Iranian Alert - May 30, 2005 - Join the "Blogosphere Supports Real Democracy in Iran" Campaign

Join the "Blogosphere Supports Real Democracy in Iran" Campaign

Why should the Blogosphere support Real Democracy in Iran?

The next few weeks in Iran may prove critical to the efforts of the pro-democracy forces there.

On June 17th, Iran has scheduled its Presidential elections and as the LA Times said recently:

It was already one of the most important elections in the world this year. It now also promises to be one of the most watched.

This time the world will see for itself that the elections in Iran are a fraud. The regime permits only those candidates that support the present regime to run. As Amir Taheri says, the outcome of the election is certain. The Supreme Leader of Iran will remain in complete control, the Presidency is meaningless. But the regime needs a high voter turnout to fool the world community that they are the legitimate representatives of the people.

This is why the people of Iran are boycotting the election

as they did in the last Parliamentary election. They want a real democracy. But this time the world media will be watching. We need to make sure the world is watching.

Those of us in the blogosphere need to publish the news on Iran in order to help Iranians searching for news know that we support their efforts to replace the existing regime with a real democracy. This is why we ask you to publish our campaign logo on your blog.

Why republish the news? Because the regime is blocking access to most major news sites and the blogosphere is a means to frustrate their efforts. It is also important for the people of Iran to know that people around the world are standing with them in their struggle. This support has proved invaluable to others that successfully overthrew their oppressive regimes in other places around the world, such as Georgia, the Ukraine, Lebanon and elsewhere.

This struggle will likely not end on June 17, but has the opportunity to pick up steam over the coming weeks and months. There will almost certainly be a run off election and a few weeks later a major anniverserary of a bloodly crackdown of pro-democracy forces there. There has never been a more volitatle situation in the Islamic Republic that that it faces this summer. Now is the time to act.

An internal regime change is the best of all possible solutions to the situation inside of Iran. As Amir Taheri points out, the EU3/Iran negotiations will never produce the solution needed to resolve the Iranian nuclear threat and a military strike on Iran is exactly what the regime is hoping for.

The oppressive regime in Iran is not only a threat to its own people but also the the the world community. The war on terror will never end as long as the present Iranian regime remains in place. The U.S. State Department:

Iran remained the most active state sponsor of terrorism in 2004. Its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Ministry of Intelligence and Security were involved in the planning and support of terrorist acts and continued to exhort a variety of groups to use terrorism in pursuit of their goals. ...

Fortunately, there is still time to help the Iranian people.

The Iranian people despise their current government and most want to replace it with a real democtracy. As Slater Bakhtavar recently pointed out:

a mere five to ten percent support for the mullahs and eighty-five percent support for a secular democratic government.

Desire for democracy in Iran today can be compared to a smoldering fire. It just needs a little air and it will burst into flame and comsume the fear of its people. For years now the Iranian people have been pleading for the world to pay attention and support its struggle for a real democracy to replace its current government.

For most of the past 26 years the world community has been blind and silent to cries of the Iranian people. But today the winds of change are blowing around the word. Totalitarian governments around the world are transforming into democracies where people are free to choose their leaders and their destinies. The Iranian people have noticed these changes and are pleading for the world to support them in this struggle.

We can you help the Iranian people in their quest for a real democracy in several ways.

The people of Iran need:

To know that they are not alone.
That western democracies are standing with them.
Training in how to bring down the regime.
Communication with the outside world.
News of demonstrations and unrest inside of Iran.
The dismantling of international financial support for the regime.
And much more.

Are you willing to help? (Questions? Read our FAQ)

Join us now!

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A VERY VERY IMPORTANT ARTICLE

http://www.iranian.com/Opinion/2005/May/Rafsanjani/index.html

Elections
America's President
The multifaceted Rafsanjani family has converted Iranian wealth into billions-dollar investments in the United States, Canada and Europe

Farhat Quam Maquami
May 30, 2005
iranian.com

On June 17 Iranians are going to the polls to pick a president in an election which can hardly be called democratic. For propaganda reasons, and to provide cover for its dwindling legitimacy, the IRI is offering people a handful of candidates from a list of over one thousand applicants for the job. In the last two elections, Mullah Khatemi was selected to be the emasculated reform candidate to provide a semblance of hope in an otherwise demoralized society, and he proved to be a failure. This time around the morally bankrupt system, faced with public apathy and certainly running out of credible candidates, has put forward the Millionaire Mullah Rafsnajani to save its corrupt and un-Islamic system. On the surface, Rafsanjani might prove to be the lesser of thousands of evil for Iranians; but, in reality he personifies what is wrong with Iran.

