Iranian Alert -- August 6, 2004 [EST]-- IRAN LIVE THREAD -- "Americans for Regime Change in Iran"

The US media still largley 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.

Khatami Accuses US of Double Standards In Iraq

August 06, 2004
AFP
Khaleej Times Online

BAKU -- Iranian President Mohammad Khatami on Friday said the United States was using double standards in its war in Iraq and accused it of sparking interethnic conflict.

Addressing the Azeri parliament on the second day of his visit to the former Soviet republic, Khatami defended both Iraq and Palestinian territories against the West.

“Unilateral international policies followed by double standards create difficulties among people, and this can be seen in Iraq and Palestine,” Khatami said.

“The Islamic religion allows for peace and security in the region and a true dialogue for between the world’s civilizations,” he said.

Khatami was paying the first visit by an Iranian leader to the former Soviet republic since 1993, trying to build ties between two countries embroiled in a dispute over oil access in the Caspian Sea and Azerbaijan’s closer recent relations with the United States.

Khatami is due to leave Azerbaijan on Saturday.

In recent months, the Pentagon has been ramping up its military assistance to Azerbaijan, which, like Iran, has a Caspian shoreline.

The US military has run joint exercises with the Azeri navy in the Caspian.

The US is backing a major project to export Azeri oil from the Caspian Sea -- home to some of the world’s biggest untapped oil and gas reserves -- to international markets.

But Iran is suspicious of US motives, particularly after President George W. Bush described the country as part of an “axis of evil” following the September 11 attacks.

http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle.asp?xfile=data/middleeast/2004/August/middleeast_August172.xml&section=middleeast&col=

Israel Presses for Halt on Iran A-Bomb

August 06, 2004
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
Leslie Susser

After months of keeping a low profile on Iran’s nuclear program, Israel has launched an intensive diplomatic campaign to convince the international community to pressure Tehran to drop its efforts to produce a nuclear bomb.

Israeli officials say the campaign, involving the United States, the European Union and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), is focusing on a September IAEA board of governors meeting in Vienna. That body has the power to refer the "Iranian nuclear dossier" to the U.N. Security Council, where international sanctions could be imposed.

The Israeli diplomatic move has been accompanied by a veiled threat of attack on Iranian nuclear facilities if the international community fails to stop Tehran’s nuclear weapons drive. However, the Iranians, undeterred, are continuing to pursue an ambivalent and potentially military nuclear program.

Like Israel, the United States is seeking stiffer international action. The EU position has been less decisive, however, and it is not clear whether the union will back a U.S. demand for sanctions. Europe’s position could be crucial.

Israel stopped its public criticism of Tehran after Iran and Libya intimated a readiness late last year to cooperate with the international community in dismantling their nuclear weapons programs.

At the time, Israeli experts said Libya was serious, but they didn’t trust Iran. Still, given the new situation and not wanting to draw attention to its own alleged nuclear capabilities, Israel decided to adopt a low profile on Iran and let the United States and Europe take the lead in pressuring Tehran to drop its nuclear weapons drive.

Now, Israel feels the international community has not been firm enough and has allowed Iran to get away with a pretense of cooperation, while clandestinely furthering its nuclear ambitions.

In late June, Israeli leaders decided to change tack. As a first step, Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom initiated a July 2 meeting in Washington on the Iranian issue with Condoleezza Rice, U.S. national security adviser. Afterward, Shalom declared that the international community "cannot allow the Iranians to move forward in their efforts to develop nuclear weapons."

Less than a week later, Mohammed El- Baradei, IAEA director general, visited Israel, where all his interlocutors, including Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, stressed the danger to world peace of nuclear weapons in Iranian hands.

On July 22, when the EU’s foreign policy boss, Javier Solana, visited Israel, his hosts made sure his itinerary included a meeting with Mossad Chief Meir Dagan, who provided Israeli intelligence material purporting to show Iran’s nuclear duplicity.

The day before, Maj. Gen. Aharon (Farkash) Ze’evi, head of Israeli military intelligence, briefed the Cabinet, delivering an assessment — immediately made public — that unless Iran was stopped, it would go nuclear by 2007 or 2008.

Hawkish legislators Ephraim Sneh of the Labor Party and Ehud Yatom of Likud took their cue.

"If the international community continues to show ineffectiveness, Israel will have to consider its next steps — and fast," Sneh said.

