IRANIAN REVOLUTION DAY 23: Neda Soltani, The Symbol of Iranian Resistance, was a Christian

Photo hat tip Susan

9:27 pm: Tehran 04:00 am (July 6): 3 people executed in Mashhad Prison

3;31 pm: Who will stand with Iranians? Afshin Molavi at Ray Man Kojast

1:30 pm: 'The revolution in Iran has just begun'

In the media's ongoing campaign to institute the agenda of the Organization of the Islamic Conference and advance Islam, it has been previously withheld from the public that Neda Soltani was a Christian.

In the oft-reproduced picture run across world media, her cross is cropped out. What deceit.

That Neda was a Christian is ample proof that everyone in Iran who took to the streets was marching for different reasons but certainly under the umbrella of  liberty and one man one vote. How vile to imply that millions marched for the inside politicking of Islamic cleric rule. Her religion flies in the face of every cold blooded pundit who has attempted to dismiss this historic movement as simply more sharia in shades of green. Photo hat tip Robert via PI)

The video

From PI (Translated from German with google German translator)

Neda, which became a symbol of the Iranian uprising, it was - as in today's print edition of the WORLD on page 5 wiki - a Christian (to enlarge click on image).

A CNN video to today's carnage, you can see here:

A young woman tells of horror with tears, which she herself has witnessed. The security forces fired indiscriminately on demonstrators as if they were animals. It describes how young men were slaughtered with axes are:

"This is a massacre, a genocide is Hitler ... help us!"

Snapshots: Women of the revolution

THE WOMEN OF THE IRANIAN REVOLUTION

All Iranian revolution liveblogging archives here.

Comments

[Exposing Islam]

May she rest in peace, but Mousavi himself has stated that he is not against the Islamic part of Republic. Mosques are still packed there and the threat to Israel remains.

[Rosemary]

This makes me righteously angry. Everything Muslim is front page, everything Christian is the last 5 minutes of the news when everyone is gone. Say something true but bad about Muslim, they take to the street. Well, it may be time for us to start taking it to the street. I've had it. They are not going to continue slaughtering Christian (along with innocent people) without having to pay dearly for it. Grrrrrrrr.

[ThunderBearMan]

The time has come, the Crusaders of Righteousness and Fighters of Freedom will now stand, as one, with the Angels sent by the True Light, the creator of all that is righteous and good. In the strength and power of the Great Spirit, the One with no beginning and no ending, the First Cause, will destroy these demon-monsters of darkness, these horns and crowns of the lord of Evil and Wickedness.

[defender]

There have been subtle indications of many in the Middle-East secretly converting to Christianity. This new information about Neda opens up an entire new dimension of analysis (which is difficult) of events in Iran.

[gunjam]

Ms Geller: Thank you for having the moral courage and honesty -- and the kindness -- to publish this. Wow! Amazing.

[Medina]

Pamela, thanks for providing coverage and information that the MSM will not.

OT-do you know why Robert Spencer's site has been down > 24 hr?

Another OT-do you have any inside info on the murders of retired NFL player Steve McNair and his 20 yr. old Muslima girlfriend? SOunds like a possible honor killing...and if it is, we'll never hear about it.

[Natalie]

Sorry Pamela, but I think you're dead wrong on this. Just because Neda was a Christian does not mean that all of those protesters wanted freedom and democracy. Where were they when the candidates were specifically hand-picked? I mean, these protesters were shouting Allahu Akbar. That says it all for me.

[Medina]

Pamela, you're onto something. I had many graduate school friends who were secular Iranians dreading the return to their home country because the Shah was out and the theocrats were in control.

35 years ago in Iran, things were quite moderate--no mandatory dress codes for women, many Westerners in-country and toleration of various religions.

I am certain that some of the protestors shouted Allahu Akbar. And many were expecting a lesser evil than Ahmanutjob.Iranians are not all bad people.

