One of the many terrible things about Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is how his denial of the murder of six million Jews by the Nazis enables Israeli leaders to claim the moral high ground even while they systematically repress the Palestinian people.
Such was the case at the United Nations yesterday where Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu came to the podium to attack delegates who had not joined the walk-out when Ahmadinejad spoke the previous night. “Have you no shame?” “Have you no decency?”, said Netanyahu.
Coming from a man whose country stands accused of committing war crimes in Gaza in a UN report into its assault on the territory last year, and ignores all calls to halt settlement building on occupied Palestinian land, this is rich indeed.
Netanyahu was given the golden opportunity to portray Israel as the wronged party by Ahmadinejad’s speech in Tehran last week. Ahmadinejad, who himself clings to his country’s presidency by naked repression following the disputed election earlier this year, is an out-and-out Holocaust denier. And he was at again on a day set aside by Iran to mark the plight of the Palestinians.
Israel, claimed Ahmadinejad, was an “historical fabrication … based on a lie". And the “lie”? After accurately describing how the British, who had the mandate over Palestine, stood by as Zionists bought up land in the inter-war period, Ahmadinejad then went overboard, claiming: “… After the second world war they created the story of Holocaust … and then they made hundreds of films and wrote hundreds of books to argue they have suffered and need a home … This is a myth and Zionists are criminals, and corrupt."
For good measure, when he addressed the UN this week, Ahmadinejad alluded to a worldwide Jewish conspiracy, saying; "It is no longer acceptable that a small minority would dominate the politics, economy and culture of major parts of the world by its complicated networks."
These are the dangerous and confused ranting of a man who almost certainly stole the Iranian election and has had his thugs beat up, arrest and kill young people who oppose the regime. All his speeches do is weaken the Palestinian cause and strengthen the hand of Netanyahu and his ilk.
Israeli leaders, for example, never tire of lumping together anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, when they are clearly different and Ahmadinejad comes in handy here because he makes no distinction. Yet there is absolutely nothing wrong in being against or hostile to Zionism – which historically campaigned for a Jewish state in Palestine – so long as it seen as just a political movement. This does not make you anti-Jewish. Far from it because many Jews, perhaps even most, do not consider themselves Zionists.
Fortunately, unlike Ahmadinejad there are movements that can make this distinction. Spain has expelled a group of Israeli scientists from a state-funded solar energy competition because they are based in occupied areas of the West Bank.
The team was from the Ariel University Centre of Samaria and was taking part in Solar Decathlon Europe. Their expulsion follows hard on the heels of the decision by the Trades Union Congress in Britain last week to campaign for a boycott of goods produced in and exported from the Occupied Territories.
These are just some of the ways to isolate the Israeli regime and support the Palestinians which are a million times more progressive than anything Ahmadinejad can utter.
Paul Feldman
Communications editor
For revolutionary solutions to create a sustainable, not-for-profit economy in place of global capital alongside a real democracy based on People’s Assemblies. Visit our web site at www.aworldtowin.net
Showing posts with label Ahmadinejad. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ahmadinejad. Show all posts
Friday, September 25, 2009
Monday, August 03, 2009
A meeting of minds in Tehran and Moscow
During the continuing street protests in Iran, in the wake of the disputed re-election of president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, protesters have been heard shouting “Down with Russia”. This is not as strange as it seems. In fact, as the show trials get under way in Tehran, the slogan carries more historical significance than the marchers may know.
The Russian government was the first to congratulate Ahmadinejad on his “victory” in the 12 June elections. So denouncing Moscow makes sense. And the marchers also wanted to distinguish themselves from the usual “Down with America” slogans of state-orchestrated demonstrations in support of the regime.
Many of those on trial in Tehran have apparently “confessed” to "acting against national security" and "conspiring with foreign powers to stage a velvet revolution". Opposition leaders have denounced the torturing of those arrested and the staging of a mass trial where the defendants have few if any legal rights.
The historical connection with Russia, of course, is the most infamous show trials of modern times, which were held in Moscow between 1936-8. The principal leaders of the 1917 Revolution similarly “confessed” to working with and for “foreign powers” and were executed. Senior generals in the Red Army were tried in secret and also shot.
Only a half a century later, in 1988, during the perestroika and glasnost period inaugurated by Mikhail Gorbachev, were the Old Bolsheviks officially rehabilitated. However, Russian is once more rewriting its history to present the Stalinist period, including the notorious trials, in a more “favourable light”.
