Replies

In response to the recent concern from students inside of Iran that the US funded Internet resource Anonymizer.com was no longer working I received the following from the management of the Anonymizer.com.

"We have received reports that the Anonymizer's privacy services have been unavailable in Iran recently.

Anonymizer provides privacy services into Iran by sending a daily newsletter with the URL of the latest privacy proxy. This changes on a regular basis to avoid Iranian government censorship of the service. Over the Holiday's there was a pause in our sending of these newsletters. They have now resumed and everything should continue to function normally.

We saw little change in the traffic from Iran through our privacy proxies during that period, and are not aware that the currently active URLs have been blocked.

Any user of the service that see that our proxy has been blocked should contact me at president@anonymizer.com"

Veiled Threats Lure Ayatollah's Grandson Home

By Michael A. Ledeen
Posted: Tuesday, January 6, 2004

ARTICLES
New York Sun
Publication Date: January 6, 2004

Hossein Khomeini, the grandson of Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, has suddenly returned to his native Iran after several months in Iraq and a quick visit to America.

Iranian news agencies laconically reported the event on Saturday, but it will shortly become a major cause celebre, since Hossein Khomeini had been un stinting in his criticism of the Iranian regime ever since his arrival in Baghdad shortly after the fall the city, when he announced his delight in being able to live in a free country.

Hossein Khomeini is not a major religious figure in Iran, but his bloodline gives him considerable standing in the country, and his clear separation from his grandfather's creation of a Shiite theocracy in Iran was widely seen as very helpful to the large opposition to the regime. He has studied Western philosophy at the theological schools in Qom, the Iranian holy city where most of the leading ayatollahs live and teach, and in public remarks at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington last fall, he vigorously supported the principles of separation of mosque and state, total freedom of religion, and even "of nonreligion, since religion must be freely embraced to be meaningful." His return to Iran is therefore a surprise, and sources close to the Khomeini family suggest that he was lured back by a combination of threats and promises. He had been unable to obtain permission for his wife and children to join him in Iraq, and his wife had recently been visited by Iranian security agents who told her, "if your children suddenly die in the streets, you must know that it was not our doing."

His grandmother sent him a message a few days ago, which stressed the importance "for the family" for him to return, warned of the danger to his children, and contained a promise from the regime that no harm would be done to him. Thus, according to the family sources, Mr. Khomeini was blackmailed into returning.

The Khomeini family has long been the object of violence. Mr. Khomeini's father, Mustafah, died suddenly in his fifties in Karbala, Iraq, two years before the Iranian Revolution, after opposing Ruhollah's theocratic movement. The grand ayatollah's son, Ahmad, died young, reportedly from opium addiction, and Mr. Khomeini himself was the target of an assassination attempt in Baghdad. He was saved by coalition forces.

Hossein Khomeini has apparently now joined the long and growing list of regime critics suffering at the hands of the professional killers and torturers whose prime mission is to break the democratic opposition.

In the past few days, American leaders, including the president and the secretary of state, have assured the Iranian people of our support for freedom in that oppressed and unhappy country. They, and all Western leaders and human rights supporters, would do well to reiterate these fine sentiments, and include the name of Hossein Khomeini on the list of the regime's victims.

Letter from Shiraz, Iran:

(translation:

Something big was about to happen in July, 2002, but everyone started talking about deals and handshakes. Jack Straws visit to Tehran sealed everything, many in Iran know that the British are strongly supporting the Mullahs, as was quoted the Mullahs are the strongest weapon the Brits ever had in Iran.

I remember the last couple years of the Shah, every country had turned their backs on the Shah -Iran's economy was booming and military one of the strongest in the world, Iran was set to become one of the strongest nations in the world in 7 years time. What's intersting is that the Shah even promised democratic reforms calling for elections whereby he'd release powers in upcoming elections..

somehow or another people were all the sudden convinced the Shah was the devil, this after massive disagreements with the Brits, and Russians over oil deals..

MI6 released information on their overthrow of a Nationalist Secular government under Mossadeqh in 1953 for cheap oil, will they also release information about overthrow of the Shah when he started to become a nationalist?

There's no conspiracy about it. The British are strongly behind the Mullahs, they created them and installed them and until they ask them to go it will never happen.