Just remember, all, what the US looks like to the world: the majority elected an unvetted Marxist who is taking the world's economy down the drain. No, we all didn't vote for Obama, but the world looks at us and sees HIM.

[Pamela Geller]

Natalie, they marched for different reasons, no doubt. But three million did not take to the streets for Islam.
It takes a lot to take a bullet, the fraudulent election was the tipping point.

[costin]

"In the oft-reproduced picture run across world media, her cross is cropped out. What deceit."
Pamela, the picture with the cross around Neda's neck is on both BBC and NYT:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/news/2009/06/090626_iran_doctor_wt_sl.shtml
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/world/middleeast/23neda.html

[Toronto]

There's nothing anyone can do because Iran has always ruled with an iron fist. How many fires can the US put out .... none.

[Cate]

I've seen that photo and the cross, and have wondered often about it. Maybe that's the reason she was targeted by the Basiji.

[Ali]

As the only Iranian here let me provide some input.

The people in the street are there for different reasons but they are all there because they are opposed to dictatorship and extremism and they think their vote has been stolen from them. They do chant ALLAH AKBAR but that doesn't mean they are extremist or even Muslim. Again many of my friends go to the rooftops and chant allah akbar while they are not at all Muslim but only because it's part of the movement

Some historic facts here: chanting allah akbar on rooftops was a tactic used during 1979 revolution as a way to protest to the dictator of that time -- shah -- It resonates with the memory of people and it appeals to the major Muslim population of Iran. That's why it is adopted as a moto for this movement. So chanting this should not 'say it all' about these people for you. It doesn't mean they are similar to the your simplistic stereotype of a Muslim.

Mousavi is not opposed to the Islamic part of the regime as he lives inside Iran and he needs to remain free to lead this movement. If he makes a statement like that they will put him in prison or even kill him. Again, although I am not a Muslim, Islam is not a bad thing per se. It's just like every other religion. Think of it as Christianity around inquisition years.

The fact that Neda wore a cross (or may have been Christian) doesn't have anything to do with her being shot. She was shot near my former apartment in Tehran. On the day she was killed about 20-30 people were also shot, some in their chests and some in their heads. It was all part of a plan to scare people with a blood bath and send them home.

All religions can be good and bad. Christian can provide food and shelter for the poor and shoot abortion doctors in their church. Islam is no better. Try to understand that what really matters is our common humanity, not our religion.

[Ali]

Oh, by the way, as you guys care about this stuff: Ahmadinejad is part Jewish. For real! Read it on the first paragraph of his wikipedia page:

Ahmadinejad, born Mahmoud Saborjhian[31] is the son of a blacksmith, born near Garmsar in the village of Aradan[32] on 28 October 1956.[citation needed] In the 1950s, when he was still a baby, his family moved from Aradan to Narmak district in southern Tehran in search of more economic prosperity;[31] it was during this time period that the Saborjhian family, whose name derives from the once-common occupation of thread painter, changed its name to Ahmadinejad.[33] According to his relatives, it was for "a mixture of religious and economic reasons."[34] The new name means 'of the race of Muhammad' or 'of virtuous race' (ahmad meaning "virtuous" in Arabic and commonly used as a byname of Muhammad, and nejad being Farsi for "race" or "lineage"). During the presidential campaign in 2009, political opponents have speculated that the name was changed in order to cover Jewish roots.[35][36]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmadinejad

[JP]

There you go, Pam, Christianity is just as bad as Islam. Brilliant.

