Friday Iran will hold mid-term elections for the Assembly of Experts and municipal elections. Ahmedinejad was once mayor of Tehran, so municipal elections are important. This year's elections pit rival reformist and hardline factions, as Iran does not allow opposition parties to form, against each other. The Rafsanjani/Khatami Reformist block seeks to reverse the Ahmedinejad/Yazdi Hardliner block's growing power. Rampant rumors in Iran regarding the ill-health of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamanei highlight how critical this election is. If, as rumors indicate, Khamanei is critically ill (some say he has terminal cancer) the winner of this election will more than likely have enough power to sway the choice of the next Supreme Leader, who is chosen by the Assembly of Experts.
Ahmedinejad, one Iranian friend told me, wants his mentor the Ayatollah Yazdi in the position, solidifying his power. Rafsanjani, largely considered a pragmatist has been open about his desire to be Supreme Leader. The Jerusalem Post is currently reporting a similar story. Again, I think it is important to note that at this time there are only rumors of Khamanei's ill health. Regardless, should Ahmedinejad/Yazdi faction win these elections it will be almost impossible for moderates in the US and West to find the political space to negotiate with Iran. It will also embolden Ahmedinejad, a leader many Iranians feel is already to arbitrary and brash. Seldom are foreign elections this important.
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Comments: 18
Do you believe that Iran has an open and fair election process?
I'm praying that our people wake up. Most of our perceptions are carefully crafted by the ubiquitous media who are acting more and more like the The Thought Police, or the Thought Formers. I would be willing to wager that if you poll a thousand Americans to give you five reasons why Cubans love Fidel Castro, 99.5% of the people wont be able to give you two reasons. Why? Same thing with brother Mahmoud Ahmadi Najid, the duly elected president of The Islamic Republic Of Iran.
Our folks hate this guy because he is represented so unfairly in he media, you can't see anything good about him. And if you were to go to Iran, most Americans are going to meet with very few people who are as religious and revolutionary as this this OG Revolutionary Guard, who took that vast American Embassy without killing a single American... not one marine was killed... shot... stabbed... garroted or harmed in any way in the Iranian Embassy take over. a fact that is virtually ignored even in scholarly treatises. What Gives?
God will give us just what we ask for so we can find out if we really wanted it after all. Those promoting and seeking violence will eventually learn their lesson ... the hard way.
So you believe President Wacko is just misunderstood do you?
…………Mr. Ahmadinejad actually seems to believe that the volumes of documentation, testimony and living memory of the Nazi genocide are exaggerated and part of a Zionist conspiracy to falsify history so as to create the case for Israel. As a former member of the Revolutionary Guards, he was indoctrinated with such thinking and as a radical student leader, he championed such a view.
Addressing the gathering of Holocaust deniers in Tehran, the man who publicly seeks to emulate Adolph Hitler said that "the Zionist regime will be wiped out the same way the Soviet Union was, and humanity will achieve freedom."
Ahmadinejad has consistently and repeatedly foretold Israel's demise since his election to the presidency last year. He is working feverishly with Russian aid to build the weapons of mass destruction he needs to achieve his aim.
Promoting this idiotic view wins him favor at home and across the Arab world for standing up to the West and allows him to present himself as morally superior to the West.
…………Students disrupted a speech by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Monday at a major university in Tehran, setting fire to photographs of him and throwing firecrackers.
The protesters chanted "death to the dictator" and demanded the resignation of Alireza Rahai, the chancellor of Amirkabir University, the Iranian Student News Agency reported. Rahai was placed in the position of chancellor by Ahmadinejad.
It was the first major public protest against Mr. Ahmadinejad since his election more than a year ago. Mr. Ahmadinejad cut his speech short and left as his security guards tried to stop angry students, who kicked at the car that carried him away, witnesses said.
He is represented so unfairly in the media????????
If anything, the "mainstream" western media doesn't show this worthless, Hitler-wannabe, jerk for what he really is! The major U.S. networks have showed very little of the seemingly endless footage, from Arabic news sources, of him screaming "death to the U.S." and "death to Israel" in front of crowds of thousands.