Yatom was more explicit, saying, "Israel must destroy the Iranian nuclear facility just as we did the Iraqi reactor in 1981."

Earlier, there had been what appeared to be a calculated leak to the press. On July 18, the London-based Sunday Times reported that the Israeli air force had completed military preparations for a preemptive strike at Iran’s Bushehr nuclear facility and would attack if Russia supplied Iran with fuel rods for enriching uranium.

An Israeli defense source, who confirmed that military rehearsals had taken place, was quoted as telling the paper, "Israel will on no account permit the Iranian reactors — especially the one being built in Bushehr with Russian help — to go critical."

By breaking its silence on Iran, Israel was indicating that it does not take the Iranian threat lightly — and neither should the West. Beside the obvious warning to Iran, the subtext of the Israeli message seemed to be directed at the international community: Act to stop Iran going nuclear, or Israel may feel it must take preemptive military action, with all the potentially destabilizing consequences.

Then, on July 29, Israel conducted a successful test off the California coast of its Arrow 2 anti-missile system. Some observers saw the test as yet another message to Iran: In a conflict situation, Israel would have the overwhelming strategic advantage of being able to intercept and destroy incoming missiles, another reason for Iran to reconsider its nuclear program.

The Iranians, however, are showing no signs of backing down. On July 25, Seyed Masood Jazayeri, commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, warned that if Israel attacks, "it will be wiped off the face of the earth."

A week later, Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi confirmed that Iran had resumed building centrifuges that can produce weapons-grade uranium. His statement followed a meeting in Paris in which Britain, France and Germany failed to persuade Iran to stop making the centrifuges and allow spot inspections of its nuclear facilities as promised.

The Europeans had offered to close the Iranian nuclear dossier if Iran cooperated with spot inspections and stopped all production of weapons-grade uranium. But Iran has been delaying the inspections, and — though it repeatedly has insisted that it was not making weapons-grade uranium — it acknowledged that it was continuing to make centrifuges that could be used for uranium enrichment. It also has said nothing will stop it from joining the world’s nuclear club.

Like Israel, the United States maintains that Iran is dissembling, pretending to run a civilian-use nuclear program while clandestinely conducting a full-scale nuclear weapons drive. With huge oil reserves, U.S. officials note, Iran hardly needs nuclear energy for civilian purposes.

Israeli officials say much will depend now on how the Europeans respond to the latest Iranian rebuff in Paris and what line they take at the September IAEA board meeting. If they back the American position, the result could well be a U.N. Security Council debate on a joint resolution threatening Iran with sanctions.

That would be a new phase in the international community’s efforts to stop Iran from getting the bomb. And if that happens, Israel may feel that its new more aggressive campaign had something to do with it.

http://www.jewishjournal.com/home/preview.php?id=12637

'Tests In Iran'; New Missiles Being Readied

August 06, 2004
Arab Times
Agencies

WASHINGTON -- The United States has determined that North Korea is working on new ballistic missile systems designed to deliver nuclear warheads and that it is testing the technology by proxy in Iran, an official in President George W. Bush's administration said Thursday.

Having agreed to a self-imposed test ban, North Korea is sharing technology information with Iran, which carries out missile tests on North Korea's behalf, the administration official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. The missile program is based on Russian technology and has been conducted with help from Russian scientists - help the United States thinks may be continuing, the official said.

A leading military publication, Jane's Defense Weekly, reported recently that North Korea was developing two new ballistic missile systems that "appreciably expand the ballistic-missile threat." A version of the missile capable of being launched from a submarine or a ship is potentially the most threatening, the weekly said. Not all of the details of the North Korean program are known to the United States, the administration official told The Associated Press. One important question, he said, is whether the missiles are exactly patterned on a Russian model. Another, he said, is whether the missiles could reach the United States.

US officials think North Korea may have the technology for a submarine-launched ballistic missile, but it is not clear whether North Korea has a missile platform, the official said. The Bush administration is working with South Korea, Japan, China and Russia to negotiate an agreement with North Korea to end its nuclear weapons program. Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly held talks with South Korean officials this week in Washington in preparation for a resumption of negotiations, possibly in September.

http://www.arabtimesonline.com/arabtimes/world/Viewdet.asp?ID=3036&cat=a

Iranian Journalists boycott the official press day and step up their struggle

Canada News Wire - Report Section
Aug 6, 2004

MONTREAL - Reporters Without Borders voiced support today for the journalists who plan to hold a one-day hunger strike to protest against press freedom violations tomorrow - Press Day in Iran - and to boycott an official ceremony at which the minister of culture and Islamic guidance is to award prizes to the press.

