Newsweek reports that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei will be the last Supreme Leader of the country, ever. Khamenei is only the second Supreme Leader the country has ever had, the first being Khomeini. His successor has proven to be less successful at being the most powerful voice in the country according to the clerical leadership.
Khamenei’s response to the massive election demonstrations this past summer reaffirmed a longstanding but secretive belief among a majority of Iran’s religious teachers and scholars: supreme clerical rule, no matter who is at the helm, can lead only to despotism and should be abolished. There can be no absolute power because, as Khamenei showed, men are fallible. It’s well enough understood outside Iran that those clerics have found common cause with the street demonstrators; what the rest of the world hasn’t realized yet is that they also want Khamenei gone.
The Supreme Leader will hold the position until he dies at which point the decision to eliminate the title could be made. Whether or not the standing theocratic order will be around that long is an entirely different question. The street protests continue sporadically and Neda Agha Soltan continues to be a powerful global symbol of the Iranian regime’s brutality (as we saw on the blog recently: Neda’s boyfriend speaks after escaping Iran).
Caspian Makan, a 38 year old Iranian photographer, has had a terrible few months. Amid massive street protests against Iran’s government his girlfriend, Neda Agha Soltan, died a bloody and disturbing death. And the whole watched it on YouTube. Things only got worse for Makan from there. He spent months in the dreaded Evin Prison and upon release, decided to flee the country for his own safety.
On the day of her death, Caspian was out with his camera in another part of the city. “I was taking pictures of the protests and the protesters that day. It was hard to take pictures as the security guards were beating up protesters. I used my mobile’s camera when I couldn’t use my big camera. It was six to seven in the evening when I started seeing people get shot and injured. I thought of Neda a lot. I was very worried for her. I wanted to call her but the mobile phone system had been disconnected and I couldn’t contact her at all. I didn’t sleep that night. The terrible scenes were going through my head. I was sitting in front of my computer, looking at the photos I had taken. Around six in the morning my mobile rang. It was Neda’s number. But it wasn’t her. It was her sister. She said, ‘Caspian, Neda is gone!’ I didn’t understand what she meant. I couldn’t believe what she was telling me.”
The LA Times has a fantastic profile of an Iranian couple who were both members of the Basiji – the hard-line militia group that provides much of the muscle behind the governments crackdowns on the opposition. It’s an incredibly personal story of transformation.
Once during a law class she took to help with her part-time job at a law office, the subject was women’s rights. Under Iranian law, the professor said, a woman was worth half a man when it came to court testimony or inheritance.
“That’s not fair,” she burst out, reminded of the bitter child-custody battle that her sister had endured, and lost, against an abusive husband.
“You’re a feminist,” the professor accused her.
That night, she pulled out a dictionary and looked up “feminist.”
She read the definition, and decided that she was.
The basij have long fascinated watchers of Iran, but given their enmity to the West, rarely speak with Western journalists. This profile seems to have been possible because the writer was longtime friends of the couple. Kouross Esmaeli, a journalist working with Collective Journalism for Current was able to get unprecedented access to the group a few years ago and some of its members gave him a very frank depiction of their worldview.
“I don’t know why in this country it’s not allowed to make any kind of criticism of you,” said the student, wearing a long-sleeved blue polo shirt and appearing calm.
“In the past three to five years that I have been reading newspapers, I have seen no criticism of you, not even by the Assembly of Experts, whose duty is to criticize and supervise the performance of the leader,” he said, referring to the clerical body that chooses the country’s supreme leader.
Khamenei countered, “We welcome criticism. We never said not to criticize us. … There’s plenty of criticism that I receive,” according to accounts in state media and on opposition Web sites.
Contrary to the stories of the thousands of protesters and critics of the country’s election results – Mahmoud Vahidnia has faced no repercussions. In fact the incident was originally reported by the Supreme Leader’s office – touting the country’s tolerance for healthy debate. Initially many questioned whether the incident was staged for such a purpose – though opposition leaders are now saying the incident was the real deal.
Here’s some video (albeit in Persian) of the meeting with a little bit of Vahidnia at the podium.
From the irony files: The Daily Telegraph has investigated a photograph taken of Ahmadinejad in 2008 and determined that Holocaust-denying Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may well have a Jewish past.
A close-up of the document reveals he was previously known as Sabourjian – a Jewish name meaning cloth weaver.
The short note scrawled on the card suggests his family changed its name to Ahmadinejad when they converted to embrace Islam after his birth.
From the Daily Telegraph
The article goes on to wonder if the Iranian President’s vitriol for Jewish people is some sort of overcompensation.