[Spirit Of 1683]

Ali, when you say you're not a Muslim, I know you're lying. The rest of the bullcrap you have written here tells me that. We're not stupid. We've read all that crap before. You bring up the Inquisition, but that killed around 3,000 people in 350 years. Islam has murdered at least 270 million infidels in 1,400 years - and probably far more than that figure. And that figure doesn't include the number of Muslims murdered by their fellow Muslims. Iran shows us what a theocratic Islamic dictatorship is like. Every ayatollah and cleric has blood on their hands by the tankerload. They call for the murder of infidels and anyone who dares oppose them. They hire foreign mercenaries from the ranks of Hamas, Hizbollah and the other Islamic terrorist outfits they sponsor to murder their fellow Iranians in order to maintain their grip on power, steal your country's wealth for themselves, and bleed your country dry. I would rather live in Hell than live in Iran. You Iranians brought this upon your own heads back in 1979. You should have stuck with the Shah or Dr Bakhtiar and kept the mass-murdering Khomeini out of your country. You Iranians have nobody to blame but yourselves for the tyranny you live under, and if you and your fellow Iranians want to remove the tyranny you've lived under for more than 30 years, you'd better be prepared to kill hundreds of Basijis and Republican Guards, mostly by stealth rather than the futility of throwing rocks at them, and take their weapons and ammunition pouches, knowing that many of you will die in the act yourself, just to get the beginnings of an armed movement strong enough to crush and topple your theocratic oppressors. That is how the Maquis and other partisan outfits started out in Nazi-occupied Europe during the 1940s, and that is the massive price of breaking the shackles you and your fellow Iranians live under. The Iranian Islamonazi theocratic dictatorship is Islam in action. Few people summed up Islam and the vice-like grip it has on its followers better than the US Consul to Tunis William Eaton in 1799 with words that are just as valid today:

"Considered as a nation, they are deplorably wretched, because they have no property in the soil to inspire an ambition to cultivate it. They are abject slaves to the despotism of their government, and they are humiliated by tyranny, the worst of all tyrannies, the despotism of priestcraft. They live in more solemn fear of the frowns of a bigot who has been dead and rotten above a thousand years, than of the living despot whose frown would cost them their lives… The ignorance, superstitious tradition and civil and religious tyranny, which depress the human mind here, exclude improvement of every kind."

What we have seen over the years and especially over these last four weeks is that the Iranian Muslim population DOES live in more solemn fear of the frowns of a bigot (Mohammed) who has been dead and rotten for almost 1,380 years, than of the living despots like Ahmadinejad and Khamenei, whose frowns have cost hundreds of Iranians their lives over these past few weeks alone, not to mention the utterly evil Ayatollah Khomeini whose frown cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iranians, and the regime itself which has murdered infidels right around the world through its sponsoring of terrorism - the sort of terrorism that would have seen a merciless war being waged against it several times over in the past. That fear of a long-dead monster explains why Iranians find it so hard to make up their minds as to whether they want to make a clean break with the religious ideology which crushes them every day of their miserable and pointless existences. They're scared witless of that thirteen-centuries-dead evil bigot. Islam is not like any other religion. No other religion is as barbaric, primitive, misogynistic, stifling, uncreative, bigoted, repressive, bloodthirsty and racist as Islam in the 21st century, nor were they in the 20th, 19th, 18th, 17th or even the 15th centuries as what Islam is today. We have beheadings and limb amputations carried out by Muslims in the here and now of the 21st century for trivial things like adultery or merely dropping a koran on the floor. No other religions followers celebrates the murder of followers of other religions like Muslims. We remember Bali, Beslan, 911, etc, and the other 13,500-plus atrocities carried out in the name of Islam since September 2001. We know we would have been enslaved and murdered on the whims of wicked mullahs and ayatollahs in pre-medieval crapholes had we not driven back the invading Islamic hordes from the West between the 8th and 17th centuries.

[Spirit Of 1683]

Errata from above:

you'd better be prepared to kill hundreds of Basijis and Republican Guards should have read you'd better be prepared to kill hundreds of Basijis and Revolutionary Guards

[Bob Belvedere]

Quoted from and linked to this posting at:
http://www.thecampofthesaints.com/2009.07.05_arch.html#1246921903288

Also, you may be interested in this:
http://www.thecampofthesaints.com/2009.06.28_arch.html#1246751314575