"While staging a pseudo-homage to the work of journalists, the Iranian authorities try to strip them of their right to work and push forward day by day with their campaign of repression," the organisation said. "We reaffirm our support for the movement of Iranian journalists who bravely refuse to let themselves be gagged, and we call on the Iranian authorities to listen to their demands."

Tomorrow's protest will be a continuation of the movement begun on 26 July with a sit-in by more than 250 people outside the Journalists Association in Tehran. It will be a day of "mourning" for the closure of the major reformist newspapers and the threats hanging over the press. Tehran state prosecutor Said Mortazavi announced at the end of July that journalists who wrote for the closed newspapers will be banned from working altogether. They are appealing for international support and solidarity for their movement.

It is also tomorrow that Emadoldin Baghi - a figurehead of the reformist press - is due to appear before the Tehran prosecutor. No explanation had been given for this summons, the latest of many Baghi has received since his release in February 2003. Baghi was sentenced in October 2000 to three years in prison for "threatening national security" and "dissemination false news."

Following his release, he edited the reformist daily Jomhouriat, which was forced to close on 18 July. He also founded a group that defends prisoners' rights.

http://www.daneshjoo.org/generalnews/article/publish/article_7496.shtml

Only Iranian Shoah Survivor Shares Life

by Karmel Melamed, Contributing Writer

In August 1939, Menashe Ezrapour could have escaped the horrors of the Holocaust by boarding a train in the French city of Grenoble, but instead, he chose to stay, ultimately becoming the only known Shoah survivor of Iranian Jewish descent interned in concentration and work camps during World War II.

Recently, Ezrapour, 86, came forward for the first time in more than 60 years to publicly share his story of survival, perhaps bringing the local Persian Jewish community closer to the Shoah.

A number of Holocaust experts, including ones from Yad Vashem in Israel, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. and the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, said Ezrapour is probably one of the few — if not the only — Iranian Jewish survivors held captive in the camps during WW II.

"To my knowledge, I have not heard of any Iranian Jews being held in camps during the war," said Aaron Brightbart, head researcher at the Wiesenthal Center.

Upon learning of Ezrapour’s Shoah experience, several local Iranian Jewish leaders said his story may personalize the Holocaust for Iranian Jews who in the past may not have been as impacted by its effects as most European Jewry was.

"We [Iranian Jewry] have always felt a close bond with the Shoah," said Dariush Fakheri, co-founder of the Eretz-SIAMAK Cultural Center in Tarzana. "This new revelation for the community just makes it so close to a personal experience for us."

Talking with The Journal at his residence on Wilshire Boulevard near Westwood, Ezrapour can still recall the names, dates and events surrounding his internment in various camps in southern France.

Ezrapour’s life-altering experience began when he and his brother, Edward, left their home in the Iranian city of Hamadan and went to Paris in September 1938 to pursue higher education. In August 1939, Ezrapour and his brother journeyed to Grenoble in southeastern France. Shortly afterward, when war in Europe seemed imminent, they decided to return to Iran.

"As we were preparing to leave, my friend from Baghdad, Maurice, who was an Iraqi Jew, encouraged me to stay," Ezrapour said.

His brother returned to Iran, but Ezrapour remained in Grenoble and continued his engineering education at a local university. For the next three years, Ezrapour said that neither France’s German occupiers nor the Vichy government bothered him. However, he was eventually forced to register as a Jew in 1941, because Vichy laws required Jews to identify themselves.

In late 1942, he and several hundred Jews in the area were rounded up and sent to nearby detention camps. The French police took Ezrapour to a work camp called Uriage. He said the prisoners there were worried that they’d be deported to Germany.

"After one month there, I got permission to return to Grenoble for two days, and I never returned to the camp," Ezrapour recalled.

Ezrapour said he stayed in the Grenoble home of a Christian woman for two weeks and used false identification papers to get around. He was ultimately arrested after the Christian woman was tricked by a police officer into revealing his whereabouts.

After 45 days in jail, Ezrapour said he was convicted of using false papers and sentenced to serve 40 more days in the Shapoli work camp. From Shapoli, he and other Jewish prisoners were taken to the infamous Gurs concentration camp, 50 miles from the Spanish border.

