SOURCES and NOTES - Narration - Pt.4, So What? Back in America

Back in America ...
Footage from the September 1, 2008 march on the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, MN

Old Iran hand ...
is Robert Tait, "who spent nearly three years in Iran as a correspondent for the Guardian until he was forced to leave last December when the government refused to renew his visa."
SOURCE: www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/iran-fury.html

"The regime feeds off American hostility. Every time there's another threat from Washington, that gives them more oxygen. ... They won't be able to use this threat indefinitely. There's a widespread feeling in Iran that the way things are isn't the way they should be. People believe that too much isolation has not been good for them. But as long as there seems to be a clear and present danger, the government has what it sees as a justification to do whatever it wants."
SOURCE: www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/iran-fury.html

Comments on the Iran-Iraq War

SOURCE: Wikipedia:
"Not all saw the war in negative terms. The Islamic Revolution of Iran was strengthened and radicalized. [Nasr, Vali, The Shia Revival, Norton, (2006), p.140]
The Iranian government-owned Etelaat newspaper wrote:

"There is not a single school or town that is excluded from the happiness of waging war, from drinking the exquisite elixir of death or from the sweet death of the martyr, who dies in order to live forever in paradise." [Column in Etelaat, [[April 4]], [[1983]], quoted in Molavi, Afshin, Soul of Iran, Norton, (2006)]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Iraq_War

COMMENT: Can it be that when the hardliners of the Islamic Republic consider the possibility of an American attack they remember ...

the Hostage Crisis at the Den of Spies - that established decades of American enmity towards Iran but whose popularity at home was so strong it led to the downfall of Bazargan's moderate Provisional Government and the passage of the theocratic constitution? and ...

the Iran-Iraq War - the last time another country invaded Iran? how the swelling of patriotism solidified the Islamic Revolution?

SOURCES and NOTES - Narration - Pt.4, So What? Thoughts

And surely you wouldn’t want anything to happen to her!!

COMMENT: This Iranian university student we met in Tehran was not only a charmer, but not-at-all pro-regime. The most pro-reform and pro-democracy demographic in Iran is women, young, and educated. North Tehran is also ground zero anti-regime territory. This was filmed in far north Tehran.

Issue of the Hostage Crisis

So what can you say to the neocon who argues that
If the issue is the injustice of the 1953 coup and Shah’s dictatorship,
then the solution to bad relations is justice. But if the issue is spite, hatred, domination … then fair play can’t really help better relations with Iran.
How can anything - except maybe force?

COMMENT: According to Middle East Expert William R.Polk: “One is the hostage issue at the American embassy [in Tehran] which has left a very deep and still raw scar on American public opinion. Throughout America people still mention that.”

SOURCE: Middle East Expert William R.Polk on United States foreign policy toward Iran interviewed by Ali Fathollah-Nejad at http://www.juancole.com/]

SOURCES and NOTES - Narration - Pt.3 - Economics

Arid Land
10% arable land
SOURCE: http://72.14.205.104/search?q=cache:uvury3Leg0MJ:earthtrends.wri.org/pdf_library/country_profiles/agr_cou_364.pdf+iran+arable+land+pasture&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&gl=us

Gas Rationing

As one critic put it: "Iran is blowing its oil profits on petrol subsidies, so that people end up spending hours a day in traffic jams. ... At this rate, Iran will burn through its oil wealth in a generation"

SOURCE: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/11/iran?gusrc=rss&feed=worldnews
Julian Borger, “High-octane politics,” ''Guardian'', March 11, 2008

Since the rationing started you only get 26/gallons a month per car at that price. If you want more, it’s a buck and a half a gallon, or at least it was in May.

SOURCE: http://www.payvand.com/news/08/may/1181.html ]
[ http://www.aspo-usa.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=165&Itemid=2 “Gas Subsidies and Iran” Written by Dave Cohen, 05 July 2007 ]

SOURCES and NOTES - Narration - Pt.3 - Officials

Here’s the head of the government organization that organized our tour in Iran

He was the Director of the Center for Interreligious Dialogue, which was part of the Organization of Islamic Culture and Relations. You may remember him from the Question on Sunnis in Iran in Part 2.

Protect the young people from post-modernism with religious media – as though Iranian TV wasn’t force-feeding all the religious programming they could already.

Iranian TV (Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting http://www.irib.ir/English/) is dominated by conservatives. SOURCE: Soul of Iran by Afshin Molavi, Norton, 2005, (for example Molavi credits their favorable coverage with of Ahmadinejad with helping him beat Rafsanjani in the 2005 presidential race)
Since the advent of satellite TV it has had to compete with popular commercial television and is reputed to be more entertaining than it was during Khomeini's time.


Dr. Mahdi Mostafavi, was the head of the Islamic Culture and Relations Organisation of Iran.
... who’s been described in the Western press as a member of President Ahmadinejad’s inner circle
SOURCE: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/2061633/Pope-avoids-Iran


MY QUESTION ON SHARIAH INNOVATION

The fatwa declared that the interests of Islamic Republic have precedence over "secondary ordinances" of Islam.

