Iranian Alert -- December 29, 2003 -- IRAN LIVE THREAD

The US media almost entirely ignores news regarding the Islamic Republic of Iran. As Tony Snow of the Fox News Network has put it, “this is probably the most under-reported news story of the year.” But most American’s are unaware that the Islamic Republic of Iran is NOT supported by the masses of Iranians today. Modern Iranians are among the most pro-American in the Middle East.

There is a popular revolt against the Iranian regime brewing in Iran today. Starting June 10th of this year, Iranians have begun taking to the streets to express their desire for a regime change. Most want to replace the regime with a secular democracy. Many even want the US to over throw their government.

The regime is working hard to keep the news about the protest movement in Iran from being reported. Unfortunately, the regime has successfully prohibited western news reporters from covering the demonstrations. The voices of discontent within Iran are sometime murdered, more often imprisoned. Still the people continue to take to the streets to demonstrate against the regime.

In support of this revolt, Iranians in America have been broadcasting news stories by satellite into Iran. This 21st century news link has greatly encouraged these protests. The regime has been attempting to jam the signals, and locate the satellite dishes. Still the people violate the law and listen to these broadcasts. Iranians also use the Internet and the regime attempts to block their access to news against the regime. In spite of this, many Iranians inside of Iran read these posts daily to keep informed of the events in their own country.

This daily thread contains nearly all of the English news reports on Iran. It is thorough. If you follow this thread you will witness, I believe, the transformation of a nation. This daily thread provides a central place where those interested in the events in Iran can find the best news and commentary. The news stories and commentary will from time to time include material from the regime itself. But if you read the post you will discover for yourself, the real story of what is occurring in Iran and its effects on the war on terror.

I am not of Iranian heritage. I am an American committed to supporting the efforts of those in Iran seeking to replace their government with a secular democracy. I am in contact with leaders of the Iranian community here in the United States and in Iran itself.

If you read the daily posts you will gain a better understanding of the US war on terrorism, the Middle East and why we need to support a change of regime in Iran. Feel free to ask your questions and post news stories you discover in the weeks to come.

If all goes well Iran will be free soon and I am convinced become a major ally in the war on terrorism. The regime will fall. Iran will be free. It is just a matter of time.

IRANIAN LEADER URGED AUTHORITIES TO SET UP COORDINATION CENTRE

BAM-TEHRAN 29 Dec. (IPS)

Iran’s leader on Monday urged the authorities to set up a centralised command centre to supervise all the relief, rescue and activities related to the earthquake that devastated the city and the region of Bam, in southeastern Iran early Friday.

Ayatollah Khameneh'i was indirectly responding to Iranian and foreign relief missions growing complaints about the lack of coordination, four days after the earth shake.

Preceding the President Mohammad Khatami by half a day, Ayatollah Khameneh'i said the creation of such a centre was "a necessity" to avoid waste of time and energy from both Iranian and foreign rescue and relief teams.

Speaking to the grieved people of the ancient city that, according to latest official estimates, has lost at least 25.000 of its inhabitants, Mr. Khameneh’i said the tragedy was a "divine test" which should not weaken our spirit and promised to rebuild the city on more solid foundations.

"We should strengthen our spirit to leave behind the bitter tragedy. Many nations which had been victims to great tragedies managed to build on the destruction and came out making progress and advance."

"We should take advantage of the bitter tragedy to strengthen national resolve to build a better future", the leader said before chairing a meeting of the official in charge of helping the needy people.

However, relief experts from some 26 countries, including the United States and Iranians doctors said the risk of epidemic spreading must be taken very seriously, as the city still lack all essential services like running water, electricity and sanitary.

Though a six months old baby have been found on Monday under tonnes of ruins, but most experts say one should not expect more "miracles", in an old city 1000 metres above sea level, where temperature is freezing, mostly by nigh time.

"There is enough of everything, but one had the impression that everything is missing, particularly heavy machinery like bulldozers and tents", one journalist on the sport reported, adding that popular solidarity for the grieved people of Bam was "overwhelming".

"It seems that the thieves are better organised that the authorities", another journalist said, referring to reports that hundreds of tents and blankets have been taken away by robbers and sent to other cities to be sold on the open market.

"I just arrested a thief who had stolen tens of blankets and tents from one truck belonging to a foreign relief mission while nearby people were warming themselves with bonfire in the open", a policeman said.

To stop the robbers, the judiciary announced it was setting up a court in the area to bring swift justice to armed bandits, who have been seen prowling the streets, and other criminals.

