Posted on 05/29/2004 9:01:35 PM PDT by DoctorZIn
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.” 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. I began these daily threads June 10th 2003. On that date Iranians once again began taking to the streets to express their desire for a regime change. Today in Iran, most want to replace the regime with a secular democracy.
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.
DoctorZin
This map is wrong!
Iran Governor Killed in Helicopter Crash
AP - World News (via Yahoo)
May 29, 2004
CHALOUS - A helicopter taking a governor and his entourage from the site of a deadly earthquake crashed in the mountains of northern Iran on Saturday, killing everyone on board, official Tehran television reported.
The crash came as army helicopters ferried rescue teams to mountain villages in northern and central Iran cut off by landslides caused by Friday's quake, in which at least 35 people were killed and 250 were injured.
Those killed in the helicopter crash included Masoud Emami, the governor of Qazvin province, three of his aides and a journalist working for Iran's state-run television, the report said. It did not say how many others were aboard.
State-run TV reported there were 20 aftershocks following Friday's quake, including a 4.6-magnitude temblor Saturday morning in the southeastern city of Bam, where a 6.6-magnitude quake in December killed 26,000 people. There were no casualties there Saturday, the report said.
A weak tremor that lasted about five seconds was felt around midday Saturday in the Iranian capital, Tehran, which has a population of about 10 million. Friday's quake was so powerful it cracked or shattered windows in the capital's north, more than 60 miles from the hardest-hit villages.
Out of fear of a greater quake, many people in Tehran slept outdoors, in yards, parks or in the streets. The government denied widespread speculation about an impending quake.
"Reports of an earthquake in Tehran in the next few hours are false, and circulated by irresponsible people," Ali Jahanbakhshi, an official at Tehran's Emergency Headquarters, told the official Islamic Republic News Agency.
Bijan Dastari, a senior Red Crescent Society official, said 35 people died and 250 were injured in the Friday afternoon earthquake, measured at magnitude 6.2 by the U.S. Geological Survey, that struck northern and central Iran.
Two army helicopters ferried rescue teams into some of the more remote villages early Saturday, IRNA reported. The quake severed road links to about a dozen villages, it said.
The road from Tehran to Chalous was riddled with large cracks, rocks and giant boulders, as well as cars that either were completely smashed or badly damaged by boulders. Crushed cars were being cleared by trailer trucks.
One driver barely squeezed into his car, whose rear side and passenger compartment were crushed, and slowly drove it away.
Fattollah Najafi, the 60-year-old owner of a roadside restaurant, said he felt the tremor, then saw boulders rolling down the mountain.
"All of a sudden, I saw the restaurant was shaking all over the place," Najafi said. "There were cars crashing into the mountain or into each other, and some were crushed by the boulders.
"One car that was hit by a boulder exploded into flames, and as far as I know everyone in it was killed."
The Red Crescent dispatched rescue teams with body-detecting dogs as well as medical teams, tents and lanterns to the stricken areas, IRNA reported. It quoted officials as saying about 50 villages were shaken by Friday's quake.
The villages hit hardest were near Alamout, about 80 miles west of Tehran, Interior Ministry spokesman Jahanbakhah Khanjani told The Associated Press on Friday.
Sixteen people were buried in their cars and more than 70 others were injured by landslides and falling boulders on the mountainous Tehran-Chalous road, state-run television reported. Chalous is 55 miles north of Tehran.
Tehran University's seismological center said the quake had a 5.5 magnitude with an epicenter in the village of Baladeh, 45 miles northeast of Tehran, near the Caspian Sea.
The USGS (news - web sites) bases its magnitude calculations by looking at measurements from a number of seismographs around the world. This figure can sometimes differ from a measurement recorded closer to the epicenter.
Alamout, the area hardest hit by the quake, is a remote region with a sinister history. It was home to an 11th-century order founded by Hassan Sabbah, who was known in Europe as the old Man of the Mountain.
His followers, known for their blind obedience and successful assassinations of many notables of the period, spread terror throughout Persia and Syria and were known to target Christian crusaders.
http://www.daneshjoo.org/generalnews/article/publish/article_6391.shtml
Iran's Judiciary: Aghajari close to having death sentence quashed
Iran Payvand News
May 30th, 2004
Tehran, IRNA -- Jailed dissident Hashem Aghajari is close to having his death sentence on apostasy charges quashed, a deputy judiciary chief told IRNA reporters here Saturday.
"Preliminary steps have been taken to revoke the (death) sentence," Deputy Judiciary Chief Abdorreza Izadpanah said.
The cleric said the judiciary had taken its cue from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's decree, which showed charges brought against Aghajari do not make a case for blasphemy.
"Given Judiciary Chief (Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi)'s stress and advice on the need for speedy handling of the case, we hope the final verdict on the case will be announced in the coming days," Izadpanah said IRNA's head office here.