According to the "Encyclopedia of the Holocaust" (Facts on File, 2000), Gurs was the first and one of the largest concentration camps in France, with approximately 60,000 prisoners held there from 1939 to 1945. According to the 1993 book, "Gurs: An Internment Camp In France," the internees included approximately 23,000 Spanish Republican soldiers who had fled Franco’s Spain in 1939, 7,000 International Brigade volunteers, 120 French resistance members and more than 21,000 Jews from all over Europe.

Ezrapour said living conditions were unbearable at Gurs, with too many people crowded together into small barracks and very little food.

"Every day, the only food available was one bowl of watered-down turnip soup and 75 grams of bread, which is the size of a teaspoon," Ezrapour said.

Gurs held thousands of Jews prior to their final deportation to the death camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Sobibor in Eastern Europe. However, more than 1,000 detainees at Gurs died of hunger, typhoid fever, dysentery and extreme cold conditions , according to the "Encyclopedia of the Holocaust."

After a month at Gurs, Ezrapour said he and 40 other prisoners were sent to a work camp in southern France called Meyreuil near Marseilles, instead of being deported with thousands of other Jews to Auschwitz.

"After two days there [at Meyreuil], an officer issuing identification cards asked me if I was Jewish, and I told him I was not, and he luckily did not identify me as a Jew," Ezrapour said. "This was an incredible miracle, because later in 1944, two Gestapo officers came to the camp and saw my Jewish name on the list and asked for me. The camp commandant told them I was an Iranian-Iraqi, and they didn’t ask for me any further."

Ezrapour said he was subsequently sent to labor long hours in the coal mines near Meyreuil. He also worked as an electrician.

In August 1944, Ezrapour said, Meyreuil was liberated by American forces, and he left the camp. He sought refuge with rebels in the Spanish underground living in a nearby border town.

For the remainder of the war, Ezrapour returned to Grenoble, where he completed his education in engineering. He returned to Iran in June 1946 and worked in the automotive spare parts business.

Despite enduring tremendous hardships at camps, Ezrapour said the experience has not made him bitter but only reinforced his belief in God.

"After witnessing all of the miracles I encountered then, I have always been grateful to God," Ezrapour said. "I had, and still have, a strong belief in God and his powers, that’s what got me through the experience."

The list of Dachau prisoners in Paul Berben’s book, "Dachau 1933-1945: The Official History" (Norfolk Press, 1975), indicates that there was one survivor of Iranian nationality at the camp in Germany when it was liberated by U.S. forces in April 1945. However, the list does not identify the prisoner’s religion. Berben’s book also indicates that non-Jews were also interned in Dachau during World War II.

Records from Yad Vashem’s Hall of Names reveals that a total of five Jews born in Iran perished in the Holocaust.

This past April, the Wiesenthal Center posthumously honored the Abdol Hossein Sardari, the Iranian ambassador to German-controlled France during World War II, who forestalled the deportation of 200 Iranian Jews living in Paris at the time. In addition, Sardari was also honored for saving several hundred non-Iranian Jews in Paris in 1942 by giving them Iranian passports to escape Nazi persecution.

Ezrapour said that while he did not encounter any other Iranian Jews during his internment in the French camps, most Iranian Jews he has known over the years have expressed great sorrow over the loss of their brethren at the hands of the Nazis.

"They do feel great pain, because their co-religionist brothers were murdered," Ezrapour said. "Perhaps my experience will give them a better idea of the seriousness of what happened."

http://www.jewishjournal.com/home/preview.php?id=12633

IN SEARCH OF AN IRAN POLICY [Excerpt]

By AMIR TAHERI
NY Post

August 6, 2004 -- AS if trying to add a last- minute item to a banquet menu, the Bush adminis tration is busy concocting an "Iran policy" for this month's Republican Party convention.

In recent weeks, the administration has solicited input from many experts and Iranian-Americans. There are no signs, however, that the end product will amount to a blueprint for dealing with a problem set to dominate America's Middle East policy for years.

To some, it may be news that the first Bush administration is drawing to a close without having worked out a policy outline on Iran. Many will be surprised that National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and her team have produced National Security Directives (the standard guidelines on policy) on more than 70 countries, but none on Iran.

The reason for this paralysis is the Bush administration's divisions over an analysis of the problem, not to mention possible solutions.

Early in his presidency, Bush included Iran in an "Axis of Evil," and came close to committing himself to regime change there.

