sunday, Mr. Obama said he had "grave concern" about the arrests and intimidation of Iran's opposition leaders, but insisted, as he has throughout the Iranian crisis, that the repression would not close the door on negotiations with the Iranian government.
But there is one sliver of hope for external action.
Mr. Biden echoed the same themes in an interview conducted in Iraq and broadcast Sunday on the ABC News program "This Week." But in a rare foray into one of the most sensitive issues in the Middle East, the vice president argued that the United States "cannot dictate" Israel's decisions about whether to strike the plants at the heart of Iran's nuclear program. He said only Israelis could determine "that they're existentially threatened" by the prospect that Iran would gain nuclear weapons capability.
The Obama administration has refused to be swayed from its policy of appeasement by new evidence of the evil of the enemy—except to one small degree: they may no longer block an Israeli air attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.
The Times of London reports that the Saudis could also cooperate in such a strike.
The head of Mossad, Israel's overseas intelligence service, has assured Benjamin Netanyahu, its prime minister, that Saudi Arabia would turn a blind eye to Israeli jets flying over the kingdom during any future raid on Iran's nuclear sites….
"The Saudis have tacitly agreed to the Israeli air force flying through their airspace on a mission which is supposed to be in the common interests of both Israel and Saudi Arabia," a diplomatic source said last week.
The Iranian regime's days are numbered. It faces two inexorable threats: growing resistance to its rule at home, and the looming prospect of a humiliating military defeat to be delivered by its most hated enemy. We'll see which will bring down the regime first.—RWT
Without Western support of those marching for one man, one vote - this was unavoidable:
Calling the move "a new phase of the revolution," leaders insist there is no room for compromise on Ahmadinejad's reelection
Maj. Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari, commander of the elite military branch, said the Guard's takeover of the country had led to "a revival of the revolution and clarification of the value positions of the establishment at home and abroad."
"Because the Revolutionary Guard was assigned the task of controlling the situation, [it] took the initiative to quell a spiraling unrest. This event pushed us into a new phase of the revolution and political struggles and we have to understand all its dimensions."
Meanwhile, their commander in chief, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, warned Western leaders against exploiting the country's political turmoil for their own ends.
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pamela:
it has taken nearly a month for the revolutionary guard to "assume" the task on might have thought "belonged" to it from the beginning.
this would indicate to me that it took considerable time for the guard to be shed its own dissident factions, sufficient for the theocrats to deem it worthy of trust, when put into the streets.
i believe the demonstrations in iran nearly toppled the regime, ... , and, had they been armed, just a little bit, they would have done so.
on wonders.-- what concessions, politically speaking, the mullahs were forced into to bring the guard to heel, and what does this portend for the future of iran, and of the dissidents. for the guard to "have taken over," in the words of its command structure, signifies to me that there very well may have been a change in power between the dog and the tail, and it becomes rather an open question, as to who wags whom. (or, what wags what, i guess.)
john jay
milton freewater, oregon usa
Posted by: jj | Monday, July 06, 2009 at 02:16 PM