The mullahs are up to their usual tricks آخوند‌های دروغگو

The mullahs are up to their usual tricks

Daryoush Iranian commentator

Draconian measures to prevent the spread of pro-democracy protests in Iran, the June 20 massacre, savage beatings, interdictions, mass arrests, random raids to private residences, internet filtering, cutting off text messaging and monitoring means of communications have graphically been reported through a new phenomenon which is citizen journalism; As is known foreign correspondents were either sent off or interdicted and in some cases (the CNN correspondent in Tehran) pressured to caliber their reporting to the wishes of the authorities.

Parallel with these measures the regime has launched a two track propaganda offensive which while patently crude is pernicious. One track is the accusation that the west – the UK, the US and Israel helped by western media – were behind these protestations. The response by western officials and the sound bites in the media has unfortunately been so stale and unimaginative that some in Iran even aboard may take the bait. We heard David Miliband say that Iran’s attempt to blame west, particularly Britain, for electoral disputes among Iranians “is without foundation.” Robert Gibbs remarks in that same connection were equally insipid. “There are people in Iran who want to make this not about a debate among Iranians in Iran, but about the West and the United States. I would add President Ahmadinejad to that list of people”.

I yet have to hear a rebuttal that make Ahmadinejad and his cohorts understand he has yet to convince, by means other than repression, his own people that he is the rightful president of Iran even by the deeply flawed electoral standards practiced by the regime in Iran.

But it’s to the second régime’s propaganda track that I like to turn. Neda Agha-Sultan has become the most powerful symbol of the Iranian youth’s resistance to clerical oppression. Never before in contemporary history of Iran has a martyrdom aroused such an emotional outpouring and passion. [My own emotional reaction is in a webpage dedicated to her: http://nedaaghasoltan.spaces.live.com/default.aspx ]

The clerics in Tehran know this and a new propaganda ploy seeks to attenuate that impact. In the last couple of days I have variably read, even in most serious news outlets, accounts describing her as apolitical and incidental participant in street protests (who would want to face Basijee goons just for the heck of it?). Another account said she had been mistaken for another suspected terrorist. Media stories that naively take the bait should nevertheless be aware of all the intimidations that Nada’s immediate entourage has been experiencing. During yesterday’s Friday prayer the cynicism reached its paroxysm when the preacher (Seyyed Ahmad Khatami) said that Neda had actually been killed by protester’s themselves in order to soil the Islamic regime. It reminded me of another ploy in another tragedy in Iran’s torturous past, that of the arson of Cinema Rex in Abadan in August 1978 when Islamists ( some have directly implicated Khamenei) charred to death some 400, mainly viewers school children, and then blamed the shah’s regime. For some the notion of “taqi’ah” (a Shiite doctrine according to which a Moslem could, for his and Islam’s protection, practice concealment, falsification, fabrication, perjury and all other forms of violation of trust) has no bounds.