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From http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/18/op...tml?ref=global
My bolding.
How can anybody take this seriously? It is obvious that what the Theocracy in Iraq is doing is protecting their own power through lies and violence, not doing the will of God. The "doing the will of God" is just another layer of lies.
I am guessing that that is what has become so blindingly obvious in Iran, hence the demonstrations. What I don't understand is why the New York Times chooses to repeat their obvious lies as if they were truth.
I guess that since they invoked the name of God, we can call them straight out, because then we would implicitly also implicate all other people who say they do God's will. And that would go against the NYT policy of neutrality, the same policy that cause the NYT to not criticize the prosecution of Jews in Germany in WW2, as it could be seen as partisanship if a Jewish newspaper though Jews were treated badly.
Argh!
TEHRAN — At the immense opposition demonstration earlier this week, I asked a young woman her name. She said, “My name is Iran.”
A nation has stirred. Provoked, it has risen. “Silence equals protest,” says one banner. The vast crowds move in a hush of indignation, anger distilled to a wordless essence.
In greater numbers than ever before, Iranians had bought in to the sliver of democracy offered by an autocratic system whose ultimate loyalty is to the will of God rather than the will of the people. Almost 40 million voted. Now, their votes flouted, many have crossed over from reluctant acquiescence to the Islamic Republic into opposition. That’s a fundamental shift.
The Islamic Republic has lost legitimacy. It is fissured. It will not be the same again. It has always played on the ambiguity of its nature, a theocracy where people vote. For a whole new generation, there’s no longer room for ambiguity.
Popular fury confronts the state’s monopoly over force. Who will flinch? I think that depends above all on the leadership of Mir Hussein Moussavi, the reformist of impeccable revolutionary credentials. If he bends, as the legalistic former president Mohammad Khatami did in 1999 and 2003, it’s over.
Unlike the student-led protests of those years, a wide array of Iranians of all ages and classes are in the streets. Shopkeepers and students march side by side. Construction workers perched on scaffolding flash them the “V” for victory sign.
Protest is broader, and accompanied by more visible splits in the ruling elite than ever surfaced before. These divisions have thrust the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, into the fray from his preferred perch.
The balance of forces has changed, which is not to say the outcome will be different. But it could be.
The regime’s fundamental mistake was to insult the intelligence of Iranians. A proud people, they do not take kindly to being treated as puppet-like fools.
There’s been some debate about whether correspondents, caught in an affluent North Tehran bubble, might be underestimating President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s support.
I don’t doubt that his piety, patronage and populism secured him many millions of votes. He personifies a defiant nationalism, symbolized by Iran’s nuclear program. But a genuine victory with almost two-thirds of the vote would not require the imposition of near-martial law to secure it.
In fact, there’s not much to debate. Kayhan, the conservative pro-Ahmadinejad newspaper, had a headline on its Web site within an hour of the vote’s close celebrating the incumbent’s victory with 65 percent of the vote. The state news agency was not far behind. There was an absurd 98 percent correlation in voting patterns across diverse regions of the country.
Take the western province of Lorestan, a place of intense local loyalties. It’s the state of the reformist cleric Mehdi Karroubi, one of four candidates in the election. In his home town of Aligoodarz, Karroubi was attributed 14,512 votes to Ahmadinejad’s 39,640. Overall, Karroubi’s vote sunk to 300,000 — less than the spoiled ballots — from more than 5 million in 2005.
As rigging goes, this looks amateurish.
The Iranian regime is not amateurish. So the mess suggests scrambling to me, an eleventh-hour decision that the surge in Moussavi’s support — the “green wave” — was too massive to tolerate.
In retrospect, a statement four days before the vote from Yadollah Javani, the head of the Revolutionary Guard political office, saying that if Moussavi had a velvet revolution in mind, he would see it “quashed before it is born,” assumes great significance.
Certainly, Khamenei, who had supported Ahmadinejad but appeared ready to live with Moussavi, did not have a prepared script. He hailed a miraculous result, but then asked the Guardian Council to investigate complaints about irregularities. He hailed Ahmadinejad as president of all Iranians, but then saw the president dismiss all who hadn’t voted for him as football hooligans. As post-electoral conciliation goes, it was a bust.
The regime has gambled on radicalism. That proved a winning card when a radical White House made an easy enemy. But the world has changed with President Obama, just as Iran’s Twittering society has changed. I suspect Ahmadinejad has ridden the stallion of world transformation to exhaustion.
In a changing Middle East, Iran could find itself isolated under a president whose grandiose calls for a new global governance based on ethics and justice fly in the face of this electoral farce.
What now? The regime is playing for time. The Guardian Council is stuffed with Ahmadinejad loyalists. I can’t see its recount yielding any outcome that changes things.
The core issue is whether, given the dimension of protests, internal and international, Khamenei will come to view Ahmadinejad as a liability. In Moussavi he has a credible vehicle for a reform of the regime that serves to preserve it — an acceptable compromise to most Iranians.
Shiism is a malleable branch of Islam. The supreme leader can find the means to reverse course. He is an arbiter beholden to the safeguarding of the Islamic Republic. Arbitration now requires bringing God and the people into a different, more sustainable balance.
