Dilip Simeon's blog

Analysts say economic desperation and growing frustration in Iranian society have led to angry demonstrations around the country that began with people protesting water shortages in the southwestern province of Khuzestan. “If the society wasn’t hopeless, it wouldn’t take to the streets. It wouldn’t react. Its dissatisfaction wouldn’t result in protests and it wouldn’t be able to raise its voice,” Tehran-based sociologist Saeed Madani  told RFE/RL’s Radio Farda . Thousands of people have protested water shortages in recent days caused by a severe drought and exacerbated by years of state mismanagement of Iran’s natural resources and poor planning in oil-rich Khuzestan, where residents — including its large ethnic Arab minority — have long complained of second-class treatment…. https://www.juancole.com/2021/07/dissatisfied-officials-khuzestan.html More posts on Iran

Saudi Arabia ’s role as a counter-revolutionary force in the Middle East is widely understood and thoroughly documented. Historian Rosie Bsheer calls the Saudi kingdom “a counter-revolutionary state par excellence,” indeed one that was “consolidated as such.” The Saudi monarchy has gone into counter-revolutionary overdrive since the onset of the Arab uprisings, scrambling to thwart popular movements and keep the region’s dictators in power — from Egypt and Bahrain to Yemen and Sudan (and beyond). Iran Human Rights Documentation Center What is less understood is the counter-revolutionary role that Iran plays in the region’s politics. This is poorly understood and under-examined because it flies in the face of the dominant narrative, that of Iran as a “revolutionary” state in the vanguard of a regional “Axis of Resistance” to US imperialism and its allies… https://newpol.org/the-other-regional-counter-revolution-irans-role-in-the-shifting-political-landscape-of-the-middle-east/#_ednref...

A survivor of the 1988 massacre says he is ready to testify before the UN about the role of Iran’s leaders in the extrajudicial killings    I was only 17 in the autumn of 1981 when I was arrested in Tehran for supporting and selling the publication of the People’s Mujahedin of Iran (MEK), a political organisation opposed to the Islamic Republic of Iran. I spent almost 11 years in Ayatollah Khomeini’s prisons in Evin, Ghezel Hesar and Gohardasht until I was finally released in the spring of 1992. During my time in prison I faced torture and mock executions. I was kept in solitary confinement for five years. But my most daunting experience was witnessing the infamous 1988 massacre. On 19  July 1988 , Khomeini, supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran,  issued a   fatwa , or religious edict, charging all political prisoners affiliated to the MEK with “waging war against God” and ordering the execution of all those who refused to renounce the group. Death ...

The Biden administration on Friday declassified and released a  CIA assessment  that Saudi crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman bears responsibility for the murder of  Washington Post  columnist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 3, 2018.  President Biden will not, however, impose sanctions on Bin Salman. Apparently the only punishment will be that Biden won’t talk to the crown prince, only to his father, King Salman. CBC: “U.S. intelligence report blames Saudi crown prince for murder of Jamal Khashoggi” But in fact, secretary of defense Lloyd Austin just spoke with Bin Salman earlier this week, because the latter holds the portfolio of minister of defense, and so is the proper counterpart for military relations.  On Feb. 19, Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, the head of the Central Command that covers the Middle East, said that the US was seeking more “back up bases” in Saudi Arabia in case of hostilities with Iran… https://www.juancole.com...

Parvin Mohammadi needs support from labor activists and feminist activists around the world. During all these years of struggle, she has never separated the labor struggle from women’s struggles for their rights.  On December 21, 2020, the Iranian government sentenced Parvin Mohammadi, in absentia, to a year in prison on charges of “sedition.” She has refused to go to prison, continues to challenge the authorities, and has now gone into hiding. Parvin Mohammadi was born in 1961 in a working class family. After graduating from high school, she was not able to attend university because she needed to work to support her family. This was the period shortly after the 1979 Iranian Revolution. She was hired as a worker by the Melli Shoe Company which had been expropriated by the Islamic Republic’s Mostazefan Foundation (a parastatal entity). In the Winter of 1981, when workers at the Melli Shoe Company went on strike, she became a strike leader. After some workers were arrested and othe...

