Iran today
: UPDATE: Hoder gives us another succinct and passionate explanation of the antipathy most Iranians direct at the MKO, the group making news with arrests and burning members in Europe:
Imagine the American Talib, John Walker Lindh, times 30,000 or 40,000 thousands (more or less). People's Mojahedeen (or MKO) are the most hated group in Iran. You don't believe it, but many many people even hate them more than the clergy. Maybe the biggest reason is that they joined Saddam during the bloody 8 year of Iran-Iraq. Iranians know them as betrayers to the motherland who even joined the enemy and killed their Iranian people to fulfill their own political agenda.
They also assassinated many of the top thinkers and authorities of the Islamic revolution in the first years of the revolution which led to a lack of people who had the ability of thinking about the future and the appropriate strategy for the future of the revolution. With all their violent and bloody actions they even caused the regime to crack down on the relatively open political atmosphere, which eventually cost a lot for moderate opposition groups and ordinary people....
Now these bastards are making a scene by burning themselves for their leader, Masoud Rajavi, who is not much different than Saddam. I get very angry when I see that American and European politicians or their ordinary people are fooled by their well-organized and always dramatic protests.
Please, don't let them deceive you by their childish actions. They are terrorists who easily kill their colleagues because they refuse to obey their orders. They have absorbed the worst part of both Stalinist communism and Islam. They have to face justice in an international court, along with their biggest enemies, the dictator mullahs who started the whole violence in the name of Islam.
As is clear here and in the paragraphs below, it's rare that one group raises such unanimous bile. The U.S. labeled them terrorists. The Iranian people hate them. The Iranian mullahs hate them. So Hoder's right; we must not be fooled into thinking that they represent Iranian opposition. More...
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: Alireza Doostdar, who runs the superb Persian Blogger Chronicles, has started a third blog, where he gives you a succinct backgrounder on the MKO, the group just arrested in Paris (where folks have been setting themselves on fire):
The European Union, as well as Iran consider them to be a terrorist group. The U.S. also declared them to be a terrorist group several years ago and attacked their positions during the war against Iraq, apparently because of their cooperation with Saddam's regime. Later, the U.S. army reached a ceasefire with them, but three weeks later, had them disarmed.... Among all the various Iranian groups, I don't think there is any hated more by Iranians than the MKO, particularly because of their outright support for Saddam during his war against Iran. They were helpful to Saddam in other ways too, including in his suppression of the Shia uprising in southern Iraq after the first Persian Gulf War in 1991.
: Notes from an
Iranian Girl writes about the MKO self-immolaters:
Iran Protesters Set Fire to Selves... what difference does it make where they are from... the Important thing is the pain that make somebody prefer burning in fire than continuing life in this world…
As I have said Mujahedeens [MKO] are members of a group that both people & government hate them; of course that makes a contrast, a same enemy for both people & leaders! So just imagine their situation as an opposition group... but you know, Most of this group's members are exposed people who have been deceived & their existence is the least important thing for the leaders of group… they are called terrorists out of country & traitors inside, that is a bleak situation...
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Pejman says these are things you can do.
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: Winds of Change has lots and lots of updates.dounloud gay movie
: Hoder gives us a wildly comprehensive list of Iranian bloggers in English (not all covering news and politics). Read, quote, link.dounloud gay movie
: Lest you continue to think that Iran is a strange and alien land, here's Tehran's No. 1 fast-food restaurant: Super Star Burger. (I think I'll take that over The House of Dizi, a meat-stew joint.) [via Persian Weblog]dounloud gay movie
Feeb Beeb dweebs
: Let's exhume this horse so we can beat it up again: The BBC is anti-American in all sense of the word, not only because it is hostile to us but also because it is anti-matter to our matter; it is the great snot factory.
This morning, listening to the obnoxiously accented Judy Swallow (sounds like a name for a porn star to me) on BBC Newshour, she repeated again and again that Paul Bremer had outlawed free speech and free assembly in Iraq and that people could not protest against the American occupation. She then interviewed a New York Times reporter who said that was quite overstated, that there have been protests and that Bremer outlawed only inciting attacks on U.S. forces. She didn't apologize. She didn't backtrack.
A few days ago, I pointed to this BBC show, What the World Thinks of America, and said I dreaded to hear what it would say about it. Well, yesterday, FoxNews finally picked up on this and had a field day repeating the anti-Americanisms of this special (with only a Tokyo Rose American BBC employee to defend them).
The BBC took a poll and among the loaded questions was this: They asked the audience to guess whether the world thought we were "humble" or "arrogant." You get one guess. But look at the actual poll and you'll see that neither word came out first in the results. Most of the world first calls us.... drumroll, please.... FREE. dounloud gay movie
: And in related news... The British independent television commission threw out complaints that FoxNews' coverage of the war was biased. [via IWantMedia]dounloud gay movie
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