Shah's son urges international protest

The son of the deposed Shah of Iran has urged nations worldwide to withdraw their ambassadors from Tehran to protest violence against opposition demonstrators.

Reza Pahlavi, who has lived in exile since his father was toppled in the 1979 revolution, has appealed for a UN investigation into human rights violations during recent unrest.

In a letter, Pahlavi urges UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon to press Iran to release those arrested and act to "halt the intolerable and increasingly dangerous march of events".

At least eight people died during protests on Sunday, while hundreds were arrested in the worst unrest in the aftermath of June's disputed presidential election.

SMH

H/T: The Jawa Report

Will Egypt Go the Way of Iran?

The current U.S. administration is supporting Egypt in the same way that Iran under the shah was backed by the U.S. in the 1970s — as a regional power supposedly doing its bidding. U.S. administrations, unfortunately, have taken a dim view of internalizing historical lessons, and it may prove particularly perilous with the Obama administration.

The improbable fall of the shah, and his replacement by the radical, anti-American, messianic Islamic Republic led by ayatollahs, could very well occur in Egypt. Hosni Mubarak’s 28-year martial-law rule is similar to that of the shah’s, albeit the shah’s treatment of his people was somewhat more moderate. And the shah at least strove to build a middle class by fostering economic growth and expanding educational opportunities to average Iranians.

As with the shah, Mubarak is receiving some of the most sophisticated offensive arms in the U.S. arsenal. According to the U.S. General Accounting Office, large quantities of F-16 fighter aircrafts, M1A1 heavy tanks, Apache helicopters, E-2C Hawkeye Airborne Early Warning spy planes, as well as an array of missiles including the Patriot missiles, shoulder-borne TOW and Stinger missiles, Harpoon anti-ship missiles, air-to-surface and surface-to-surface Hellfire missiles, Maverick air-to-surface guided missiles, and cluster bombs have been delivered to Egypt by the U.S. (Most of these Israel receives as well.) Egypt receives about $2.1 billion annually courtesy of U.S. taxpayers (in 1990 the U.S. forgave $7.1 billion in past Egyptian military debt).

Egypt’s name, according to a report by the Federation of American Scientists, can be found on the CIA’s list of known proliferators, along with Iran, Iraq, and North Korea.

On the eve of the Iranian Islamic revolution, few pundits would have predicted the demise of the shah. The influx of rural workers to the cities, especially Tehran, along with the inability of educated young men and women to find suitable employment became a time bomb which Ayatollah Khomeini exploited.

The Egyptian internal security forces are as brutal as the Iranian SAVAK, and Egypt’s exploding population (83 million at last count), high unemployment, low wages, rampant corruption, and nepotism (Gamal Mubarak, the president’s son, is being groomed to succeed the 81-year-old Hosni Mubarak) makes Egypt like Iran in 1979 — ready for an explosion.

The Muslim Brotherhood, with its largest following in Egypt, is waiting in the wings — and it may yet proclaim Egypt as the next Islamic republic. Opposition to Mubarak’s arbitrary rule and the possibility of Gamal Mubarak’s succession is a prescription for a combustible political situation.

More at Pajamas Media

Iran Opposition: Government More Brutal Than Shah

TEHRAN, Iran — The showdown between Iran's clerical leaders and a resilient protest movement sharpened Saturday, as opposition leaders accused the government of becoming more brutal than the shah's regime and authorities announced a new Internet crackdown.

Two of Iran's top pro-reform figures said in a Web statement that police used excessive force against anti-government protesters who took to the streets last week on the sidelines of state-sanctioned rallies to mark the 30th anniversary of the U.S. Embassy takeover.

Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mahdi Karroubi, who lead the protest movement rejecting the legitimacy of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's June re-election, said authorities wielding batons even struck women on their heads.

They called such treatment an ugly act that was not even seen during Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's response to the 1979 Islamic revolution that toppled him.

"I can't understand why they should treat people like this," Karroubi was quoted as saying by several opposition Web sites. "... I struggled against the Pahlavi regime for 15 years ... but there were no such crackdowns."

Such Web statements have been the mainstay of an opposition movement struggling to stay alive despite being brutally swept off the streets in the weeks after the June 12 election. Mousavi and his supporters contend that he was the rightful winner of the vote, but that Ahmadinejad was fraudulently declared the winner.

In a clear effort to silence the opposition's Internet outlet, Iranian authorities announced they were deploying a special police unit to sweep Web sites for political material and prosecute those deemed to be spreading lies, Iranian media reported Saturday.

Many opposition Web sites are already banned, but the opposition has continued to set up new Web sites within days of the old ones being blocked.

The new 12-member police unit will report to the prosecutor's office, signaling an intention to bring offenders to trial.

"Authorities know that the Internet is one of the few available channels for the opposition to make its voice heard. They want to silence opposition voices," said reform-minded journalist Akbar Montajabi, who described the measure as the latest set of restrictions imposed on media in the country.

Iran also pushed ahead Saturday with another key component in its battle with the opposition, sentencing a student activist to eight years in prison, according to the pro-opposition Web site Mowjcamp. More than 100 activists and some senior pro-reform figures have been on trial since August on charges of participating in rallies and plotting to overthrow the country's clerical rulers.

Foxnews

Tehran unlikely to dissuade Muslims from joining British Army

Anyone who counts Ayatollah Abdolhossein Moezi as a spiritual leader is unlikely to have joined the British military in the first place. He is the religious envoy of the same regime that calls Britain “the little Satan”.

Ayatollah Moezi is the director of the Islamic Centre of England, the London outpost of Iran’s neoconservative regime — a role to which he was personally appointed by Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

His leadership — as political as it is religious — is anathema to most British-Iranians, the majority of whom came to the country to escape the Islamic Revolution.