An example of critics maintaining the fatwa meant Khomeini's Islamic state was an ideological failure:
SOURCE: http://gemsofislamism.tripod.com/khomeini_promises_kept.html#Laws_in_Islam

The fatwa was highlighted by the regime's critics because the raison d'etre for the overthrow of the Shah, according to Khomeini, was the Shah's failure to strictly adhere to the laws of Islam.
Khomeini had proclaimed before the revolution that
"No one has the right to legislate and no law may be executed except the law of God ... The law of Islam, divine command, has absolute authority over all individuals AND the Islamic government."

SOURCE: Khomeini in exile January-February 1970, Islamic Government by Ayatollah Khomenei, 1970 p.55 of Islam and Revolution : Writings and Declarations of Imam Khomeini

Some details on the labor law that provoked the fatwa and the reasoning behind the fatwa by a blogger unsympatheic to Khomeini:
http://gemsofislamism.tripod.com/khomeini_promises_kept.html#footnote_72a

A interpretation of the issue by an academic sympathetic to the regime:
http://www.imamreza.net/eng/imamreza.php?id=5978
(scroll down to: iv) Al-Hukm al-Awaly and al-Hukm al-Sanavy )

SOURCES and NOTES - Narration - Pt.2 - Bahai

And one last religious minority – the Bahais – the one religion officially not tolerated in the Islamic Republic.
This is their leadership, all of whom were recently busted and imprisoned by the Ministry of Intelligence.
SOURCE: http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/05/16/iran.bahais/

About 200 Bahais, mostly leaders have been killed since the revolution.
SOURCE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Bah%C3%A1%27%C3%ADs

The regime says they are conspiring with foreign enemies. The Bahais say they are being persecuted because they are considered apostates.
SOURCE: http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/05/22/iran.bahais/index.html

Unlike Jundallah, no one besides the Islamic regime has accused them of involvement in violence.
COMMENT: At least I have never found anything saying so.

SOURCES and NOTES - Narration - Pt.2 - Sunnis

It is true that most of the Sunnis are ethnic minorities living near Iran’s borders, but Tehran’s boom town job market has attracted some of them, one million according to that International Religious Freedom Report.
SOURCE: http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/irf/2004/35497.htm

Even allowing for exaggeration there must be enough for a mosque. 10%, 15% of the population of Tehran being well over a million people.
SOURCE: Population of greater Tehran is estimated at 14 million

But the issue of Shia Sunni relations in Iran is super sensitive. It’s not just the carnage in Iraq. A Sunni fundamentalist insurgent group in eastern Iran - Jundallah - claims to have killed 400 Iranian soldiers.
SOURCE: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IB24Ak01.html

And it appears they’re getting aid from the US government. It’s not just the Islamist regime that says so. Seymor Hersh a US journalist with good ties to the US military wrote about it in the New Yorker magazine.
SOURCE: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/07/080707fa_fact_hersh

SOURCES and NOTES - Narration - Pt.2 - Jews

Jews of Persia

An even older religious minority in Iran are Jews.
The Persian Jewish community stretches back nearly 3000 years when Jews were freed from Babylonian captivity by Persia's King Cyrus the Great.

Mufti of Jerusalem

In the West we hear of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem visiting Hitler, Arab soldier helping out the Fuehrer in Serbia and the popularity of the anti-Semitic classic Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the Muslim world. 20sIn Iran the MP told us a story of how Nazi’s called Jews “Muslims” - the idea being the Nazis didn’t know or care what the difference was between the two Semitic groups.

SOURCE: “From his appointment in 1921 by the British as the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Husseini was a major figure, and during the 1930s and 1940s he was the recognized leader--recognized, that is, by the British Mandate authorities and the Zionist leadership and, not least, by the leaders of the surrounding Arab societies and states--of the Palestinian Arab national movement, much as Yasser Arafat was the leader of the movement from the late 1960s until his death in 2004. And like Arafat, Husseini basked in the support of the Palestinian multitudes,

“… the story published in Joseph Schechtman's The Mufti and the Fuhrer (1965),
Zvi Elpeleg's The Grand Mufti (1993), or Jennie Lebel's Haj Amin and Berlin (1996).
To be sure, Haj Amin was an anti-Semite. ... His anti-Semitism was certainly reinforced by what he picked up during his years in Germany, between 1941 and 1945, when he was employed by the Third Reich to broadcast jihadist anti-Allied propaganda to the Arab world and to recruit Muslims for the Wehrmacht in Bosnia, while the Nazis, as they described it, were battling "international Jewry" and its agents in London, Washington, and Moscow. Husseini seems to have accepted the Nazi view of the Jews' world-embracing powers--something that is entirely lacking in Qur'anic and early Islamic anti-Semitism, which, if anything, belittled the Jew.
From: The New Republic
September 10, 2008
“The Darker Side” by Benny Morris
http://www.tnr.com/booksarts/story.html?id=701916b5-4f75-4a2b-8fa2-535badfb4ffe&p=5