New economic protests in Tehran challenge Iran's government

[Singularity]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/iran-mark...052232082.html

New economic protests in Tehran challenge Iran's government

AMIR VAHDAT and JON GAMBRELL, Associated Press December 30, 2017 16 minutes ago

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — A wave of spontaneous protests over Iran's weak economy swept into Tehran on Saturday, with college students and others chanting against the government just hours after hard-liners held their own rally in support of the Islamic Republic's clerical establishment.
The demonstrations appear to be the largest to strike the Islamic Republic since the protests that followed the country's disputed 2009 presidential election.
Thousands already have taken to the streets of cities across Iran, beginning at first on Thursday in Mashhad, the country's second-largest city and a holy site for Shiite pilgrims.
The protests in the Iranian capital, as well as U.S. President Donald Trump tweeting about them, raised the stakes. It also apparently forced state television to break its silence, acknowledging it hadn't reported on them on orders from security officials.
"Counterrevolution groups and foreign media are continuing their organized efforts to misuse the people's economic and livelihood problems and their legitimate demands to provide an opportunity for unlawful gatherings and possibly chaos," state TV said.
The protests appear sparked by social media posts and a surge in prices of basic food supplies, like eggs and poultry. Officials and state media made a point Saturday of saying Iranians have the right to protest and have their voices heard on social issues.
However, protesters in Tehran on Saturday chanted against high-ranking government officials and made other political statements, according to the semi-official Fars news agency. Hundreds of students and others joined a new economic protest at Tehran University, with riot police massing at the school's gates as they shut down surrounding roads.
Fars also said protests on Friday also struck Qom, a city that is the world's foremost center for Shiite Islamic scholarship and home to a major Shiite shrine.
Social media videos purport to show clashes between protesters and police in several areas. At least 50 protesters have been arrested since Thursday, authorities said. State TV also said some protesters chanted the name of Iran's one-time shah, who fled into exile just before its 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Telecommunications Minister Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi send a message by Twitter to the CEO of messaging service Telegram, Pavel Durov, saying: "A telegram channel is encouraging hateful conduct, use Molotov cocktails, armed uprising, and social unrest." Telegram responded saying it had suspended the account.
"A Telegram channel (amadnews) started to instruct their subscribers to use Molotov cocktails against police and got suspended due to our 'no calls for violence' rule. Be careful - there are lines one shouldn't cross." Durov tweeted.
The semi-official Tasnim news agency quoted the deputy commander of Tehran's Revolutionary Guard base, Brig. Gen. Ismail Kowsari, as saying: "Peace has returned to city of Tehran and its surroundings." He added that if inflation was the reason the protesters took to the streets they should not have destroyed property, according to the report.
The Semi-official ILNA news agency reported on Saturday that the security deputy of Tehran's governor, Mohsen Hamedani, said that Tehran's provincial security council held a meeting to address the protests, but that its decisions were "classified."
Earlier Saturday, hard-liners rallied across the country to support Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and others. The rallies, scheduled weeks earlier, commemorated a mass 2009 pro-government rally challenging those who rejected the re-election of hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad amid fraud allegations.
State TV aired live the pro-government "9 Dey Epic" rallies, named for the date on the Iranian calendar the 2009 protests took place. The footage showed people waving flags and carrying banners bearing Khamenei's image.
In Tehran, some 4,000 people gathered at the Musalla prayer ground in central Tehran for the rally. They called for criminal trials for Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mahdi Karroubi, leaders in the 2009 protests who have been under house arrest since 2011. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, whose administration struck the 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, campaigned on freeing the men, though they remain held.
Mohsen Araki, a Shiite cleric who serves in Iran's Assembly of Experts, praised Rouhani's efforts at improving the economy. However, he said Rouhani needed to do more to challenge "enemy pressures."
"We must go back to the pre-nuclear deal situation," Araki said. "The enemy has not kept with its commitments."
Ali Ahmadi, a pro-government demonstrator, blamed the U.S for all of Iran's economic problems.
"They always say that we are supporting Iranian people, but who should pay the costs?" Ahmadi asked.
Iran's economy has improved since the nuclear deal, which saw Iran limit its enrichment of uranium in exchange for the end of some of the international sanctions that crippled its economy. Tehran now sells its oil on the global market and has signed deals for tens of billions of dollars of Western aircraft.
That improvement has not reached the average Iranian, however. Unemployment remains high. Official inflation has crept up to 10 percent again. A recent increase in egg and poultry prices by as much as 40 percent, which a government spokesman has blamed on a cull over avian flu fears, appears to have been the spark for the economic protests.
While police have arrested some protesters, the Revolutionary Guard and its affiliates have not intervened as they have in other unauthorized demonstrations since the 2009 election. The economic protests initially just put pressure on Rouhani's administration.