Iran has executed a former opposition figure over his involvement in anti-government protests in 2017, state TV announced on Saturday. Ruhollah Zam had been granted political asylum in France and reportedly lived in Paris, running a website called Amadnews and a channel on the Telegram messaging app, before being "lured" back to Iran. State television said the "counter-revolutionary" Zam was hanged on Saturday morning after the supreme court upheld his sentence due to "the severity of the crimes" committed against the Islamic republic. Judiciary spokesman Gholamhossein Esmaili had on Tuesday said Zam's sentence was upheld by the supreme court "more than a month ago". France reacted with anger to the execution, which it said ran counter to Tehran's international obligations. "France condemns in the strongest possible terms this serious breach of free expression and press freedom in Iran," the foreign ministry said in a statemen...

Likely, the operation, whether by Israel or Saudi Arabia or both, was intended to spike tensions in US-Iranian relations so as to make it more difficult for Joe Biden to start back up the 2015 nuclear deal or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Israel does not acknowledge its covert operations, but it seems the most likely culprit…. The Iranian newspaper Ettela’at reports that on Friday, what it called “armed terrorist elements” mounted an assault on the automobile carrying Dr. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who was badly wounded in the midst of the clash between his security team and the assailants and was transported to hospital, where he died of his injuries. Fakhrizadeh, an eminent nuclear scientist, was the head of the Research and Innovation Organization within the Iranian Ministry of Defense and Armed Forces Logistics.  Iran’s chief justice, Ayatollah Sayyed Ibrahim Ra’isi, characterized the attack as by “foreigners and international Zionism,” with, he said, “the sinister objec...

Romina Ashrafi, a 14-year-old girl, victim of a so-called ‘honour killing’ in Iran.  Twitter screengrab An Iranian man who beheaded his 14-year-old daughter has been sentenced to only nine years in jail, in a case that has sparked outrage at the way Iranian law appears to enshrine supposed male rights over women’s lives. Rana Dashti, the mother of 14-year-old Romina Ashrafi, expressed fury at the lenient sentence in an interview with the Iranian Labor news agency (Ilna) on Friday and said the court’s ruling had “caused fear and panic for me and my family”. Romina was murdered by her father after she ran off with a man aged 28. Dashti said she would appeal against the decision, and that after 15 years she had no interest in continuing to live with her husband. More on so-called honour killing of women She added she was worried about the lives of her only son and other relations. “I no longer want my husband to return to the village,” she told the news agency. The cas...

History’s a joke, right? We know that from our president who creates laughable moments of history daily -- as when, reading from a script recently, he pronounced America’s famed Yosemite National Park “ Yo-Semite .” In that context, let me bring up one of his favorite countries: I-Run. Its modern history, if anybody remembered anymore, would leave us all chuckling grimly. If you’re thinking about alternate futures (and you happened to remember the past), you might wonder what that country would have been like if, in 1953, the CIA and British intelligence  hadn’t overthrown  an elected secular democratic government there led by Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh at the very moment when he wanted to nationalize the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (now known as BP). They then reinstalled the autocratic young Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi in power along with his terrible secret police, the Savak. Vanessa Thorpe: MI 6, the coup in Iran that changed the Middle East, and the cover-up ...

The hidden role of a British secret service officer who led the coup that permanently altered the Middle East is to be revealed for the first time since an Observer news story was suppressed in 1985.  The report, headlined “How MI6 and CIA joined forces to plot Iran coup”, appeared in the 26 May edition but was swiftly quashed. It exposed the fact that an MI6 man, Norman Darbyshire, had run a covert and violent operation to reinstate the Shah of Iran as ruler of the country in 1953. Yet just a few days after the newspaper came out, all fresh evidence of this British operation and of Darbyshire’s identity disappeared from public debate. “We still do not know who leaked this to the Observer originally, or why,” said film-maker Taghi Amirani this weekend, ahead of the release of his documentary, Coup 53. “We only know that any record of the interview with Darbyshire quickly disappeared and no one followed up the story. It smacks of a complete cover-up of British involvement to this ...