This comes in the wake of a provisional court's ruling in western Hamedan province which recently reaffirmed the death sentence on Aghajari.
It first tried and sentenced Aghajari to death for blasphemy in 2002.
The ruling sparked days of student protests in Tehran and several other cities, prompting Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei to order a review in November 2002.
The sentence is related to the statements made by Aghajari in Hamedan, in which he decried some of the Shi'ite Muslim practices and demanded they be rectified.
In addition to the death penalty, the court sentenced him to 74 lashes, a 10-year ban from teaching, and eight years of internal banishment.
Aghajari is a history professor at Tehran Teachers Training University and lost a leg in the Iraqi-imposed war of 1980-88.
His defense lawyer, Saleh Nikbakht, had said recently that he was confident the the Supreme Court would absolve his client and revoke the death sentence imposed by the lower court.
Aghajari has consistently refused to appeal the death sentence.
http://www.payvand.com/news/04/may/1196.html
I think so. There's alot going on that we don't know about.
Iran complains to Jordan over wedding invite for ousted royals
IranMania News
30th May, 04
TEHRAN, May 30 (AFP) - Iran has lodged an official complaint with Jordan after Farah Diba, the widow of the ousted Iranian shah, was invited to the wedding of Crown Prince Hamza bin Hussein to a distant cousin, Princess Noor,the Iranian foreign ministry said.
"The foreign ministry has summoned the Jordanian charge d'affaires to protest over this invitation. It was an injustifiable gesture. There were people invited who have no status in their own country," foreign ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told reporters.
He also warned that the invitation of Farah Diba, the widow of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, "will have repercussion on the relations between our two countries."
The widow of the shah, ousted by Iran's Islamic revolution in 1979, was among 2,500 guests -- who also included a number of European royals -- at a garden party in Amman Thursday.
Last Monday, Iran complained to Spain after both Farah Diba and her son were invited to the marriage of Crown Prince Felipe de Bourbon and former television news presenter Letizia Ortiz.
http://www.iranmania.com/news/300504e.asp
Reza Pahlavi's Antidote
May 30, 2004
Iran va Jahan
Reza Bayegan
I said goodbye to an Iranian relative who had come to visit me from Italy at Paris's Bercy station before attending Reza Pahlavi's panel discussion at Sciences-Po, one of France’s elite academic institutions. As he was embarking his train he held my hand and said: "let me know what happens at the meeting."
As the situation in Iran becomes more devastating each day, the campaign trail of Reza Pahlavi who is fighting to bring an end to dictatorship in his homeland is followed by Iranians with an increasing sense of urgency. On 25 May 2004, at this French centre of learning and enlightenment, his message consisted in highlighting the great potential of his nation for being a beacon of modernity and stability in the troubled region of the Middle East.
Referring to the 'obscurantism' as the congenital and incurable disease of the Islamic revolution he elucidated its pernicious effect on Iran's material and spiritual resources:
"Turning into instruments of religious fascism, the Islamic Republic has sapped all the moral and spiritual bases of an ancient country with several millennia of civilization and history. The harmful effect of this type of fascism is dualistic - it is both temporal and spiritual."
All those Iranians who are able to look at their homeland and recognize the weakened body of their nation suffering a fresh blow everyday, undergoing another new humiliation and pain by the hour, can identify with the message of the king and fathom the depth of his anguish.
Keeping the country up to its neck in unceasing calamity, or as Reza Pahlavi calls it a "permanent state of crisis" has from the beginning of the revolution been the survival tactic of the dictators in Tehran. The prime objective of such a style of governance is to create a state of moral fatigue where the political esteem of the population is constantly assaulted and its spirit of resistance debilitated.
The main thrust of Reza Pahlavi’s campaign for the past two decades can be characterized as an antidote to this kind of moral and political infection. By constantly encouraging Iranians that they should not settle for any destiny except the best they deserve, he has kept alive a national dream: A national dream of human excellence, dignity, liberty and democracy that is bound to prove itself more powerful than any nightmare concocted by the tyrants of the Islamic Republic.
There is no doubt that the force of international pressure can play a major role in helping Iranians to fulfil their political aspirations. World solidarity in the past has played a major role in overthrowing tyrannies such as the Apartheid regime in South Africa. In Sciences-Po, the Iranian king reiterated what he has been saying all along: The removal of the Islamic Republic is a sine qua non to global security and a requisite step for establishing a democratic government in Iran.
Reza Pahlavi attends meetings, conferences and interviews around the clock. While owing to his stature, position and impressive character, all eyes are turned upon him, his own gaze remains focused on the plight of his people and their release from the claws of religious tyranny. He is a man moving from standing ovation to standing ovation without being distracted from the long term objectives he has devoted his life to accomplish. His real appeal comes from his modesty, sincerity and above all lack of any ambition for political power for himself.
http://iranvajahan.net/cgi-bin/news.pl?l=en&y=2004&m=05&d=30&a=5
Nice write-up
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