Trump tweeted out support for the protests Saturday.
"The entire world understands that the good people of Iran want change, and, other than the vast military power of the United States, that Iran's people are what their leaders fear the most...." he tweeted. "Oppressive regimes cannot endure forever, and the day will come when the Iranian people will face a choice. The world is watching!"
It's unclear what effect Trump's support would have. Iranians already are largely skeptical of him over his refusal to re-certify the nuclear deal and Iran being included in his travel bans. Trump's insistence in an October speech on using the term "Arabian Gulf" in place of the Persian Gulf also has also riled the Iranian public.
Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson's comments in June to Congress saying American is working toward "support of those elements inside of Iran that would lead to a peaceful transition of that government" has been used by Iran's government of a sign of foreign interference in its internal politics.
The State Department issued a statement Friday supporting the protests, referencing Tillerson's earlier comments.
"Iran's leaders have turned a wealthy country with a rich history and culture into an economically depleted rogue state whose chief exports are violence, bloodshed and chaos," the statement said.
Iran's Foreign Ministry dismissed the comments.
"The noble Iranian nation never pays heed to the opportunist and hypocritical mottos chanted by the U.S. officials and their interfering allegations on domestic developments in the Islamic Republic of Iran," the state-run IRNA news agency quoted ministry spokesman Bahram Ghasemi as saying.
___
Gambrell reported from Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

[سيف الله]

Salaam

Another update

[Singularity]

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/artic...o-burn-mosques


The Iranian Game-Show Host Urging His Fans to Burn Mosques
The expat's influence via social media helps to explain the undercurrent of violence in this round of protests.
By Eli Lake
32
January 3, 2018, 11:19 AM MST


Nonviolent resistance has the better track record. Photographer: Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images
Seyed Mohammad Hosseini makes for an unlikely revolutionary. The last time he was in Iran was in 2011. He was a minor celebrity, as the host of "Simorgh," a zany game show on which he would ask contestants to perform silly stunts for prizes.


Today he lives in America and urges Iranians to burn mosques and deface police stations. (Imagine an exiled Joe Rogan forming a new Weather Underground.) Since March of last year, Hosseini has been broadcasting messages to the people of Iran on Telegram, Instagram and other social media platforms urging them to #restartIran, a hashtag and the name of a movement he is now hoping will earn the support of the U.S. government.


"We started with a color protest," he told me. "We told people to spray colors on the walls of buildings that belonged to the Basij." (The Basij is the state militia that was deployed to terrorize protestors and keep order during past uprisings.) After this, Hosseini said they moved on to urging Iranians to throw rocks at the windows of government buildings. "Then we said there should be a fire protest," he said. "They should burn down government mosques and police stations."


Hosseini is by no means a leader of the current protests in Iran. The demonstrations do not appear connected to his campaign. But he is an important element of the unrest. There is an undercurrent of violence to the uprising this time around that was missing from the protests of 2009, after a stolen presidential election. It's one of the reasons Iran's president, Hassan Rouhani, has called for those damaging property to be prosecuted.


Potkin Azarmehr, an Iranian broadcaster based in London who has been poring through cell-phone videos from Iran in recent months, told me he has counted at least 20 videos of property damage using the #restartIran hashtag since the fall. "I am not saying the protests have anything to do with Restart," he told me. "They are only a small part of this. But 20 incidents in three months are not isolated. It shows that something as ridiculous as this campaign is getting a reaction and that Iranians are losing their fear."