A nation has stirred. Provoked, it has risen. “Silence equals protest,” says one banner. The vast crowds move in a hush of indignation, anger distilled to a wordless essence.
In greater numbers than ever before, Iranians had bought in to the sliver of democracy offered by an autocratic system whose ultimate loyalty is to the will of God rather than the will of the people. Almost 40 million voted. Now, their votes flouted, many have crossed over from reluctant acquiescence to the Islamic Republic into opposition. That’s a fundamental shift.
The Islamic Republic has lost legitimacy. It is fissured. It will not be the same again. It has always played on the ambiguity of its nature, a theocracy where people vote. For a whole new generation, there’s no longer room for ambiguity.
Popular fury confronts the state’s monopoly over force. Who will flinch? I think that depends above all on the leadership of Mir Hussein Moussavi, the reformist of impeccable revolutionary credentials. If he bends, as the legalistic former president Mohammad Khatami did in 1999 and 2003, it’s over.
Unlike the student-led protests of those years, a wide array of Iranians of all ages and classes are in the streets. Shopkeepers and students march side by side. Construction workers perched on scaffolding flash them the “V” for victory sign.
Protest is broader, and accompanied by more visible splits in the ruling elite than ever surfaced before. These divisions have thrust the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, into the fray from his preferred perch.
The balance of forces has changed, which is not to say the outcome will be different. But it could be.
The regime’s fundamental mistake was to insult the intelligence of Iranians. A proud people, they do not take kindly to being treated as puppet-like fools.
There’s been some debate about whether correspondents, caught in an affluent North Tehran bubble, might be underestimating President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s support.
I don’t doubt that his piety, patronage and populism secured him many millions of votes. He personifies a defiant nationalism, symbolized by Iran’s nuclear program. But a genuine victory with almost two-thirds of the vote would not require the imposition of near-martial law to secure it.
In fact, there’s not much to debate. Kayhan, the conservative pro-Ahmadinejad newspaper, had a headline on its Web site within an hour of the vote’s close celebrating the incumbent’s victory with 65 percent of the vote. The state news agency was not far behind. There was an absurd 98 percent correlation in voting patterns across diverse regions of the country.
Take the western province of Lorestan, a place of intense local loyalties. It’s the state of the reformist cleric Mehdi Karroubi, one of four candidates in the election. In his home town of Aligoodarz, Karroubi was attributed 14,512 votes to Ahmadinejad’s 39,640. Overall, Karroubi’s vote sunk to 300,000 — less than the spoiled ballots — from more than 5 million in 2005.
As rigging goes, this looks amateurish.
The Iranian regime is not amateurish. So the mess suggests scrambling to me, an eleventh-hour decision that the surge in Moussavi’s support — the “green wave” — was too massive to tolerate.
In retrospect, a statement four days before the vote from Yadollah Javani, the head of the Revolutionary Guard political office, saying that if Moussavi had a velvet revolution in mind, he would see it “quashed before it is born,” assumes great significance.
Certainly, Khamenei, who had supported Ahmadinejad but appeared ready to live with Moussavi, did not have a prepared script. He hailed a miraculous result, but then asked the Guardian Council to investigate complaints about irregularities. He hailed Ahmadinejad as president of all Iranians, but then saw the president dismiss all who hadn’t voted for him as football hooligans. As post-electoral conciliation goes, it was a bust.
The regime has gambled on radicalism. That proved a winning card when a radical White House made an easy enemy. But the world has changed with President Obama, just as Iran’s Twittering society has changed. I suspect Ahmadinejad has ridden the stallion of world transformation to exhaustion.
In a changing Middle East, Iran could find itself isolated under a president whose grandiose calls for a new global governance based on ethics and justice fly in the face of this electoral farce.
What now? The regime is playing for time. The Guardian Council is stuffed with Ahmadinejad loyalists. I can’t see its recount yielding any outcome that changes things.
The core issue is whether, given the dimension of protests, internal and international, Khamenei will come to view Ahmadinejad as a liability. In Moussavi he has a credible vehicle for a reform of the regime that serves to preserve it — an acceptable compromise to most Iranians.
Shiism is a malleable branch of Islam. The supreme leader can find the means to reverse course. He is an arbiter beholden to the safeguarding of the Islamic Republic. Arbitration now requires bringing God and the people into a different, more sustainable balance.
How can anybody take this seriously? It is obvious that what the Theocracy in Iraq is doing is protecting their own power through lies and violence, not doing the will of God. The "doing the will of God" is just another layer of lies.
I am guessing that that is what has become so blindingly obvious in Iran, hence the demonstrations. What I don't understand is why the New York Times chooses to repeat their obvious lies as if they were truth.
I guess that since they invoked the name of God, we can call them straight out, because then we would implicitly also implicate all other people who say they do God's will. And that would go against the NYT policy of neutrality, the same policy that cause the NYT to not criticize the prosecution of Jews in Germany in WW2, as it could be seen as partisanship if a Jewish newspaper though Jews were treated badly.
Argh!
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