Watching this new video produced by the human rights NGO Iran 180, I was struck by Congressman Barney Frank's pithy summation of what good governance involves. "No government ought to consider itself threatened by its citizens wanting to express themselves," Frank said. "And no truly popular government need worry about that."
Frank was addressing the Iranian people, but his remarks are applicable to Egypt too. And they stand out in marked contrast to this next item, so excruciating that a word like "hypocrisy" simply falls short as a descriptor. I refer to the specter of Ali Larijani, the sinister speaker of the Iranian parliament and one of the architects of the country's nuclear program, waxing poetically on the upheavals whipping through the Arab world. "The revolution of the noble," was his pronouncement on the surge of people power in Tunisia and Egypt. In similarly florid style, Larijani's colleague, Foreign Minister Ali Salehi, chimed in that Egyptians could look forward to the "resurrection of their glory."
The protesters in Egypt can probably do without such encomiums from the Iranians, while those citizens bravely confronting the anti-western Arab regimes -- that of Omar al-Bashir in Khartoum, that of the Ba'athist Assad dynasty in Damascus -- shouldn't expect them to begin with. For Iran's experience over the last three decades contains three sobering lessons for the wider region.
Firstly, that revolutions which incubate the impulses of liberal democracy alongside social and religious conservatism are easily subverted. Secondly, that successor regimes can be just as brutal as their predecessors; and as Zimbabwe under Mugabe shows, this phenomenon is not confined to the Middle East alone. Thirdly, that like their predecessors, successor regimes with no democratic legitimacy are similarly driven by the desire to remain in power at any cost.
Which brings me not to Cairo in 2011, but Tehran in 2009. After stealing an election he was widely predicted to lose, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad faced the wrath of the Iranian people. Using the social media tools that have defined the current wave of Arab protests, as well as a courageous willingness to confront the thuggish Revolutionary Guard, demonstrators flooded the streets of Tehran and other cities. As in Tunisia and Egypt, it quickly became clear that the fate of the regime would be decided by the sustainability of those protests.
As we now know, repression won the day, assisted by a lack of international leverage over the Iranian regime and the churlish reaction, ranging from indifference to hostility, in the surrounding Arab countries, including among opposition forces. "Noble, manly and humane," were the words chosen by Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood leader Muhammad Mahdi Akif to describe Tehran's leaders in the year of the stolen election.
Since the passing of the country's revolutionary moment, the Iranian regime's grip has become a stranglehold. Always a world leader in the practice of execution, since 2009, the regime has accelerated the killing process. In 2010, between 18 and 25 people were executed each month. In the first month of 2011, a staggering 66 people were executed.
Gruesomely, while Larijani was lauding the Egyptian protestors, a dual Dutch-Iranian citizen, Zahra Bahrami, was dragged to the hangman's noose after being arrested for participating in the 2009 protests and then convicted on fabricated charges of drug smuggling. Meanwhile, those who escape the death sentence, like the journalist and human rights advocate Navid Khanjani, are being battered by heavy prison sentences and monetary penalties.
Iran, then, offers a glimpse of what might lie in store for Egypt. Abbas Milani, the highly regarded Iranian historian, revisited the broken pledges of Iran's theocrats in an article for The New Republic: "More than once, [Ayatollah Khomeini] promised that not a single cleric would hold a position of power in the future government. But once in power, he created the current clerical despotism. And when, in June 2009, three million people took to the streets of Tehran to protest decades of oppression, they were brutally suppressed."
There are many reasons to be skeptical that the Middle East is on the cusp of democratic transformation akin to eastern Europe in 1989. But if that is the case, it's worth recalling that not every communist state in Europe was overturned; Belarus doggedly remains as the continent's last dictatorship. Iranians should not share the same fate just because, as Barney Frank might put it, they are faced with a regime "threatened by its citizens wanting to express themselves."