Hosseini's campaign has also worried Telegram, the low-bandwidth messaging app used by millions of Iranians. The government has just taken this app offline. Telegram banned Hosseini's first account, "showman1," in October. He has since migrated to mirror accounts on Telegram. In an Oct. 29, 2017, post, Telegram founder Pavel Durov wrote that Hosseini's account was an example of a "line one shouldn't cross." He said the account "started to urge its members to throw stones into the windows of public buildings and vehicles (schools, temples, buses) and film it." The service asked Hosseini to stop this "vandalism contest," but he ignored Telegram and "launched another creepy competition urging their 100K+ users to burn mosques by throwing Molotov cocktails into them and film it. As a result, we were left with no other option but to block."


It's understandable why some Iranians and their allies in the West may want to get behind Hosseini's #restartIran movement. The Iranian regime deploys violence against students, activists, minorities, labor leaders and anyone else who challenges their country's clerical fascists. Why shouldn't the resistance treat the regime in kind? But at this stage, it would be a strategic error.


The state has many more guns than the people do. The best odds for the uprising come through nonviolent civil disobedience. The goal for Iran's demonstrators now should be to build as wide a coalition as possible. If regular people feel threatened by revolutionaries, they will not feel safe enough to join the opposition to the dictator. The opposition must create a space where regular police officers feel empowered and safe enough to disobey if ordered to disperse crowds and arrest activists.


Nonviolent resistance has a far better track record in bringing down tyrants in the modern world. It's true that massive state-to-state wars ended regimes in Nazi Germany and Fascist Japan. But Iranians today are not asking to be invaded. A good model for Iran is the uprising that unseated Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia or Eduard Shevardnadze in Georgia. These campaigns succeeded because the leader's henchmen, in the end, would not shed blood to keep the boss in power.


Hosseini is not impressed by these arguments. He told me Iranians want revolution by any means possible. His next goal is to get an audience with President Donald Trump. "I like Trump," he said. "He was a reality television star. I am a reality television star. We are on the same page."


This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
To contact the author of this story:
Eli Lake at elake1@bloomberg.net

[سيف الله]

Salaam

Another update

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[Mustafa16]

Salaam

Another update

the government of Iran is a totalitarian regime that treats its citizens like dirt. the people of Iran deserve better than your nasty "CIA fingerprints" conspiracy theories. besides, the government of iran is shia rafidah and is killing sunnis and arming groups like hezbollah and pro shabiha militias and assad, i thought people like you were against people like that?

[سيف الله]

Salaam

I give various viewpoints because we wont understand the world if we hear only what we want to hear.

Americans and other hostile powers are involved directly, indirectly. as they have been for decades trying to overthrow the regime. Its no big secret and Trumps been very explicit about it. So they'll try and stir up, hijack protests for their own ends, then throw the protesters under the bus when they have served their purpose.

Iran has a bad government, and treats its citizens badly, so what? When has that ever bothered the powers that be? you really think that what motivates them?

I agree with you on the Iranian expansionism (Shia crescent) in the middle east, Hezbollah acting as an Iranian proxy (has been compared to blackwater) and stiring up sectarianism to achieve their ends at the expense of the Sunni communities who are now being subjugated in Iraq and Syria. This has to be stopped, but then again are the Sauds, Qataris and co are they any better?

I don't like the Iranian expansionism and this will be considered a pipe dream but there's going to have to be a peace deal of sorts between the powers in the middle east to stop this conflict spiraling out of control.

[Singularity]

http://www.latimes.com/world/middlee...htmlstory.html


Iranians asked #Where_Is_She? Suddenly, it seems she's everywhere
By SHASHANK BENGALI and RAMIN MOSTAGHIM
JAN 29, 2018 | 9:50 AM
| TEHRAN

An Iranian woman who removed her headscarf in public to protest the theocracy’s Islamic dress code apparently has sparked a bold trend in Tehran, the capital.


