Iran Protests 2

sanizadeh wrote:

Not at all. An act of killing an armed militia member who is shooting people to death on the scene, is self-defence not lynching. Do I approve it? Absolutely. It is recognized in western law as well. Did you think the rights of Baruch Goldstein was abused when he was killed by the Palestinians just as he had massacred 37 of them? I don't think you did.  

And you keep repeating that the protestors were shot at when they attacked a police station? who said that? The Iranian state TV! Now is that something we are supposed to believe?

Yes, to the best of my knowledge and based on what I heard, they were no core group of demonstrators trying to "push the envelope". They did try to defend themselves when attacked. But no provocation has been reported by any independent media.

I don't think one should try to make statements just based on his speculations, or to call reported facts "bullshit", without having more direct or first hand knowledge of the situation. Do you have such first hand knowledge when you call my points "bullshit", or is it that you just know things?

Yes in fact, I would say that you could charachterized the killing of Baruch Goldstein as a lynching. After he was subdued with a fire extinguisher, he should by all rights have been handed over to the authorities.So yes, I do think his rights were abused when he was beaten to death, after he was subdued and disarmed.

Your description combined with the doctors description of the original "arrest" of the Basiji militiaman who was suspected of killing Neda clearly demonstrate that the person was fully in control of the demonstrators and no longer a threat. Furthermore, he was let go, as you pointed out and then later recaptured. We don't even really know if the person in the first instance, is the person in the second instance, for sure, or whether it was not someone who univolved in the killing and then picked up later.

But in either case, once captured, and one presumes disarmed, the person no longer is a credible threat, so one has to assume that this was simply vigilante violence.

Who is to know? Certainly not I. Of course one would be concerned about the person being tried and so on and so forth, and also about what will happen if they are released, and the anger of people is certainly understandable, but it is a pretense to say that he was "an armed militia member who is shooting people to death on the scene", since of course he would have been shooting the people who were trying to arrest him, and must have been in the control of the demonstrators in order for them to beat him to death.

I am certainly not going to argue if such is justified, or not, but lets not try and paint a false picture of these things, were lily-white protestors happen to beat someone to death as an act of self-defence. Basically you have to be entirely in control of someone in order to beat them to death, it is hard to do at 20 paces when they are shooting at you.

My personal feeling is that posing these events as simply an issue of peaceful protestors against violent security forces is way too oversimplified. What we are really talking about is an escalation of violence, in a situation were mutual fear is a fundamental factor. The actions of individuals on either side here could be the igniting spark that causes an erruption of violence in any given situation, and I do note, that in early scenes of the demonstrating, what we see is police backing off from demonstrators, not just Basiji militiamen brazenly provoking demonstrators, though this is also evident.

Does a guerrilla army have the right to summarily shoot prisoners because they are an encumberance and therefore a liability to that army? Well, that is a tough question, and under the circumstances, such may even be justifiable, but lets not pretend that it is something other than it is: Summary Execution.

Strange article that.

In the first case there is a serious misconstruction of the kind of class analysis that Bishra ia using. Class is not something derived from simple statistics, One does not automatically drop from the middle class, and become lower class if one enters university, and then fails to get a well paying job afterward. What one often becomes is someone with middle class expectations and aspirations who is not having those aspirations and expectations fulfilled.

In the context of this particular struggle, it could very well be that a "middle class" revolt would indeed be predicated on the failure of the society to fulfill those expectations, and so, simply demonstrating that there is a substantial number of unemployed people under 30, does not in and of itself undermine Bishra's analysis. I am not going to venture a guess as to whether of not Bishra is right about the class constitution of those in revolt, against those in power, and who they represent, but as far as s deconstruction of Bishra's analysis, this simply does not cut it.

In the second case, there is precision little about how Bishra's analysis expresses a "latent defeated mentalities", except that this seems like a convenient throwaway line, dangled without an arguement or proof. I will say that calling Nasralah and Bishra "defeatists" is completely absurd, prima facie.

This brings me to the third point. If there is anything that Arabs know about this particular struggle, is that to be in opposition to the official enemies of the west is to find oneself hailed as a liberator of ones people, and to have ones name become a household world over night, whereas to be Azmi Bishra, a former elected Arab member of Knesset, who was outspoken about making Israel a country of all its people, and a supporter of popular revolt against tyrrany, and a lifelong proponent of "democratic" means, is to be persecuted, stripped of ones elected office, deemed a traitor and to be forced into exile, without even cursory comment from the western press.

Problematic? If there is anything problematic it is a Palestinian stateman trying to present a social analysis of Iran without having much knowledge of the Iranian society. Bishara's false assumption, that the poor support Ahmadinejad, is the main basis for his faulty analysis. It is a pity that the arab intellectutals seem so blinded by Ahmadinejad's rhetoric that they neglect to notice how much his policies, political, economical or social, have been completely in line with what the neoconservatives and pro-Israel crowd want.