Shia Muslims, who traditionally take their spiritual guidance from imams such as Ayatollah Khamenei, are outnumbered in Britain by Sunni Muslims, mostly from Pakistan and Bangladesh, who do not all recognise any special priestly authority.

The late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini united Shias and Sunnis in overthrowing the Shah of Iran in the Islamic Revolution. It inspired a new wave of political Islam in both sects, and Sunnis and Shias alike responded with equal vigour to his fatwa on Salman Rushdie.

But Ayatollah Khamenei has failed to achieve the same popularity or leadership and the gap between the two sects has widened bitterly, and bloodily, in the conflicts in Iraq and Lebanon.

The crisis that followed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election in June has undermined both his political and religious leadership further. He is now openly questioned by politicians and clerics alike.

Iran’s increasingly hegemonic behaviour, and nuclear ambitions, has spooked both Arab states and populations across the Middle East. When Ayatollah Khamenei or his acolytes speak, it is no longer taken as the word of God but the word of the regime alone.

If a British Muslim, Shia or Sunni, has taken the decision to serve his country at war it will take more than Tehran’s mouthpiece to dissuade them.

Times Online

Iran's Grand Design for Iraq

By Amir Taheri

The mausoleum of Hussein Ibn Ali, the third Imam of Shiism, in Karbala will soon have a new gate. It took dozens of Iranian artisans several years to make the gate that, according to experts, is a masterpiece of Persian handicraft.

At first glance, there is nothing remarkable in that news item carried by Iranian media last week. After all, the mausoleum, like other Shiite places of pilgrimage in Iraq, was built by Iranians and maintained by their donations for centuries.

What is remarkable is that the Iran's state-owned media have chosen to present the report in the section devoted to "domestic news." The official news agency, IRNA, carried the item in its section of "news from the provinces."

Karbala, however, is located in Iraq, a country that, although a neighbor of Iran, has been an independent state for almost 90 years.

It is clear that many within Iran's ruling elite have difficulty acknowledging that fact. To them, concepts like national sovereignty have little meaning.

Official mullahs, such as Ahmad Khatami, a preacher at the Friday prayers at Tehran University, pretend to have never heard the word "Iraq." To them, Iraq is either "Bayn al-Nahrayn" (Mesopotamia) or "Atabat al-Aliyat" (The Holy shrines). Apparently, even the war that lasted eight years and left a million dead has not convinced them that Iraq is a sovereign state.

Dominating Iraq has been an ambition of Iranian elites since the Ottomans drove Persia out in 1797, after the death of Karim Khan Zand.

After the First World War and the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, the Shiite clergy tried to persuade the Qajar Shah in Tehran to annex the "holy" cities of Iraq. However, the Qajars, on their way to the graveyard of history, were in no position to dream of conquest.

Once it became clear that Iraq would become independent with British support, the clergy decided to boycott the process and kept Iraqi Shiites on the sidelines.

By the 1940s, the Iranian elite had more or less accepted independent Iraq as a fact.

In the 1950s, an attempt to link the two countries through royal marriage, however, failed, when the Shah's daughter, Princess Shahnaz, and Iraq's King Faisal failed to develop enough chemistry for the plot to proceed.

Read more,,,

Source: Asharq Alawsat

Fox News Reporting: Americans Held Hostage in Iran

It was America’s first showdown with radical Islam. On November 4, 1979, radical Islamist students stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran.

Initially, it was to be a brief protest against America’s decision to allow the exiled Shah of Iran to enter the United States for medical treatment.

Instead, the world watched as a 444-day hell began for 52 American hostages.

Thirty years later, Iran's unpopular leadership still paints America as the "great Satan," but the younger generations — those Iranians who had nothing to do with the Revolution — showed last spring that they do not always agree with the oppressive regime.

And at least two of the Iranian students who were closely involved in the Embassy takeover 30 years ago are now ardent critics of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's regime—the very same government they supported and helped to establish.

VIDEO: Fox News Reports on Iranian Hostage Crisis.

In this watershed moment of American history, Fox News Reporting talks to those who were there and goes inside the strategies of the players and the politicians at the epicenter of the Iranian hostage crisis.

Fox News examines how President Jimmy Carter struggled to solve the crisis in an election year, and talks with insiders in the Reagan administration about the negotiations leading to the hostages' eventual release.

We also hear the dramatic stories of four former hostages, including then acting Ambassador, Bruce Laingen.

"Fox News Reporting: Americans Held Hostage in Iran" hosted by Greta Van Susteren airs Friday, Nov. 6, at 10 p.m. ET only on Fox News Channel.

Source: Foxnews

How we all miss the Shah

THE widow of the Shah of Iran, Empress Farah Pahlavi, is still around to remind us how bad Jimmy Carter was as president -- long before his recent Israel-bashing and his calling Obama detractors racist.

If Carter hadn't let the Shah be overthrown in 1979, "there wouldn't be this problem in Afghanistan, nor would there have been the Iran-Iraq war," Pahlavi tells Avenue magazine.

"Iraq would never have dared to even send a plane over our country. The Gulf War wouldn't have happened, nor would any of the problems of the past 30 years, including the exporting of religious fanaticism."

In the intro to the interview, Bob Colacello talks about his and Andy Warhol's 1976 visit to Iran: "The fact that the empress would invite Andy Warhol, fresh from Studio 54, to the Imperial Palace . . . showed just how open-minded, not to say hip, Her Imperial Highness was." Unlike, say, the Ayatollah Khomeini.

Source: New York Post