Several images appeared on social media Monday purporting to show women standing atop benches and telephone utility boxes and waving hijabs just like the iconic demonstrator who was arrested last month.


At least one of the demonstrators and a person photographing her were arrested, according to witnesses.


Shadi Sadr @Shadisadr
Today, another Iranian woman has stood on the same busy spot in #Tehran as #VidaMovahed waving her white scarf to protest the cumpolsary hijab. #Where_Is_She #دختران_خیابان_انقلاب #دختر خیابان انقلاب #ويدا_موحد


2:37 AM - Jan 29, 2018
4 4 Replies 48 48 Retweets 255 255 likes
A burgeoning movement is challenging the compulsory hijab law, which requires women to cover their hair in public. It is part of a raft of social codes instituted after the 1979 Islamic Revolution that reform-minded Iranian women say are outmoded and infringe on freedom of choice.


Critics of the law had been wearing white clothing on Wednesdays for months before a dark-haired, sneaker-wearing woman stood in Tehran’s bustling Enghelab Square in late December and waved her white hijab on the end of a stick.


She was arrested, and she became one of the icons of the anti-government protests that would sweep Iran a few days later. A social media campaign dubbed #Where_Is_She sprang up to demand information about her fate.


But her identity was not publicly known until days ago, when human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh said she had been told by a court that handles alleged cultural offenses that the woman was released from custody.


Sotoudeh identified the woman as Vida Movahedi, a 31-year-old mother of a 20-month-old child. It was not immediately clear whether Movahedi had been charged with a crime. Iran’s state-controlled news media have not covered the story.


On Monday, with parts of Tehran still dusted with the remnants of a weekend snowfall, several women were photographed mimicking her protest.



Mohammad Ghaznavian @mohamGhaznavian
یک، دو، سه، هزار خیابان انقلاب می-سازند و
سفیدها سرخ می-شوند.#دختران_خیابان_انقلاب


7:35 AM - Jan 29, 2018
6 6 Replies 43 43 Retweets 232 232 likes
One stood in the same spot as Movahedi, wearing a green ribbon that likely identified her as a supporter of the opposition Green Movement whose leaders are under house arrest.


A second was spotted in bustling Ferdowsi Square north of the British embassy, standing on a telephone box.


Yet another stood in Vali Asr, a busy commercial area in central Tehran, dangling a black scarf on a fishing rod like a piece of bait.


“The message of these citizens is clear,” Sotoudeh said. “We, the women and girls, are fed up with this compulsory hijab. We want to manage our clothing and what to wear.”


BeiSbyLnbq7
Special correspondent Mostaghim reported from Tehran and Times staff writer Bengali from Mumbai, India.


shashank.bengali@latimes.com


Shashank Bengali covers Iran for The Times. Follow him on Twitter at @SBengali

[Zafran]

women are "brave" for taking there headscarf off - just like the women in France were brave for wearing a Burkini or women standing up to Israeli occupiers when they face imprisonment or worse death.

Total hypocrisy from liberal media.

[Mustafa16]

women are "brave" for taking there headscarf off - just like the women in France were brave for wearing a Burkini or women standing up to Israeli occupiers when they face imprisonment or worse death.

Total hypocrisy from liberal media.

there's a difference between being forced to wear a headscarf under a totalitarian regime and having religion shoved down your throat by people who take bribes and steal your money, and willingly wearing a headscarf in a land that by comparison is relatively free.

[azc]

there's a difference between being forced to wear a headscarf under a totalitarian regime and having religion shoved down your throat by people who take bribes and steal your money, and willingly wearing a headscarf in a land that by comparison is relatively free.

it sounds you are in support of these ladies

[Mustafa16]

it sounds you are in support of these ladies

im not in support of removing hijab, im merely saying they're desperate. just as killing civilians in war is not justified, but palestinians who kill civilians are desperate people and we sympathize with the palestinian cause.

