Following on from Simon Tisdall’s
stenograph earlier in the week, the Weekend Guardian continued its campaign against Iran with a
new article by neocon hacks, Robert Tait. He starts with the trusted favourites of war pimps everywhere, human rights violations and political repression.
The bloodied face of a young woman – stripped of her Islamic head-covering after a “confrontation” with Iran’s morals police – provides a more graphic insight into the psyche of that country’s rulers than any macho boasts of nuclear feats or American accusations of meddling in Iraq.
The event was captured on camera in Tehran’s busy Hafte Tir Square last week and has since been circulated on Iranian websites and broadcast on the US state department-funded Voice of America’s Farsi language TV broadcasts.
It has become the most compelling image of the government’s so-called “morality” crackdown, in which thousands of young women – and many men – have been detained for wearing dress or hairstyles deemed insufficiently Islamic.
The crackdown has extended beyond the inappropriately dressed. Last weekend, police in arrested at 1,000 “thugs” – a description broadly covering criminals, thieves and general street urchins – in Tehran’s rougher southern neighbourhoods. The move prompted condemnation even within the regime after pictures circulated online showing some of the alleged miscreants being paraded in public with toilet-wash bowls around their neck and marks of severe beatings on their faces.
In recent days, the police’s attention has extended to drug users, of which Iran has several million. Some of the most serious addicts have been rounded up in a series of swoops. Police say they have been taken to rehabilitation centres, but critics suspect less humane treatment may have been meted out.
Given the ink is still drying on this year’s Amnesty International report which has just heavily criticised the US itself for human rights violations or the plight women and children in countries that the axis of feeble has liberated or even the over enthusiasm of some Western police officers, Tait’s rant is nothing short of hypocrisy. He then looks at Iran’s economy:
At the same time, there has been panic on the Tehran stock exchange, after Mr Ahmadinejad ordered a reduction of interest rates to 12% despite surging inflation and contrary advice from economists. Experts say the move will trigger a banking crisis and hyperinflation. To cap it all, Ahmadinejad’s government will next month impose petrol rationing – an extraordinary move in a nation synonymous with oil wealth – to curb the crippling costs of providing subsidised fuel to motorists.
Iran’s economy does have problems but that is against a backdrop of imposed sanctions. Moreover, Tait should be well aware of the Iranian situation in which it is oil rich but refining capacity poor – due in part to US interference. Tait drones on.
These events have played out against a backdrop of arrests of a series of Iranian-American scholars supposedly suspected of fomenting a velvet revolution against the country’s Islamic power structure.
More remarkable than those was the detention this month of a former nuclear negotiator, Hossein Mousavian, an ex-ambassador to Germany and confidant of the former president, Hashemi Rafsanjani. Mousavian, who has since been bailed, was accused of spying. But well-informed Iranian emigres say his real crime was being caught on a bugged telephone advising an Iranian diplomat currently based in Germany against returning home to an increasingly unstable and uncertain situation.
It all points to a society – and a political system – turning in on itself. Iran is not nearly as unstable as, say, Zimbabwe, but the external pressures – in the form of UN sanctions and American hostility – are greater and the situation is becoming increasingly volatile.
Apparently, according to Robert Tait or whoever dictated this piece of hackery to him, Iran is on the verge of collapse.
With Iran this week defying yet another security council deadline for suspending its uranium enrichment and the International Atomic Energy Agency declaring its nuclear programme to be making dramatic progress, the image projected abroad is one of powerful menace by a populist self-confident government. That view has been enhanced by US claims of an Iranian summer surge designed to force American troops out of Iraq.
A journalist covering Iran should know that Iran is well within its rights to enrich Uranium under the NPT. The UN resolution he refers to was obtained under pressure from the US, and it deals with the inspections agreed to voluntarily by Iran, not with its NPT obligations. The IAEA, on the other hand has been turning over information gathered during the inspections to US and Israel. Both the countries have prepared the detailed target lists for their planned bombing of Iran through the information provided by IAEA inspectors. There is no reason, therefore, that Iran should cooperate with an organization, whose sole purpose is to legitimize US-Israeli aggression against other sovereign states — especially, when it has shown no interest whatever in preventing, or for that matter containing, the vast Israeli nuclear program.
Tait ends by saying,
If the west really is headed towards a full-frontal confrontation with Iran, it will find itself up against a country not at ease, but at loggerheads, with itself.
Why a liberal paper like The Guardian is printing this rubbish I don’t know but I am getting fed up of being patronised by the likes Robert Tait and Simon Tisdall using their position on to indoctrinate the supposedly ignorant masses. The only thing they’ve not done so far is promise us that it will be a cakewalk and that we will be greeted with sweets and flowers.
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