Islamic Republic is a trade name, a slogan used for propaganda, and an empty phrase which has been coined to subjugate people who believe in Islam all over the world. It is a strange dictatorship, baptized in blood baths and terror established in 1979. It is ironical that the system which murdered many as "Corrupt on Earth" and "Warrior against God" has become the symbol of corruption and socioeconomic oppression. In order to repress the growing opposition to clerical rule, the regime relies not on soldiers or uniformed police; but, on the enforcers of Hezbollah, death squads Bassijis and the equally thuggish Revolutionary Guards. Mostly recruited from the same wretched of the earth lumen proletariats whose siblings spearheaded the overthrow of Mossaddegh in 1953.

The mullahs who control this weird republic claim that the regime drives its legitimacy from Allah; but they remain on top with gangster like methods of intimidation, violence, murder and draconian system of terror. In reality the regime is neither Islamic nor a republic and basically was created, supported, sustained and designed under Zbigniew Brzezinski Doctrine to fight communist ideology. On the one hand, it utilizes the terminology Islam and its utopian ideals to prevent any philosophical convergence of socialism and Islam, on the one hand it propagate a perverted theological justification of Neo-liberalism and the so-called Free Market Economy to enrich the mullahs.

The political system has been basically a "dictatorship of mullahs" achieved by a Bolshevik-type blood bath and run by a shadow government that terrorizes Iranians inside and finances shadowy groups outside to protect a corrupt economic system. Its economy is dominated by shadow business empires controlled by the Rafsanjani family and its related gangs of collaborator mullahs, and its power is protected by a shadow army of mafia-type enforcers.

Ironically, the man who came out of nowhere and put in charge of the secretive power structure of the Republic has been America's poster child Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, is now the Godfather who is being pushed as the leading candidate to save the bankrupt Islamic Republic. That is why nothing short of revolution may save the country from the path of moral corruption, cultural deprivation and economic hardship of the majority of Iranians whose national wealth has been siphoned by the Godfather and his gang of mullahs.

Rafsanjani came into power in a secretive pact with General Huyser in which in lieu of the American assistance to dismantle the Shah's regime, which did not fit in with the American new strategy of fighting Communism. The monarchy was replaced with an Islamic Republic and that is how a bunch second rate businessmen and pistachio farmers became billion-dollar conglomerates and millionaire mullahs draining Iran and devastating its economy. Rafsanjani is what is wrong with Iran and Iran would take another step backward with him as president again.

In order to discover how the Iranians left, right and the center were duped into revolutionize Rafsanjani's family fortunes rather than revolutionizing Iran, the buck stops at Rafsanjani's door. Rafsanjani was getting his instruction from American Neo-Cons economists before it became fashionable in the U.S. The 1979 revolution transformed the Rafsanjani clan into commercial Rubber Barons. One brother headed the country's largest copper mine; another took control of the state-owned TV network; a brother-in-law became governor of Kerman province, while a cousin runs an outfit that dominates Iran's $400 million pistachio export business; a nephew and one of Rafsanjani's sons took key positions in the Ministry of Oil; another son heads the Tehran metro construction project.

Today, Rafsanjani's octopus family is in control of everything from narcotics, prostitution rings, and illicit alcohols to investments in U.S. satellite TV stations, Canada's private toll ways, Australia meat packing and wherever his multi-national corporation can operate. The Rafsanjani family operates through various foundations and front companies, that is why he innocently claims that he is a humble man with no assets. The family is also believed to control one of Iran's biggest oil engineering companies, a plant assembling Daewoo automobiles, and an airline company.

Rafsanjani has always been in the background assuring that the economic system would privatize and follow the Neo-liberal guideline of establishing a "free-market" economy for exploitation of the wealth of Iran by global corporations. He is the Godfather of Iran's "privatization" program during which mullahs and their allies took over public companies at dirt cheap prices. They expropriated the old regime's properties for free and established a new "crony capitalism" in Iran. It is this new class of Westernized mullahs who control many satellite TV and Internet sites, exploiting fugitive Iranians from Australia to Canada and from London to Los Angeles.