This is obviously a very fascinating story if wholly accurate. It strikes me though a possibly a little too neat. While I trust that the Daily Telegraph has accurately translated the text on the identity card – I wonder about some of the other logic. Does the Jewish name mean a Jewish family? Are they certain it was his parents who held the name? Anyone who has any more insight into this, please weigh in.
What is happening in Geneva?? I just can’t stand the waiting! Are they finally going to work it out?
Hah. No. Probably not. It’s helpful to remember that in the world of foreign policy things can move glacially slow. The question for the P5+1 talks with Iran happening in Geneva is what direction is that icy relationship moving?
For its part, officials and experts said, Iran is likely to turn up with a narrow agenda on its nuclear program, but a host of other issues, including overhauling the United Nations; giving greater voice to non-Western countries; and universal nuclear disarmament. It laid these out in a five-page proposal last month, which was met with derision by Obama administration officials.
FP Passport has the State Department’s take on the meetings in this morning’s “Briefing Skipper” (a distillation of the State Department press briefing):
Crowley sought to manage expectations about the new talks with Iranian officials. “I wouldn’t expect a call for sanctions tomorrow night at the end of this meeting. I think we’re looking for a process,” he said. He acknowledged that Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki was in Washington and that the State Department granted his visa request on the basis he wanted to visit the Iranian Interest section at the Pakistani embassy. There were no plans for him to meet administration officials, Crowley said. “I wouldn’t read too much into this,” Crowley cautioned the reporters. Right…
So we’ll see what officials (from both sides) emerge with. But really the most notable thing happening in Switzerland today is the fact that the US and Iran are meeting at all.
When demonstrators took to the streets after Iran’s disputed Presidential election, many of them were students. That’s why, as Iran’s universities opened back up to students this week, many expected widespread student demonstrations.
The NY Times Lede Blog links to this great first-person video walking along with protests at Tehran University.
As for the other big Iran story: potential threats to the regime’s reputation from abroad. As news from the US is that Obama is preparing to set up a new round of sanctions, Tehran announced today that it will allow inspectors from the IAEA to come in and take a look around the Qom facility revealed last week. What will they find? A facility for purely civilian use? More roadblocks? We’ll see…
New York may see a taste of Tehran this week as Iranians from around the world descend on the city to protest Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This isn’t the first time Ahmadinejad has attracted protests in New York (and once a hilarious music video by Andy Samberg), but it will be the first opportunity for the world’s #iranelection protestors to confront him outside of the Islamic Republic.
The New York protests are expected to be the largest gathering of Iranians in exile since the early days of the Islamic Revolution. In 1977, nearly ten thousand people gathered in Washington to oppose Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s visit to the White House. That rally became a turning point in the revolution, showing that the Shah was on shaky ground at home.
Anybody out there in NY? Outside of how bad the traffic is with the General Assembly in town, any specific encounters with Iranian protests?
Brief (past) encounters with Ahmadinejad:
– A student’s perspective on Ahmadinejad’s controversial visit to Columbia University: Iran Invades Columbia (Video)
– And Current’s Supernews on that same visit: Oh That Mahmoud
Today is Qods Day in Iran, an annual anti-Israel holiday (sic). As people were expected to already be out in the streets, opposition leaders saw an opportunity to serve Iran’s leaders another round of demonstrations.
It’s been nearly three months since the controversial elections in Tehran set the streets afire and for the most part things look to have settled down. The US media’s focused on DC and #iranelection is mostly out of the trending topics on Twitter. But these protests are a strong reminder that anti-Ahmadinejad sentiments are still brewing.
Meanwhile, the US is about to sit down and talk with Iran in October. The Obama Administration promised dialogue with Iran, no matter who its leaders were, and they seem to be delivering on that promise. But is it worth talking? Will this regime last? Do talks with the West help to further legitimize them?
The NYTimes Lede Blog has a fascinating story about Hassan Abdulrahman, an American ex-pat living in Tehran who runs the web site for Press TV, Iran’s English language state news outlet. He’s perhaps best known for an assassination he carried out on American soil at Iran’s behest.
“At first, Mr. Abdulrahman told The New Yorker in 2002, he tried to convince the Iranians to let him kill a more prominent American target. He suggested either Henry Kissinger or Kermit Roosevelt — a grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt who had orchestrated the 1953 plot to depose Iran’s prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, and return the Shah to power. But his Iranian handlers were less concerned with striking a symbolic blow than with eliminating Ali Akbar Tabatabai, the exile who was holding meetings of a counter-revolutionary group at his home in Bethesda at the time.”
Seriously, an American national carrying out an assassination for a foreign power on US soil? Wow.
Meanwhile, things in Iran have calmed down quite a bit since the election, but there are still things bubbling under the surface. Just this week opposition leaders called for a rally on Friday, during Qods day.