Then, it is quite telling that a well-known leftist Iranian post-colonialist intellectual like Hamid Dabashi, who is a leading anti-war and pro-palestinian figure in the academia, feels necessary to rebuke the false assumptions in Bishara's piece. Can anyone here find a piece from any anti-imperialist or leftist Iranian in favour of the recent election results? I haven't seen any.   

sanizadeh wrote:

Then, it is quite telling that a well-known leftist Iranian post-colonialist intellectual like Hamid Dabashi, who is a leading anti-war and pro-palestinian figure in the academia, feels necessary to rebuke the false assumptions in Bishara's piece. Can anyone here find a piece from any anti-imperialist or leftist Iranian in favour of the recent election results? I haven't seen any.   

You may want to argue that Bishra's assumption is false. That is an entirely different than Dabashi completely sidestepping the arguement about class that is made, and using a surface statistical analysis to do so, where people's class interests are simply a reflection of their immediate material circumstance. Furthermore, you seem completely content with this "post-colonialist" intellectual lecturing Arabs about their "defeated mindset".

You seem pretty sure fo the fact that having prominent Iranian intellectuals attacking prominent Arab dissidents, such as Nasralah and Bishra as examples of "defeated mentalities", is not what the "neo-conservatives" want? I am not so sure. How the hell did Arab defeatism get in here anyway? Or could not Dabashi contain his desire to do a little Arab bashing by taking up the traditional line of blaming them for their own mifortunes, as if this is not thematic in anti-Arab Zionist propaganda?

It would have been sufficient to simply deconstruct what is wrong with Bishra's critique of the present circumstances about iran, don't you think? Or is bashing Arabs dissidents as examples of "defeated mentalities" absolutely necessary to the critique?

If Dabashi wants to attack the fundamental "assumption" that Bishra has made, then he would do better to attack the basis of the assumption, internal to the arguement, as opposed sidestepping it, and engaging in broad as hominem sideswipes, about "latent defeated mentalities".

I wish to contribute a few links on this subject, following what Mori wrote on [url=http://moriab.blogspot.com/2009/07/martial-law-government-of-khamenei.ht... blog[/url]:

Quote:

Please continue reporting about Iran - dont stop now - crime against humanity is happening now! CNN and other American or European news media must continue their reporting about Iran at this crucial juncture of the history of Iran. A big crime against humanity is happening right now in Iran by Khamenei -Ahmadinejad and it is our moral and humane duty to report about all these injustices in Iran. [...] History is requesting from you to do so when the coup d'état regime of Khamenei-Ahmadinejad for silencing everyone totally shut down the reporting from Iran.

And following what [em]Antiwar[/em]'s [url=http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2009/06/28/liberty-and-the-tehran-spr... Raimondo[/url] wrote about being between a rock and a hard place when it comes to committing oneself to supporting the protesters in Iran:

Quote:

"[T]he U.S. government today is the greatest obstacle to the worldwide freedom movement, not its ally: any groups or media outlets it controls are merely extensions of U.S. foreign policy, subject to its machinations and sudden policy reversals, and ultimately fated to betray the cause of human liberty. We do that cause no favors by supporting Washington in its efforts, [b]yet by disdaining the genuine impulse of peoples everywhere to be free, we commit a moral crime.[/b]" [em][emphasis mine][/em]

Here then are a few links that I've been following, which I hope you will find useful. In a couple of cases, I've linked to an interesting article. You can go to the main page from there.

[url=http://tehranbureau.com/regime-survive/]Tehran Bureau[/url] is doing superb work.

There's this Iranian professor, in exile I guess, who blogs at [url=http://windowsoniran.wordpress.com/2009/07/01/windows-on-iran-72-electio... on Iran[/url]. A great site! 

Very interesting is Naj's blog, [url=http://iranfacts.blogspot.com/]Iran Facts[/url]. 

This person is doing back-breaking work trying to keep us to date with the latest: [url=http://www.caulleyscorner.com/IranNews/index.htm]Iran News - One Stop Source[/url] 

A heart-wrenching site: [url=http://iranbodycount.blogspot.com/]Iran Body Count[/url] 

Finally, for now, for those of us who need incentive to get involved, if only to just email interesting links to friends & family or just post a link on your blog: [url=http://www.sidewalklyrics.com/?p=835]Meet Mr. Abbasi[/url]!

"...one is shown to be carrying military grade small arms."

"Interestingly, it now seems to the photo of the protestor carrying the rifle has been removed from the Pro-Protestor blog from which I got found it." 

are you referring to the photo in #14?

Something to take into consideration when reading the column at the link I posted above, [em]Clerical Group Defies Leader on Disputed Iran Election[/em]: [url=http://enduringamerica.com/2009/07/05/iran-and-the-clerics-who-are-the-a... are the "Association of Teachers and Researchers of Qom?"[/url]

It's pretty unfortunate that bloggers are deleting phographic evidence that is not entirely favourable to the anti-Amedinejad camp. The photo Doug posted is of protestors trying to get into some kind of secured compound or other.