Note: A strong majority of Iranians believe the Islamic Revolution was instigated and funded by the Brits.

Letter From Tehran -- Iranians See British Behind Every Mullah
Commentary, Shahla Azizi,
Pacific News Service
Editor's note: As a war of words heats up between Iran and the United States, a strange mixture of conspiracy theories and apathy abounds in Tehran.

TEHRAN, Iran--These are uncertain times in Tehran. The recent accusations and tough talk against the clerical regime coming from Washington, together with the war in Iraq has made many Iranians hopeful that the Americans will come here next to help liberate them from the ruling mullahs. That is, if the British don't stop them.

The Iranian public, from the grocery man to the university student to the doctor to the reformist member of Parliament, all believe in conspiracy theories so far-fetched they make JFK assassination buffs seem like real empiricists.

The majority of Iranians believe that the mullahs, the hard-line clerics, have the full backing of the British. In order to understand this line of thinking you have to look at the enormous influence of foreign powers here in the past. The British and the Soviets divided the country into southern and northern zones of power under their direct influence during WWII. Reza Shah, the founder of the previous dynasty, was put on a ship and sent to exile by the British because of his sympathies for Hitler. His son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was briefly ousted in 1953 but quickly put back in power by a coup d'etat that the CIA now admits having engineered. He was toppled by the Islamic Revolution of 1979, which brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power with enormous popular backing.

Strange as it may sound to Western readers, a main line of popular thinking has flourished against this historical backdrop. It goes something like this:

The English are the wits and brains behind American actions in the region since WWII. The British know that in order to keep Iranian oil and resources for themselves, they have to keep the clerics, who are their agents, in power. They are now pushing them on the naive Americans. Iranians truly believe that if it were not for the marriage of the clerics and the British, this Islamic regime would not stay in power. Southern Iraq, which according to this theory is under British control, provides proof of this. Ayatollah Hakim, the Iraqi Shiite cleric exiled to Iran who returned to Iraq in May, must have British backing, or he would never have been allowed to return with such bravado.

The conspiratorial nature of this line of thinking is not lost on Iranians themselves, who at times satirize it. A notable example is Iraj Pezeshkzad's "My Uncle Napoleon," one of the all-time best-selling Iranian novels and a television series. Written a few decades ago, it is nevertheless still popular. In it, a man who greatly admires the French ruler is obsessed with the idea that the British are behind everything.

"You see," I was told by more than one person, including my elderly landlady and a member of the Majlis (parliament), "these guys (meaning the hard-line clerics) are smart -- they have made a deal with the British. Not only are they here to stay, but they are taking over Iraq as well." They go on to explain, "the Americans are bullies, but they are too stupid in the face of British wit."

This belief in the cleverness of the British and their agents, the clerics, is so widespread that no one believes that the overwhelming religiosity of the majority of Iraq's Shiites might have something to do with Hakim's popularity.

Many even claim the 1979 Revolution was also the work of the British and the Americans. The majority here believes that the British fooled the hick peanut farmer, Carter, into getting rid of the Shah and allowing Khomeini to return from exile to impose his Islamic Republic. Few believe that Carter had a genuine human rights agenda, or that there had been a genuine desire for an indigenous ideology in the form of the Islam that Khomeini offered.

Even among hard-line Hezbollahi types, conspiracy theories abound. One man who helped bring Khomeini back from exile in France and played an important role in the early days of the Revolution told me that all the reformists in the Majlis are agents of the Americans. "If we give in to them," he reasoned, "we will have given the Americans our country."

The upshot of all this is that few Iranians believe that Iranians themselves can do anything about their political future. A political apathy more suffocating than the strong arm of the clerics prevails here. Tired of struggling, inherently fatalistic and used to foreign meddling in their affairs, the masses are waiting to see if the British and their mullahs will fool the Americans once again.

A word of caution to Washington is in order. Iranians blamed the Americans for bringing the Shah to power, and now blame the British for supporting the mullahs. Anyone going in to change regimes should perhaps sign a sort of prenuptial agreement with the Iranians, so if things turn sour in the future Iranians will have only themselves to blame.

http://news.pacificnews.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=0ee5ccdd93c67585476ba08eff4536cb

Thank you for the follow-up.