[azc]

im not in support of removing hijab, im merely saying they're desperate. just as killing civilians in war is not justified, but palestinians who kill civilians are desperate people and we sympathize with the palestinian cause.

they are desperate...... Killing civilians isn't justified .... Palestine killing civilians...... We sympathise with them....???????

[Mustafa16]

they are desperate...... Killing civilians isn't justified .... Palestine killing civilians...... We sympathise with them....???????

we sympathize with palestinians who want a state and get abused by israelis, but we recognize their action of killing israeli civilians is wrong......we sympathize with iranian women who feel oppressed by iranian regime, but we recognize their action of taking off their hijab in protest is wrong. it's called being "pushed to the edge"

[azc]

we sympathize with palestinians who want a state and get abused by israelis, but we recognize their action of killing israeli civilians is wrong......we sympathize with iranian women who feel oppressed by iranian regime, but we recognize their action of taking off their hijab in protest is wrong. it's called being "pushed to the edge"

Have these Palestines been pushed to the edge or not...?

[Zafran]

there's a difference between being forced to wear a headscarf under a totalitarian regime and having religion shoved down your throat by people who take bribes and steal your money, and willingly wearing a headscarf in a land that by comparison is relatively free.

Like France? where your not allowed to wear a burkini or did you prefer the extreme secularist in Turkey that didn't want women to wear Hijab at all. Its hypocritical only focusing one country when plenty of countries restrict citizens in different ways including China, Russia and European countries as well.

[Mustafa16]

Like France? where your not allowed to wear a burkini or did you prefer the extreme secularist in Turkey that didn't want women to wear Hijab at all. Its hypocritical only focusing one country when plenty of countries restrict citizens in different ways including China, Russia and European countries as well.

what do you think is worse? not being allowed to wear a hijab, or no freedom or press, no freedom of movement, no economic freedom, no freedom of the ballot box (rigged elections and censored campaigns), extrajudicial killings of political dissidents who criticize the government, ethnocide, corruption, sectarianism, murderous prejudice, genocide, torture of schoolteachers.......etc.

[Zafran]

what do you think is worse? not being allowed to wear a hijab, or no freedom or press, no freedom of movement, no economic freedom, no freedom of the ballot box (rigged elections and censored campaigns), extrajudicial killings of political dissidents who criticize the government, ethnocide, corruption, sectarianism, murderous prejudice, genocide, torture of schoolteachers.......etc.

Sounds like secular Turkey but they didn't like the Hijab as well. The army did plenty of Coups.

[Mustafa16]

Sounds like secular Turkey but they didn't like the Hijab as well. The army did plenty of Coups.

honestly I would prefer a coup over what we have has a government in Turkey now. justice and security is more important than relatively simple things like hijab. you obviously have no idea what youre talking about. id rather live in a liberal democracy where my daughters and wife weren't allowed to wear hijab or go to the beach in a burkini than live under a dictatorship.

[azc]

By Martin Love

An American looks at a mandatory hijab

http://www.tehrantimes.com/news/4207...andatory-hijab

An American looks at a mandatory hijab - Tehran Times Iran’s most visible leaders to writers like me in the U.S. seem to support the rights of Iranians to protest some mandates they may not like. Consider the delicate matter of women having to wear the hijab if they are out and about in public. Certainly lots of women in Iran probably prefer to wear a head scarf. What might be uncomfortable is not the scarf itself, but occasionally getting arrested if they are seen without hijab, as noted recently in an article about Iran here in the U.S....

[Zafran]

honestly I would prefer a coup over what we have has a government in Turkey now. justice and security is more important than relatively simple things like hijab. you obviously have no idea what youre talking about. id rather live in a liberal democracy where my daughters and wife weren't allowed to wear hijab or go to the beach in a burkini than live under a dictatorship.

what?? you hate "dictatorships" but don't mind a coup - military rule Is dictatorship - look at Egypt - Of course you don't mind women being harassed or threatened with legal action as it doesn't effect you at all.

Its funny you have no idea what "liberal democracy" actually means because women not allowed to wear Hijabs and Burkhins would be against the liberal part of the liberal democracy.