It's hard to tell with a picture Cueball.  They could very well be the militia for all we know.  And besides, that little pea shooter has all the look of a childs toy.  Both sides will have an interest in photographic propaganda.  Nice clarity in that pic too.  Almost like he was posing.

It seems that doug's photo is indeed a photo taken from the June 15th attack on the Basiji HQ in Tehran on June 15th, and the protestors are clearly trying to scale the walls. Here is the uneditorialized version of the photo:

Video footage of the event can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBWEw2N78pY

One can clearly see that the molotov cocktails have been thrown into the compound, and also more footage of the same scene, shown through Iranian news sources clearly show that there is an organized assault on the Basiji HQ:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W20A52QhCNw

From the various sources it is possible to get a fairly clear picture of what is happening here, and this is not simply an episode of some peaceful demonstrators defending themselves against police assault, but an organized attack upon a police facility. Even the person who collected the film footage describes it as an "attack against a base". This not a matter of police provacateurs, staged dramatics or Iranian state propaganda as some have alleged here.

Any such attempt in North America, or Europe, would certainly result in the police firing upon demonstrators.

I highly doubt he is a foreign plant, or agent of anyone. I am sure that many Iranians have aquired weapons over the years. That really isn't the point. The point is that the contention that the actions of all protestors were universally non-violent and provoked is nonesense. As with most of these kinds of things there was a hard core of protestors who were more than willing to move the cause to a higher level of insurgency. No doubt also there were members of the Baiji who also escalated tensions.

Among other things it is quite evident that the Basiji are badly trained and organized, as can be seen in numerous you tube videos. The one of 6 or 7 of them riding motorcycles into a potentially hostile crowd, then being dismounted and assaulted shows how foolish they are. That kind of thing is not only ineffective, it is also likely to get you killed.

It is quite evident that on June 15th a large group of protestors assaulted a police compound and were shot at. Not suprising at all. Nor is it particulaly evidence of police excess.

And the "deciding" seems to be a nuclear based decision. I am dismayed (to put it lightly) that Israel will possibly start a war with Iran over Iran's supposed nuclear ability, while Israel can, apparently with immunity, stockpile their own nuclear weapons.

CBC reported this evening that Saudi Arabia is going to allow Israel to use it's airspace to attack Iran.

Stargazer wrote:

CBC reported this evening that Saudi Arabia is going to allow Israel to use it's airspace to attack Iran.

Interesting, as it seems that  big oil, gas and mining has consolidated their global hegemony and are now willing to act with impunity against all the people's of the world.

Cueball wrote:

It is quite evident that on June 15th a large group of protestors assaulted a police compound and were shot at. Not suprising at all. Nor is it particulaly evidence of police excess.

By the way so based on you view, the Israelis shooting at rock throwing Palestinian youth was not "particularly evidence of police excess" either, right?

You know, I am surprised to hear this from you. With this statement it will be hard for you in future to oppose any kind of police reactions to civilian protests, be it in Palestine, in anti-globalism marches, etc. Is this what you truly believe in, or you are just trying to play devil advocate?

As usual the US/Israel come to the aid of hardliners in Iran. No surprise there. The surprise is about those who still believe this regime is still anti-imperialist. Khamenei needs Israel, and Israel need him.

[url=http://iran.whyweprotest.net/news-current-events/9895-canadian-mps-suppo... MPs supporting of human rights in Iran[/url]

[url=http://www.iranian-heroes.org/]Light a candle![/url]

[url=http://www.payvand.com/news/09/jul/1026.html]A petition to protest against repressions in Iran[/url]

On that latter point, see [url=http://www.humanrights-ir.org/php/view_en.php?objnr=284]here[/url] [em][via [url=http://niacblog.wordpress.com/2009/07/08/iran-updates-july-8/]NIAC's blog[/url]][/em].

MPT9Smm

The submachine gun MPT9 cal. 9 mm is an automatic weapon and can be used for either single and bursts selectively from all shooting positions. The weapon is loaded directly with pressure of power gas and its barrel cooled with air. Cartridges are fed from 30 round box type magazine, in order to carry the weapon easily and better usage it is usually equipped with retractable butt stock, if required it can be replaced with fix butt stock.

http://www.diomil.ir/en/aig.aspx

July 9th demonstrations on Twitter [url=http://twitter.com/bistoon]here[/url] [em][via [url=http://niacblog.wordpress.com/2009/07/09/iran-updates-july-9/]NIAC's blog[/url]][/em]

Andrew Sullivan's [em]The Daily Dish[/em] is also putting out information: [url=http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/07/iran-erupts... and [url=http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/07/more-footag... and [url=http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/07/livetweetin....

There will be updates as more news comes through, I'm sure.