Iran has sentenced a French-Iranian academic to a maximum sentence of six years in prison on charges of breaching national security and spreading propaganda against the country. Fariba Adelkhah, an anthropologist and researcher at the Centre for International Research (CERI) at the Paris political institute Sciences Po, has been held at Evin jail, north of Tehran,  since last June .  She was initially charged with spying but this was dropped in January. The Iranian authorities continued to hold her on other charges.  On Saturday, it was announced she had been given a five-year jail sentence for “colluding with the aim of breaching national security” and a further one-year term for “propaganda against the system”, but was told she would only serve the longer sentence.  Adelkhah, 61, weakened by a 49-day hunger strike at the beginning of the year, is a specialist in Shia Islam. Her lawyer, Saeid Dehghan, had hoped she would be released after her appearance in ...

No longer can its religious leaders claim papal infallibility. If they can lie about killing innocents on a Ukrainian airliner – most of them Iranian — then surely their jurisprudence might prove equally flawed “In wartime,” Churchill famously told  Stalin , “truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” He said this on 30 November 1943 – by chance his 69th birthday – in an effort to impress upon the Soviet leader the importance of deception in the planning of  D-Day . In fact, the Allies did deceive the Germans, whose Wehrmacht commanders thought the landings would be made in northern France rather than on the beaches of Normandy.  But the meaning of truth and lies – even the very word “wartime” – have so changed their meaning and usefulness in recent  Middle East  history that it’s almost impossible to apply Churchill’s quotation today. After its anti-aircraft missile destroyed Ukrainian Airways flight 752 this m...

Donald Trump may act like a schoolyard bully and an impetuous infant, but he is not the only one to blame for recklessly bringing the world closer to a catastrophic war. While the responsibility for approving the assassination of Qassem Suleimani, Iran’s top general, in a drone strike near Baghdad international airport is certainly his, Trump’s actions would not have been possible without the deep infrastructure for war that lies at the core of the American political system, especially since 2001. After the “War on Terror” began, the United States - already a deeply militarized country - essentially abdicated public deliberations of war and peace when Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). The executive branch has been invoking the AUMF for almost two decades as its primary legal basis for military operations around the world.  Put another way, war isn’t hell. War is mundane. We’ve already arrived at the point when even the Senate armed service...

NB : When Trump was first elected (and just before), numerous supposedly well-informed observers were looking forward to his presidency as a blow against Islamist extremism. Since then, he has demonstrated that his sole commitment is to his family business, the petro-chemical industry , the arms manufacturers , nullification of environmental regulations, rulers like Putin and regimes such as Saudi Arabia . He has abandoned the Kurds, who fought valiantly against ISIS; disregarded the Saudi royal family's involvement in the gruesome murder of journalist Khashoggi , and now assassinated the man ( no angel mind you), who played a big role in the defeat of ISIS.  Those who hoped this racist motor-mouth would at least pull his country back from endless armed global interventions are now faced with another round of armed conflict. I wonder if our local contingent of Trump-worshippers will now invent another set of rhetorical justifications for this manic president's decision, b...

When Trump took office, there was no US crisis with Iran. He created one  The Trump administration’s assassination on Thursday of General Qassem Suleimani could turn out to be its biggest foreign policy blunder. The killing could lead to a war with Iranian proxies across the Middle East, belying Trump’s supposed desire to extricate the US from its endless conflicts. But its most likely immediate effect will be to ratchet up pressure on the Iraqi government to expel US troops from Iraq. And that would mean Iran extending its already substantial influence over Iraqi government and society. The Trump administration was quick to portray the assassination as a pre-emptive strike, saying Suleimani had been “actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region.” Earlier on Thursday, the US defence secretary, Mark Esper, had warned from Washington, “The game has changed”.  But Trump has consistently increased tensions and cour...

What American corporate media won’t report is that Trump has put Iran under an almost complete economic blockade after breaching the 2015 nuclear accord that the US had signed. That accord removed economic sanctions on Iran in return for it mothballing 80% of its civilian nuclear enrichment program. That agreement could have formed the basis for reintegrating Iran into the world system and greatly reduced the tensions in the region for a generation. Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The madman in the White House has been sulking and raging for weeks about his impeachment proceedings, tweeting manically on some days more than 100 times. With the release by  JustSecurity.org  of unredacted emails on the Ukraine scandal showing that Trump personally (and illegally) withheld congressionally mandated military aid to an ally, the Republican defense of the president is collapsing. Iraqi Gov’t “Reviewing” US Relationship Some GOP senators such as Susan Collins and Lisa Murkows...