The Pentagon supported that position. The State Department, however, retained the analysis made in the final year of the Clinton administration, which saw Iran as "something of a democracy" with which the United States must seek "positive engagement." The National Security Council avoided taking sides by refusing even to commission a paper on Iran.

The policy vacuum has encouraged some Republicans to try to commit the United States to regime change in Iran through legislation, as happened with Iraq during the Clinton administration. Meanwhile, some Democrats have tried to exploit the Bush administration's lack of policy by promoting rapprochement with Tehran.

This is in sync with Sen. John Kerry's long-held views. In a conversation on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, almost two years ago, Kerry spoke of his desire to "engage Iran in a constructive dialogue." Last December, in an address to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in New York, Kerry promised to adopt "a realistic, non-confrontational policy with Iran," ultimately leading to normalization "just as I was prepared to normalize relations with Vietnam, a decade ago."

Last month, the CFR endorsed Kerry's position in a report on Iran produced by a Task Force led by President Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser Zbigniew Bzrezinski and former CIA Director Robert Gates. The report amounts to an attempt at reopening Iran to U.S. oil, aircraft, and construction companies.

Yet both sets of advocates — of regime change and of détente — base their different strategies on a fundamental misunderstanding of the situation in Iran.

Advocates of "regime change" claim that the Islamic Republic is on the verge of collapse and that what is needed is an extra push from America.. The promoters of détente insist that the Khomeinist regime is "solidly entrenched" and that Iran is "not on the brink of revolutionary upheaval."

Both are mistaken because they see Iran as a frame-freeze, ignoring the realities of a dynamic political life. The "overthrow" party underestimates the resilience of a regime that is prepared to kill in large numbers while buying support thanks to rising oil revenues. The détente party, on the other hand, underestimates the growing power of the movement for change in Iran.

Both camps also ignore the dialectics of the Irano-American relations. The "overthrow" party ignores the fact that improving relations with Washington could help the regime solve many of its economic and diplomatic problems, thus strengthening its position. The détente camp fails to acknowledge that a U.S. commitment to help the pro-reform movement win power in Iran could alter "the solidly entrenched" position of the Khomeinists and encourage "revolutionary upheaval."

In other words, any U.S. action, or inaction, could help alter the picture in Iran.

Both the "overthrow" and the détente camps in Washington see Iran through the prism that was used for determining policy on Iraq under Saddam Hussein. But the Iranian system is not dependent on an individual and his clan. There are internal mechanisms for change — mechanisms which, if helped to function properly, could produce the changes desired both by the people of Iran and the major democracies led by the United States.

Iraq was a tete-à-tete between Saddam and Washington. Iran is a triangle in which the Iranian people, the Khomeinist regime and the United States have different, at time complementary and at others contradictory, interests and aspirations.

Whatever the outcome of the coming U.S. presidential election, Washington cannot equivocate on Iran much longer.

Anyone with knowledge of Iran would know that a majority of the Iranian people are unhappy with the status quo. America shares that discontented, albeit for different reasons. The reasons for U.S. discontent cannot be eliminated by endorsing the status quo in the name of détente: Instead, that would help consolidate the regime, and policies, that caused the discontent in the first place.

The Iranian people and the United States share an interest in promoting change in Tehran. But that shared interest does not mean that the people of Iran would give Washington carte blanche for regime change.

Iran is passing through a phase experienced by virtually all nations that have emerged from a major political revolution. In such a phase, the divergent interests of the state and the revolution come into conflict.

Any student of Iranian politics would know that today there are two Irans. One embodies the Khomeinist revolution that controls the instruments of power; the other represents the Iranian nation-state as shaped over the past 400 years.

In some cases the interests of the two coincide; in many more they diverge.

Today, Iran is one of only two countries in the Middle East (the other is Israel) where the United States enjoys popular support. The reason is that the U.S. is seen as the only major power not yet prepared to appease the Khomeinist regime.

Those who preach détente are, unwittingly perhaps, trying to appease the Khomeinists — an ultimately self-defeating task. If implemented, their policy could turn the people of Iran against the United States, thus, paradoxically, underpinning the regime's anti-American message.

Yet the "overthrow" scenario could also alienate the Iranian people by confirming the Khomeinist claim that the U.S. "imperialism" is out to impose its will, regardless of domestic popular movements. ...

http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/26321.htm

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