On 19 June, Russia’s largest online history resource at www.hrono.info was shut down by the home affairs ministry in St Petersburg. Founder Vyacheslav Rumyantsev said the closure followed after an article criticised the city’s governor for cutting an allowance given to survivors of the Nazi siege of Leningrad.
In December, police in St Petersburg raided the human rights organisation Memorial, removing much of the material used by Orland Figes in The Whisperers, his book on family life under Stalin. It included interviews with gulag victims, photos and personal testimonies.
The attack on the website comes in the wake of the publication of school textbooks that now portray Stalin not as a mass murderer but as a great national leader and an "efficient manager" who defeated the Nazis and industrialised a backward Soviet Union. In May, president Dmitry Medvedev announced he was setting up a new body to counter the "falsification of history", which, naturally, actually means the opposite.
The commission will be dominated by members of Russia's FSB intelligence service rather than professional historians. Its first job is to counter interprations of the 70th anniversary of the August 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact, under which Hitler and Stalin agreed to carve up Europe, with Moscow annexing the Baltics and two-thirds of Poland.
As a taster of the “new history” to come, this month Russia's defence ministry posted a lengthy article on its website claiming that Poland provoked the Second World War! The article said Poland refused to yield to Germany's "modest" ultimatum demands in 1939 for a land corridor to East Prussia and Gdansk. The ministry withdrew it after Poland protested to Russia's ambassador in Warsaw.
Meanwhile, on Saturday, Mohammad-Ali Abtahi, a former vice-president arrested for protesting against Ahmadinejad, reportedly testified in Tehran that now he understood that the vote was "clean" and that allegations of fraud in the election were "a lie". No doubt there is quiet approval for all this in the Kremlin, where the rehabilitation of Stalin is proceeding apace, in a country where anti-government demonstrations are usually banned and where investigative journalists are gunned down.
Paul Feldman
Communications editor
The Russian government was the first to congratulate Ahmadinejad on his “victory” in the 12 June elections. So denouncing Moscow makes sense. And the marchers also wanted to distinguish themselves from the usual “Down with America” slogans of state-orchestrated demonstrations in support of the regime.
Many of those on trial in Tehran have apparently “confessed” to "acting against national security" and "conspiring with foreign powers to stage a velvet revolution". Opposition leaders have denounced the torturing of those arrested and the staging of a mass trial where the defendants have few if any legal rights.
The historical connection with Russia, of course, is the most infamous show trials of modern times, which were held in Moscow between 1936-8. The principal leaders of the 1917 Revolution similarly “confessed” to working with and for “foreign powers” and were executed. Senior generals in the Red Army were tried in secret and also shot.
Only a half a century later, in 1988, during the perestroika and glasnost period inaugurated by Mikhail Gorbachev, were the Old Bolsheviks officially rehabilitated. However, Russian is once more rewriting its history to present the Stalinist period, including the notorious trials, in a more “favourable light”.
On 19 June, Russia’s largest online history resource at www.hrono.info was shut down by the home affairs ministry in St Petersburg. Founder Vyacheslav Rumyantsev said the closure followed after an article criticised the city’s governor for cutting an allowance given to survivors of the Nazi siege of Leningrad.
In December, police in St Petersburg raided the human rights organisation Memorial, removing much of the material used by Orland Figes in The Whisperers, his book on family life under Stalin. It included interviews with gulag victims, photos and personal testimonies.
The attack on the website comes in the wake of the publication of school textbooks that now portray Stalin not as a mass murderer but as a great national leader and an "efficient manager" who defeated the Nazis and industrialised a backward Soviet Union. In May, president Dmitry Medvedev announced he was setting up a new body to counter the "falsification of history", which, naturally, actually means the opposite.
The commission will be dominated by members of Russia's FSB intelligence service rather than professional historians. Its first job is to counter interprations of the 70th anniversary of the August 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact, under which Hitler and Stalin agreed to carve up Europe, with Moscow annexing the Baltics and two-thirds of Poland.
As a taster of the “new history” to come, this month Russia's defence ministry posted a lengthy article on its website claiming that Poland provoked the Second World War! The article said Poland refused to yield to Germany's "modest" ultimatum demands in 1939 for a land corridor to East Prussia and Gdansk. The ministry withdrew it after Poland protested to Russia's ambassador in Warsaw.