According to the Interior Ministry and local officials, 25.000 corpses have been buried, many in common graves, a procedure forbidden by Islam, the nation’s dominating religion.

"The scale of the catastrophe is so big that whatever has been done is not yet sufficient", he told reporters. "I hope more and more aid will arrive in coming hours", Mr. Khatami added upon his arrival at Bam airport.

I believe the (death) toll will reach 30,000", said a government official in Kerman.

ENDS IRAN EARTHQUAKE 291203

http://www.iran-press-service.com/articles_2003/Dec-2003/iran_earthquake_291203.htm

Dead Mother's Embrace Saves Iranian Baby's Life

By Parisa Hafezi
Reuters
Monday, December 29, 2003; 1:55 PM

BAM, Iran, Dec 29 - A baby girl cradled in her dead mother's arms was rescued from the rubble of a collapsed building in Bam, officials said on Monday -- a rare moment of joy amid the devastation of Iran's earthquake.

Red Crescent aid officials told Reuters the mother's protective embrace had shielded six-month-old Nassim from falling debris and saved her life.

The rest of her family, which officials said included sisters and brothers, were found dead.

Details of Nassim's recovery are still sketchy.

One Red Crescent Society official said the girl was discovered on Monday a full 72 hours after the quake, but rescue officials and state television later said she had been found after 37 hours.

"She is alive because of her mother's embrace," Hessamoddin Farrokhyar, Red Crescent public relations deputy director in Tehran, told Reuters. "The baby girl is in good condition considering the circumstances."

He said the girl was found in the southern part of Bam. It was not clear how she survived without food or water. Temperatures at night have been bitterly cold.

Iranian state television also reported Nassim's rescue, a sliver of hope on an otherwise bleak day when the death toll climbed towards 30,000.

"The baby girl was found after 37 hours by rescue teams," state television reported. "Unfortunately her mother was dead and she is the only one left alive in her whole family in that house."

The world's most lethal quake in at least 10 years laid waste most of Bam's mud brick buildings in seconds.

Officials have warned the death toll, which is now officially 25,000, could reach 30,000.

The quake which measured 6.3 on the Richter scale struck before dawn as people slept.

On Saturday night, rescuers found a young boy alive under the rubble, but he suffocated as people rushed forward to dig him free.

"We found a seven-year-old boy alive," said Austrian rescue worker Sabine Seichtinger. "The crowd rushed to the scene. But the boy choked and then died."

The search for children -- and the recovery of their broken lifeless bodies -- has provoked particular grief in Iran, with the media capturing heart-breaking images such as one of a man carrying the corpses of his two young sons over his shoulders and burying them together in a small grave.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38540-2003Dec29.html

The following article is an important read inorder to understand the middle-eastern mind. -- DoctorZin

The Conspiratorial Mind of the Arab World

By Robert Spencer
FrontPageMagazine.com | December 29, 2003

Have you heard? Saddam Hussein is in Tel Aviv. He has been an agent for the U.S. and Israel since 1980, and followed instructions given him by George W. Bush himself in a phone conversation last winter about how to behave when American troops entered Iraq. The capture of Saddam was an elaborate charade designed to bolster the flagging morale of American troops in Iraq. The bearded, broken man who was captured wasn’t Saddam; any keen observer would know that Saddam had a mole or wart on his cheek, but that the crude double in the hands of the Americans has no such mark. What’s more, in the footage of Saddam’s hideaway, the foliage is from late summer! Clearly the Americans are trying to fool us with months-old archival footage that has nothing to do with Saddam at all!

Saddam’s sons Uday and Qusay, meanwhile, are in Monte Carlo, continuing to live the high life. American troops spirited them out of the country and staged their deaths in order to demoralize the Iraqi resistance.

This kind of talk, fantastic and unbelievable as it is, is rampant in the Muslim world today. The idea that the Americans faked the capture of Saddam, and that the genuine article is still at large somewhere, is just the latest installment in a string of paranoid fantasies that have captured the imagination of untold numbers of Muslims worldwide. Most notorious, of course, is the idea that Mossad or the CIA, or both, actually flew airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. If Muslims were involved at all, goes the story, it was only to take the rap and justify the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan (as well as, coming soon to a theater of war near you, Syria and Iran).