Rafsanjani somehow became the power behind Khomeini and worked behind the scene with Huyser and Fardoost and Ghareh Baghi (two turn coat generals) to make sure the Shah's nationalist generals would not derail the American designed Islamic Revolution. Later on when Death Squads blew up the entire emerging nationalist leadership, mysteriously Rafsanjani survived. He thanked God in public and the CIA in private for his miraculous survival. He made sure that economic system would be privatized and follow the Neo-liberal free market economy. He has run Iran for the past 25 years.

He assumed the powerful position of the Speaker of Parliament and the brain behind Khomeini in the 1980s. As a show of gratitude to his American masters he secretly negotiated a deal to help the Contra's in Nicaragua. He was the Iranian counter revolutionary who received and ate the infamous key shaped cake with Iran Contra front-man Oliver North. They both conspired to finance Death Squads to sabotage the revolutionary Sandanistas and indiscriminately kill civilians in order to ensure the failure of Sandanistas semi-socialist system. He was the recipient of the Bible signed by Ronald Regan which signaled the beginning of the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages deal. He was president from 1989 to 1997 and is now the chairman of the powerful Expediency Council, which is the seat of actual political power in Iran.

Compared to Ayatollah Taleghani, whom I had the privilege of being his cellmate in Quasr Prison, Rafsanjani has no revolutionary credentials. Yet Taleghani, who could have been a real revolutionary was set aside in favor of money hungry mullahs, led by the deal maker businessman Mullah Rafsanjani. He is the man who has done what the American Neo-cons would have loved to see in America: complete privatization of the economy and human beings to the point that one million Iranians would enjoy everything the West has to offer and the other 69 million live in exploitation, poverty, destitution and economic deprivation. Yet the population has been sedated by an ideology which makes them believe that it's all God's will. This is Calvanism pure and simple, not the revolutionary Islam of Ali and Hossien.

Rafsanjani and his gang never espoused revolutionary Islam. They used Islam in a pejorative way, the same way George Bush uses the term "liberation", "oppression" and "democracy". These are empty words used as propaganda to achieve certain aims and a smokescreens behind which they accomplish their real design. Revolutionary Islam can never condone the Pinochet type rein of terror that gave birth to the Islamic Republic; nor would have let public companies be privatized and given to mullahs or even would have let them rule a civic society and expropriate the means of production. Revolutionary Islam would have never permitted exploitation of man by fellow man.

It was Khomeini who proudly declared -- but never acted on -- a government of the oppressed by the oppressed to share and divide the communal wealth of a nation. Rafsanjani not only subjected Iran to Neo-liberal foreign trade but opened up the oil sector to private companies and put Iran's assets on the auction block for Conoco and Shell. Most of the Iran's finest properties and top contracts have ended up in the hands of mullahs, their relatives, associates and supporters. The multifaceted Rafsanjani family has converted Iranian wealth into billions-dollar investments in the United States, Canada and Europe. The Islamic Republic has really revolutionized and transformed the lives of a small pistachio farmers in Rafsnajan and changed them into billionaire mullahs in a quarter of a century while 80 percent of Iranians live in abject poverty.

Iran's social, economic and cultural problem cannot be solved by an election or a referendum. Iran needs a revolution. This generation of disillusioned young people need fresh blood, a person uncorrupted by power who wants to be a mirror image of pain, deprivation and grievances of its populous. He must promise to bring the utopian idea of government of the "oppressed" by the "oppressed" and punish those blood suckers who in the name of Islam have brought capitalist corruption to the country. He must promise to re-nationalize and expropriate assets and return them to the treasury and public ownership. If none of the candidates succeed to arouse public enthusiasm and participation in the political process, chances are that the alienated public, especially the youth, would fall prey to cause disturbances which might be followed by a public uprising to overthrow the whole system of reactionary Islam.

This might be the last chance to save whatever is left of the Islamic Republic which has become an EMPTY SHELL OF PROPAGANDA covering its rotten seeds of crime and corruption. Public apathy and non-participation in election would be the last times that the bell would be ringing for the American mullahs. It is the last chance to save a morally corrupt regime which its proponents have become "Warriors against God" and "Corrupt on Earth" and now would be waiting for the "Allah the Avenger."

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