Meanwhile, on Saturday, Mohammad-Ali Abtahi, a former vice-president arrested for protesting against Ahmadinejad, reportedly testified in Tehran that now he understood that the vote was "clean" and that allegations of fraud in the election were "a lie". No doubt there is quiet approval for all this in the Kremlin, where the rehabilitation of Stalin is proceeding apace, in a country where anti-government demonstrations are usually banned and where investigative journalists are gunned down.
Paul Feldman
Communications editor
Monday, June 22, 2009
Getting it right about Iran
A little humility is called for in making an assessment of what is at stake in Iran, not only for the sake of the courageous students and others who are in the firing line of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s thugs and secret police. Getting it right about the essence of independent mass movements is not just an Iranian question.
Ahmadinejad’s slogan of “death to US imperialism” and the attacks on Britain are being churned out as a desperate ploy to hold sway over a rebellious population who want their basic democratic rights and to come out of the shadows of a theocratic state. In Iran, as in Britain, there is a crisis of legitimacy for the state regime and all sorts of devices, including nationalism, are being used to prop up the political system.
Supporters of Mir Hossein Moussavi are continuing to defy the government-imposed ban on demonstrations, arrests, riot police and the thugs of the Basiji militia but now under conditions of fear and terror. Photographs and videos are having to be smuggled out since the regime has clamped down on the internet and live reporting.
On Saturday the state media said that 13 died in clashes with riot police, bringing the official death toll to at least 20. At least 457 people have been arrested, including the family of former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Rafsanjani, who is 75, heads the Assembly of Experts, a clerical body which has the power to dismiss or appoint the Supreme Leader, a post presently filled by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who has staked his position on suppressing the demonstrations.
As the unresolved issues from the 1979 revolution that toppled Shah Reza Pahlavi rumble through all levels of society, the seismic shocks of a new mass popular movement are exposing those who, behind their “left” words, reject the ability of the masses to make a challenge for political and state power. Amongst them is Guardian “left” journalist Seumus Milne, who has suggested that the anti-government movement led by Mousavi is simply a US-Western inspired attempt to “neutralise” Iran, thus echoing the words of Khamenei who has denounced Britain as a conspirator against his rule.
Milne and his co-thinkers in the “anti-imperialist” camp seem to have missed the fact that young people inside Tehran are desperately pleading for support. Among those who Milne dismisses as “the gilded youth” of Tehran are students who are laying down their lives.
As an Irish blogger notes: “I wonder if it ever occurred to the likes of Milne that the men and women protesting in Iran are not ‘gilded youth’ but people who are frustrated not only by what they see as a blatantly fraudulent election; they are frustrated by life in an oppressive society, frustrated at being second class citizens (in the case of many of the women, frustrated at high inflation, frustrated at high unemployment). They are angry and they want change.”
Milne is not the only voice on the “left” that finds it impossible to believe that millions are ready to risk all to rid themselves of the backward nationalism and anti-Semitism that characterises the Ahmadinejad regime. As blogger Bill Weinberg notes, other lefts such as “the retro-Stalinist Workers World and its International Action Center” and “Monthly Review and the World Socialist Website have weighed in for Ahmadinejad and dissed the protesters as dupes or pawns of US imperialism. How interesting to see these supposed ‘leftists’ making common cause with right-wing cheerleaders for authoritarian regimes...”
The divisions within the top of Iranian society – Mousavi held leading posts in the Islamic Republic after the revolution of 1979 – reflect the deep movements below in society at large. A secular way forward towards a democratic society based on common ownership and control of the country’s resources is what’s at stake.
Achieving that will require a new, revolutionary leadership in Iran, as elsewhere. A mass movement against the state such as has emerged in Iran, with its growing independence from old leaders, has to be supported, not for what might be achieved in the short term in terms of the disputed presidential election but for the prospects that it holds for deep-going transformation in the longer term.
Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary
Ahmadinejad’s slogan of “death to US imperialism” and the attacks on Britain are being churned out as a desperate ploy to hold sway over a rebellious population who want their basic democratic rights and to come out of the shadows of a theocratic state. In Iran, as in Britain, there is a crisis of legitimacy for the state regime and all sorts of devices, including nationalism, are being used to prop up the political system.