Iran provides "Justice" and security as any other military dictatorship - Hijab is also not just a "simple" thing. If it was you wouldn't mind Iran having a law on Hijab - at the end of the day its the same as the French Burkini ban or the secular Turks anti Hijab movement. Hypocrisy right there.

[سيف الله]

Salaam

Iranian opposition cleric accuses Khamenei of abuse of power

Instead of blaming others Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei should take responsibility for Iran’s economic and political shortcomings, an opposition leader under house arrest said in a letter published on Tuesday. In rare public criticism of Khamenei, Mehdi Karroubi accused Iran’s hardline top authority of abusing power and urged him to change the way he runs the Islamic Republic before it is too late.

“You have been Iran’s top leader for three decades, but still speak like an opposition,” Karroubi said in an open letter to Khamenei published on Saham News, the official website of his reformist political party By “opposition”, Karroubi meant that Khamenei, head of a Shi‘ite theocracy, should not be wielding ultimate power while criticising the government of elected President Hassan Rouhani, a pragmatist who wants to liberalise an economy dominated by the elite Revolutionary Guards and other state conglomerates.

“During the last three decades, you have eliminated the main revolutionary forces to implement your own policies, and now you should face the results of that,” Karroubi added.

Karroubi, 80, a Shi‘ite cleric like Khamenei, and fellow reformist Mirhossein Mousavi ran for election in 2009 and became figureheads for Iranians who staged mass protests after hardline conservative President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was returned to power in a vote they believed was rigged. Authorities denied this.

Karroubi, Mousavi and the latter’s wife Zahra Rahnavard have been under house arrest since 2011 without trial, by the direct order of Khamenei.

The Supreme Leader is commander-in-chief of Iran’s armed forces and appoints the heads of the judiciary. Key cabinet ministers are selected with his approval and he has the ultimate say on Iran’s foreign policy and nuclear programme.

By comparison, the president wields little power.

Karroubi also criticised Khamenei for letting the Revolutionary Guards take a commanding role in the economy as this “has tarnished the reputation of this revolutionary body and drowned it in massive corruption”.

KARROUBI CITES UNACCOUNTABLE ELITE

He said that under Khamenei’s leadership, bodies formed at the beginning of the 1979 Revolution to wipe out poverty had turned into conglomerates that own half of Iran’s wealth without a supervisory organisation to question their actions. More than 10 million Iranians, among 80 million, now live in absolute poverty, Karroubi said quoting official figures.

“Under such conditions, it is natural that the lower classes, who were the grassroot supporters of the Islamic Revolution, will turn into a gunpowder barrel,” Karroubi said.

Khamenei has often accused Rouhani’s government of responsibility for the lack of headway towards reducing high unemployment, inflation and inequality. He has also blamed members of parliament, former presidents and Western powers. Rouhani, however, was easily re-elected in 2017, suggesting many Iranians still see him as their best hope for improving the economy and easing religious restrictions on society. Karroubi further said December’s nationwide street protests against “corruption and discrimination” were an alarm bell for the authorities to reform the economic and political system.

Goaded by soaring food prices, the protests - the biggest in Iran since the post-election unrest of 2009 - took on a rare political dimension, with a growing number of people calling on Khamenei himself to step down. Clashes between protesters and police resulted in 25 deaths, according to official figures.

Karroubi also said that by vetting candidates in elections, Khamenei had reduced parliament to “an obedient assembly” under his thumb and the influence of Revolutionary Guards lobbies. The Assembly of Experts, a council of elected clerics charged with electing, supervising and even disqualifying the Supreme Leader, has turned into a “ceremonial council that only praises the Leader”, Karroubi added.

Karoubi, an ex-speaker of parliament, has been accused by hardline authorities of being a “seditionist” and “traitor”.

In a public letter to Rouhani in 2016, he asked “the despotic regime” to grant him a public trial so he could hear the indictment against him and defend himself.

https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-iran-politics-karroubi/iranian-opposition-cleric-accuses-khamenei-of-abuse-of-power-idUKKBN1FJ1RG