I think we're looking for a political solution to our problems without searching for the philosophical/ethical theorems that makes solving them possible. Right and wrong is not a question of perception just like correct and error. No matter what the Pope thought he saw, the sun does not revolve around the earth. And although the Jewish people were treated insanely cruel in Europe, that variable did not give them the ethical right to go to even want to ursurp the anceteral homeland of others to insure their own safety. That notion was neither ethical nor correct. Therefore, it is only right for a man like The Iranian President to simply stand up and say, that it is morally rediculous to saddle the Muslim Middle East with a problem Europe created and is now perpetuating.
Wrong is wrong. All you have to do is ask yourself, "Would I want someone to treat me that way?" That is how you test for righteousness. It is as simple as that. Yet. If not for the brave, bold acts of a significant minority, I'd be picking cotton on some plantation in Mississippi. Damned near all the white folks int he south, just fifty years ago, thought that the worse thing in the world was that black people should drink out of the same water fountain as white people; and in reality, there's no such thing as black people or white people.
What will it take for our people to come to grips with this horribly immoral mistep? We look back at the lynchings of the 40's 50's and part of the 60's down south with shame and remorse. How will we feel when we look back at the deformed Iraqi children from the depleted uranium bombs we rained on them? How will we feel about the over one million premature deaths due to the senseless sanctions we placed on the Iraqi people that never even phased the Iraqi leadership? And what will we think in generations to come after the entire region is totally unstablized and the Middle East resembles an Eager Rice Borroughs "John Carter" novel? What will the angels think? What will God think? And will we be unilaterally blamed throughout all eternity as the oppressors of the weak and the innocent? God Help Us All.
It is unwise to demonize a person who is not a demon. It is as unwise to, without close examination, demonize a person whose view is different from yours as it is to canonize a person whose view is the same as yours based on nothing but empathic bigotry. Without a doubt there are people who don't like Brother Ahmad inside Iran. But they are a very small minority. The man won by landslide, and his popularity is still ascending. The question is why? Is it because he does nothing good? He's a total Hitler, or Stalin type character? I doubt this very strongly. How many students did you see burning Hitler or Stalin's image in effigy? Take note and understand.
As for cries of Death to Israel and Death to America, you should know that only a foolish, brainless, half wit could conceive of a way that The Islamic Republic of Iran could defeat the USA in anything except praying, fasting, temperance, and middle weight wrestling (maybe soccer). Come on, Indiana!!! Wolf tickets (empty threats) don't bite, brotherman. What we the people of The United States Of America should be worried about is why do these people hate our government's guts?
When you count up the frozen billions in Chase Manhattan, the promotion of the navy captain who "accidentally" shot down an Irani air liner, The total siding with The Shah over The Islamic Revolutionaries, whom the Shah murdered by the tens of thousands a year for ten years, and the coup launched by Kermit Roosevelt (Teddy's Nephew) that caused hundreds of deaths and the overthrow of the first democratically elected secular government in the region... when you add up all this... walk a mile in the other guy's shoes... do you still think these folk are crazy for not likening the way we play our foreign policy games?
It's also true that the elections in Iran are especially important this year and I eagerly await more reports from SPK as it's impossible to predict - well, much, if anything!
You all think our nation's problem is solved by voting. You're delusional. It is not. Our problems are only perpetuated by the narrow minded, short sighted apathetic, unimaginative world view our people tend to hold on to for dear life. And that is the reason why I think it is so hard for our people to like an honest politician like Brother Ahmad.
Dude is honest. Dude sees the thing logically and clearly, and correctly. All this ranting about that dinky holocaust conference and no mention of the criminalization of contradicting a point of history? Why even the hint of further research on the matter puts folks in a Grand Inquisitional mood for mayhem. We just can't tolerate these history heretics. Can we? Folks are actually going to jail for what they've written, in so called progressive, liberal Western countries. And that doesn't strike yawl as odd?
Come on. Wake up. The Whole World Is Liable To Go To War To Protect An Obvious Oppressive Move. If the Holocaust is obvious, and I for one believe that it is. Then the rape of Palestine to make it all better for the European Jews, and those who did not want them in their lands, is just as obvious. And that is the point that is being made here. No, I don't believe that Jews should be unilaterally killed, SILLY. But I don't believe that Zionism is the answer to the Palestinian Problem. It can only breed more and more war... more and more suffering... and if America continues to support The Nuclear Powered Zionist State, they will eventually push us into a corner where we have to act even worse than we already have. What brother Ahmad says, is nothing compared to what Bush, Blair, and The JDF has done.