Supporters of Mir Hossein Moussavi are continuing to defy the government-imposed ban on demonstrations, arrests, riot police and the thugs of the Basiji militia but now under conditions of fear and terror. Photographs and videos are having to be smuggled out since the regime has clamped down on the internet and live reporting.
On Saturday the state media said that 13 died in clashes with riot police, bringing the official death toll to at least 20. At least 457 people have been arrested, including the family of former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Rafsanjani, who is 75, heads the Assembly of Experts, a clerical body which has the power to dismiss or appoint the Supreme Leader, a post presently filled by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who has staked his position on suppressing the demonstrations.
As the unresolved issues from the 1979 revolution that toppled Shah Reza Pahlavi rumble through all levels of society, the seismic shocks of a new mass popular movement are exposing those who, behind their “left” words, reject the ability of the masses to make a challenge for political and state power. Amongst them is Guardian “left” journalist Seumus Milne, who has suggested that the anti-government movement led by Mousavi is simply a US-Western inspired attempt to “neutralise” Iran, thus echoing the words of Khamenei who has denounced Britain as a conspirator against his rule.
Milne and his co-thinkers in the “anti-imperialist” camp seem to have missed the fact that young people inside Tehran are desperately pleading for support. Among those who Milne dismisses as “the gilded youth” of Tehran are students who are laying down their lives.
As an Irish blogger notes: “I wonder if it ever occurred to the likes of Milne that the men and women protesting in Iran are not ‘gilded youth’ but people who are frustrated not only by what they see as a blatantly fraudulent election; they are frustrated by life in an oppressive society, frustrated at being second class citizens (in the case of many of the women, frustrated at high inflation, frustrated at high unemployment). They are angry and they want change.”
Milne is not the only voice on the “left” that finds it impossible to believe that millions are ready to risk all to rid themselves of the backward nationalism and anti-Semitism that characterises the Ahmadinejad regime. As blogger Bill Weinberg notes, other lefts such as “the retro-Stalinist Workers World and its International Action Center” and “Monthly Review and the World Socialist Website have weighed in for Ahmadinejad and dissed the protesters as dupes or pawns of US imperialism. How interesting to see these supposed ‘leftists’ making common cause with right-wing cheerleaders for authoritarian regimes...”
The divisions within the top of Iranian society – Mousavi held leading posts in the Islamic Republic after the revolution of 1979 – reflect the deep movements below in society at large. A secular way forward towards a democratic society based on common ownership and control of the country’s resources is what’s at stake.
Achieving that will require a new, revolutionary leadership in Iran, as elsewhere. A mass movement against the state such as has emerged in Iran, with its growing independence from old leaders, has to be supported, not for what might be achieved in the short term in terms of the disputed presidential election but for the prospects that it holds for deep-going transformation in the longer term.
Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
The uprising in Iran
The titanic struggle on the streets of Iran unleashed by the disputed results of the presidential election contain a revolutionary essence that has the potential to take on a momentum all of its own.
To march in their hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, through the streets of the capital in defiance of the authorities, to gather in the universities to denounce president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a dictator, to use social networking and Internet sites to mobilise and to reach the outside world amounts to a significant challenge to the state which not even the killing of seven marchers can halt.
The marchers chanted defiant slogans as they moved down Azadi Street yesterday towards an iconic monument built by the country’s former despot, the Shah. "Death to the dictator", "Death to the lying government" the chants rang out. "Iranians, why are you silent," went another slogan. "Iran has become Palestine. We will take back our votes even if they kill us," was another.
Masses of people believe that their votes have been stolen. They cannot credit that Ahmadinejad won almost two-thirds of the votes in last week’s presidential election, defeating former prime minister Hossein Mousavi. Whether Ahmadinejad did or not is now irrelevant, however. The decision today of the powerful Guardian Council to authorise a partial recount will not suffice. Even Mousavi has rejected the move, with a spokesman saying that nothing less than re-run of the election will do.
In 1979 millions rose up to overthrow the US-backed Shah’s dictatorship. To the shock of many liberal Westerners, the revolution took hold under the auspices of an Islamic clergy and took refuge in the safety of the mosques to escape the notorious Savak, the Shah’s secret police.
Now the momentum is towards the completion of that revolution through establishing popular, secular power. Mousavi will not be able to deliver anything like because he is also part of the state establishment which tries to balance between the masses and capitalism. That is what has come unstuck.