While courageous souls such as the American Ambassador to Egypt, David Welch, have confronted these lurid fictions head-on in meetings with Muslim media figures, the stories persist — in no small part because some of these have been spread at the highest levels. Not long after 9/11, according to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), Yasir Arafat declaimed to an appreciative audience in Ramallah: "Oh brothers, there is a conspiracy to Judaize Jerusalem." MEMRI also reports that Uday, before he took up his place at those great Monte Carlo gaming tables in the sky, wrote in an Iraqi paper in 2002 that Iran was "part of the new conspiracy against Iraq and that the Iranians were ready to cross the border at any moment to materialize their ambitions."

And of course, the mother of all conspiracy theories, that noxious incitement to genocide known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, still circulates widely in the Muslim world. Nor would an inquiring mind have to go to a seedy bookstore in a shabby part of town to pick up a smudgy copy of this implausible account, cooked up by the Czar’s secret police in the 19th century, of the Zionists’ plot to rule the world. An up-to-date conspiracy theorist would need only a television: during this past Ramadan, Hizballah’s worldwide satellite TV network broadcast a thirty-part dramatization of "the criminal history of Zionism" that was quite similar to the Protocols — the genuine article was already dramatized on Egyptian television the previous year. More literary types could repair to the new Library of Alexandria, the heir to the legendary collections that shone in antiquity as beacons of civilization. There, until an international outcry forced its removal, the first Arabic translation of the Protocols was prominently displayed next to a Torah in a manuscript exhibit. According to MEMRI, a library official, Dr. Yousef Ziedan, explained that the Protocols "is more important to the Zionist Jews of the world than the Torah, because they conduct Zionist life according to it... It is only natural to place the book in the framework of an exhibit of Torah [scrolls]."

Amid all this there are glimmers of self-awareness, particularly in post-Saddam Iraq. "Every time Arab peoples are afflicted with disaster, defeats, or tragedies, it is always blamed on a Zionist, colonialist, or American imperialist conspiracy." This strikingly honest assessment comes from Iraq’s Al-Ittihad daily. Unfortunately, however, it’s unlikely that conspiracy paranoia will be extinguished in the Islamic world anytime soon. After all, it has deep roots.

A fundamental element of Islamic culture is an implacable belief in its own superiority. This idea is rooted in the Qur’an and Islam: the revelation to Muhammad, according to orthodox Muslim belief, is the final and perfect revelation from the one true God. It corrects and abrogates all previous revelations, including the Torah and Gospel that form the foundation of the culture of the non-Muslim West. The Jews and Christians who remain in the world after the time of Muhammad are renegades who have rejected this final revelation out of corruption and malice. At certain points in the Middle Ages, this Muslim self-understanding meshed quite well with the realities of the world: a unified Muslim empire encroached inexorably upon a Christendom riven by squabbles and overmatched in both military might and technology.

But when all that began to change, and when the squabbling mini-states of Western Europe began to chip away at the former domains of the Mehmet the Conqueror and Suleiman the Magnificent, the Muslim world found that it had no framework to deal with defeat. The superiority of the House of Islam was a given. How then did it lie defeated, divided, colonized? Well, it must not have been a fair fight. The Muslims must have fallen victim to shabby, shadowy trickery — to a conspiracy. After all, even the Qur’an itself portrays Jews and Christians as scheming liars: "When they come to [Muhammad], they say: ‘We believe’: but in fact they enter with a mind against Faith, and they go out with the same, but Allah knoweth fully all that they hide" (Sura 5:61). Jews are even portrayed as fabricating divine revelations in their lust for money: they "write the Book with their own hands, and then say: ‘This is from Allah,’ to traffic with it for miserable price!" (Sura 2:79).

The orthodox Muslim view of verses like these (and there are many others like them) is not that they are seventh-century polemic, but words spoken by Allah himself which retain their validity for all time. Consequently all too many Muslims today see them as revelatory of the twenty-first century world. The crafty, dishonest Jewish and Christian renegades are up to their same old tricks. But even though Bush, Sharon and Co. have all the world’s resources at their disposal as they weave their conspiracies and deceptions to ensnare the Muslim world, the Muslim can see through them: he has the Qur’an.

This is the point at which all these conspiracy theories stop being merely amusing or pathetic and start to appear genuinely lethal. For what bridges of genuine trust can be built with people who view the world from this perspective? The epidemic of conspiracy stories in Middle East and Iraq in particular today betrays a mistrust that is far deeper than most anyone has imagined, and is in fact founded upon fervently held religious concepts. We may fervently hope that cooler heads will prevail, and it isn’t inconceivable that they ultimately will. But it would be wise not to expect too much in the short term.

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and the author of Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West (Regnery Publishing), and Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World’s Fastest Growing Faith (Encounter Books).

http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=11483

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