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Haroon Moghul: The Revolutionary Fashion Police: What Not to Wear When Egypt's Government Goes Down
Brian D. McLaren: The Egyptian Revolution and Theological Reformation
“The sad truth is that it is precisely political oppression, intellectual suffocation and gender discrimination that explain, far more than other factors, the chronic difficulties of the Middle East.
To be sure, there exist no overnight or over-the-counter remedies for these maladies that would allow the region to unleash its vast potential, but let's be clear: they, not the straw man of Israel, are at the heart of the problem.” (David Harris).
"When Israeli commandos boarded the ships, they were met with violence from a supposedly non-violent group, including gunfire from automatic weapons and attacks with knives and axes. Several Israelis were wounded. As a result of the clash triggered by the pro-Hamas group, a number of them were killed or wounded in the confrontation."
http://www.ajc.org/site/apps/nlnet/content3.aspx?c=ijITI2PHKoG&b=6161803&ct=8418965
Letter from an Iranian to the people of Egypt
http://www.iranian.com/main/2011/jan/learn-our-mistakes
Lack of powerful leader slowing Mubarak's overthrow, says former MP Emad Afrough
http://www.iranian.com/main/2011/feb/egyptians-dont-have-khomeini
Reasons Why the Islamic Republic Can Crush Uprisings When Others Fail
[...]
The Iranian regime is one that seized power through a revolution and is thus well experienced in how to avert a revolution. As a friend of mine in Iran quoted his revolutionary guards commander "we will do everything the Shah didn't do and not do any thing that the Shah did during the 1979 revolution. Just one concession will open the floodgates and increase people's confidence in overthrowing the regime, we will not give one concession to the protesters"
Just one reminder of how brutal the repression in Iran was, watch the video of attack on student dormitories here, which resulted in five students killed
http://azarmehr.blogspot.com/2011/01/tunisia-egypt-iran-differences.html
http://www.iranian.com/main/blog/onlyiran/reasons-why-islamic-republic-can-crush-uprisings-when-others-fail
2. They are both despised by the majority of their people who want them to go.
3. They both rule a young population that is plagued by unemployment, poverty and general frustration.
4. They both have total control over media and social networking sites and censor and/or ban both.
5. They both accuse their opponents of being foreign agents and traitors against the nation.
6. They both intimidate foreign press and try to stop the truth from getting out to the world.
7. They are both Israel’s wet dream come true.
8. They both (Khamenei and Mubarak) are grooming their sons to be their successor when doing so is against their constitutions.
9. They both use plain clothes thugs to beat, kill and intimidate peaceful demonstrators. In Iran, they do it riding motorcycles, and in Egypt they do it on horseback and camelback.
10. They are both experts at putting together sham elections.
One significant (among others) dissimilarity: the IRI is a million times more brutal than the Mobarak government. And for that, and other reasons that are explained in this blog, it is much more likely to remain in power long after Mobarak’s regime is gone.
http://www.iranian.com/main/blog/onlyiran/reasons-why-islamic-republic-can-crush-uprisings-when-others-fail
There were many rigged elections in Egypt, the latest one with 97% vote for Mubarak.
West and US did not say or do anything about these real rigged elections in places like Tunisia, Egypt, Afghanistan, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia but are very loud against the democratically elected HAMAZ, Hizbullah and Ahmadinejad.
Hypocrisy has no limits in west.
Fortunately the reality on the ground is in the face of hypocrites and the contrast will dispose their lies.
No matter how many times you repeat this falsehood, the election was not stolen.
See Eric A. Brill's 'Did Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Steal The 2009 Iran Election'
http://karmalised.com/?p=13045
"the Dutch television program "Nieuwsuur" reported on January 31, 2011 that in 2003 Ms. Bahrami had been caught at Schiphol Airport with almost 16 kilograms of cocaine in her luggage, for which she was sentenced by a Dutch court to 3 years imprisonment, of which one year suspended"
http://nieuwsuur.nl/onderwerp/215523-geexecuteerde-bahrami-eerder-veroordeeld.html
and it doesn't come when powerful interests see suppression as key to their prosperity