Motivation for the present upsurge is all too apparent. Despite being the world’s fourth largest oil producer, Iran is suffering from massive inequalities and a denial of basic democratic rights. About half its 71 million people are under 25. But more than a fifth of them are unemployed. Soaring unemployment has led to a "brain drain" from the country, leaving it short of (among others) health professionals, particularly doctors and dentists. Annual inflation is more than 25%. The wildly fluctuating price of oil is adding to the crisis facing the state.
The 1979 revolution was part of a great tide of national struggles throughout the world against imperialism for independence and self-determination. In the 21st century, these are beginning to assume a more definite social, anti-capitalist character as, for example, in Venezuela and other parts of South America.
In Iran, an election has re-opened the floodgates of mass confrontation in the streets between the state forces who back Ahmadinejad and the millions who voted for Mousavi. As commentator Robert Fisk, who watched yesterday’s mobilisation in Tehran, remarked: “Government is not about good guys and bad guys. It is about power, state and political power – they are not the same – and unless those wanly smiling riot police move across to the opposition, the weapons of the Islamic Republic remain in the hands of Ahmadinejad's administration and his spiritual protectors.”
As Ahmadinejad hob-nobs it with Russian and Chinese leaders – who know a thing or two about putting down social unrest – the momentum is running against him. Whether or not the present struggle succeeds in forcing the Holocaust-denier Ahmadinejad out, Iran can never be the same again.
Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor
To march in their hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, through the streets of the capital in defiance of the authorities, to gather in the universities to denounce president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a dictator, to use social networking and Internet sites to mobilise and to reach the outside world amounts to a significant challenge to the state which not even the killing of seven marchers can halt.
The marchers chanted defiant slogans as they moved down Azadi Street yesterday towards an iconic monument built by the country’s former despot, the Shah. "Death to the dictator", "Death to the lying government" the chants rang out. "Iranians, why are you silent," went another slogan. "Iran has become Palestine. We will take back our votes even if they kill us," was another.
Masses of people believe that their votes have been stolen. They cannot credit that Ahmadinejad won almost two-thirds of the votes in last week’s presidential election, defeating former prime minister Hossein Mousavi. Whether Ahmadinejad did or not is now irrelevant, however. The decision today of the powerful Guardian Council to authorise a partial recount will not suffice. Even Mousavi has rejected the move, with a spokesman saying that nothing less than re-run of the election will do.
In 1979 millions rose up to overthrow the US-backed Shah’s dictatorship. To the shock of many liberal Westerners, the revolution took hold under the auspices of an Islamic clergy and took refuge in the safety of the mosques to escape the notorious Savak, the Shah’s secret police.
Now the momentum is towards the completion of that revolution through establishing popular, secular power. Mousavi will not be able to deliver anything like because he is also part of the state establishment which tries to balance between the masses and capitalism. That is what has come unstuck.
Motivation for the present upsurge is all too apparent. Despite being the world’s fourth largest oil producer, Iran is suffering from massive inequalities and a denial of basic democratic rights. About half its 71 million people are under 25. But more than a fifth of them are unemployed. Soaring unemployment has led to a "brain drain" from the country, leaving it short of (among others) health professionals, particularly doctors and dentists. Annual inflation is more than 25%. The wildly fluctuating price of oil is adding to the crisis facing the state.
The 1979 revolution was part of a great tide of national struggles throughout the world against imperialism for independence and self-determination. In the 21st century, these are beginning to assume a more definite social, anti-capitalist character as, for example, in Venezuela and other parts of South America.
In Iran, an election has re-opened the floodgates of mass confrontation in the streets between the state forces who back Ahmadinejad and the millions who voted for Mousavi. As commentator Robert Fisk, who watched yesterday’s mobilisation in Tehran, remarked: “Government is not about good guys and bad guys. It is about power, state and political power – they are not the same – and unless those wanly smiling riot police move across to the opposition, the weapons of the Islamic Republic remain in the hands of Ahmadinejad's administration and his spiritual protectors.”
As Ahmadinejad hob-nobs it with Russian and Chinese leaders – who know a thing or two about putting down social unrest – the momentum is running against him. Whether or not the present struggle succeeds in forcing the Holocaust-denier Ahmadinejad out, Iran can never be the same again.
Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor
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