From an Islamic Republic towards an Islamic Government

Etemad-e-Melli newspaper on its March 5, 2009 issue had an interesting report on the Religious Democracy Conference held by the Imam Khomeini Educational and Research Institute of Qom. The report correctly calls it "a conference by the critics of democracy," for almost everyone in the conference opposes democracy. The views of the holders and participants of the conference, among which are Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi and some of his students, are most illuminating especially because the coup d'etat President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is known to be a faithful follower of Mesbah Yazdi.

The first presenters while believing that literal obedience from the principals of democracy is against the teachings of Islam, continue to say that its possible to domesticate democracy into the Islamic state. Then comes Mesbah Yazdi himself. He says those who talk about domesticating democracy are talking from "an ugly extremistly submissive" point of view. He believes the complete accepting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is against Islamic judicial instructions such as execution and amputation (of hands), and hence not acceptable. He continues that Ayatollah Khomeini did not believe that the the government needs popular support to be legitimate. He says that while Khomeini has argued that the pre-1979 Imperial regime of Iran was unpopular and hence illegitimate, he used the popularity argument only for the sake of the argument and did not believe that Islamic government should have popular support. Those who come after Mesbah Yazdi are (if possible) even more extremist. Hojjat-al-Islam Haji Heydar argues that popularity is not even acceptable for the purposes of an argument. Asserting that Velayat-e Faqih is not the democratic pillar of our government, he says undemocratic institutions should outrank democratic ones. There should be a high council of 45 faqihs that outranks the popularly elected "lower" parliament.

This is only a sample of the beliefs of those who are gaining more and more power in Iran. Mesbah Yazdi is believed to have issued a Fatwa permitting election fraud. And this is only one of the horrible things attributed to him. But all of the dreadful rumors aside, the mere opinions of his presented here is enough to know what kind of person we're dealing with. And these are not the kind of people that stop at the borders of Iran. Their goal is global domination as is the goal of Islam. If they are not stopped right now, there might come a time soon that is too late.

There's one last thing that I owe to the Ayatollah to mention here. As much as I despise this man, he is at least frank about his beliefs on democracy. There are many others in the ranks of the Islamic Republic that more or less believe in the same things but try to hide their beliefs under the masquerade of their sham elections.

Voice for the Voiceless

I hear that rajanews.com and farsnews.com, two government-funded hardline Iranian news agencies, are not accessible from non-Iranian IP addresses. I tried to verify this by using a few proxy servers I have access to outside Iran and it seems to be correct. But why should a news agency limit its audience on purpose? Not unless, of course, because they have different recipies for the news they "make" for people inside and outside Iran. The lies they easily sell to Iranians with severed accesses to the outside world would not sell so easily to people who have access to all the news sources in the world. They need more delicacy, which leads me to my point: Press TV.

Press TV is an Islamic Republic funded news network for the English speaking audience. If you're reading this outside Iran, I beg you, do not fall for their seemingly independent point of view. I have seen people who, in search of an alternative news source besides the mainstream media, fall for Press TV. This is a mistake, it's jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. Consider this: Press TV advertizes itself as "the voice for the voiceless." While the seventy million people of Iran, the people whose country's wealth is being spent on PressTV, has no voice in any of the Islamic Republic media, how they can "give voice to the voiceless?" You want a news source better than the mainstream media? It's fine. But go somewhere else. Anything else would be better than the Islamic Republic's "news making machine."

Update: Iain Dale and Nick Ferrari have decided not to appear on Press TV ever again. Read about their reasons here and here.

Now I'm officially an owl

I go to sleep in the morning and wake up at night. I start with a meal which is more like dinner, and a few hours after that a breakfast like meal and an hour or two after that, something like an "afternoon tea." I might have an ice cream too, while starting studying around 3:00 AM. Maybe I should start making up more proper names for my meals. Crazy life, isn't it?

This deserves a Guiness World Record

Ahmadinejad seriously deserves the world record for the most blatant remarks in the history of human kind.

As IRIB News reports (IRIB is the Islamic regime's gigantic media machine), he told Sunday Times reporter, "In Iran, women have more rights than men."

Even much worse than that, also reported by IRIB News, is what he told the Economist reporter, "The freedom here is nearly absolute because people can tell anything they want."

I may vomit.

Call your parents every two hours!

I went to university today, only to find that the exams have been postponed. Our university is actually one of the last to do so despite the announcement by the Ministry of Science that no exams are to be postponed.

I met one of my professors though, and after a few moments of talking he suddenly asked me if I live alone or with my parents. When I told him that I live alone and my parents live in another city he said, "You know your parents are very proud of you -you're not a father so you may not understand now- and they care so much about you. You should call them every two hours and reassure them that you're safe."

That's what he said. The situation is grave!

Partly Blocked

I just noticed that when I try to open my post about Mohammad Ali Fardin, I get the infamous "Access to this website is blocked" message (that's a loose translation of the Persian message). It's weird. I mean I've written worst things about the regime and none of my other posts are blocked. I thought that this might be because of a "forbidden word" in the URL (weird blocking cases can happen when a URL has forbidden words in it), but this doesn't seem to be the case since I can view the page in Google cache. My only conclusion is that that single page for some reason has been blocked.

Hooray! I finally pissed them off. It won't be long they will be coming to my door to arrest me. Time to go into hiding!

Back to Revolution

I hear cries of crowds from some distance. At first, I thought it's the neighbor's TV. The Islamic Republic loves to show lengthy footage of its fake demonstrations. "Damn it. Why don't they turn it down?" I told myself, but then I realized it's not just from one direction. It comes from all around me, and from the roofs. I listened trying to distinguish what they were saying. Then I realized what I'm hearing; "Allah-o-Akbar!" which means "God is great." Now this is a religious chant, but every Iranian knows of the last time this happened: during the 1979 revolution, the chanting now is a sign of resistance. And this time, the chanting is against the Islamic regime itself.

I'm not religious at all, and in fact I very much dislike religious chantings, but this time I was deeply touched. Many times during past few years, and especially yesterday after the result of that fraud of an election was announced, I've told myself that there is no hope of change for Iran, but maybe I am wrong. I still look at it with great skepticism, but I can't help thinking "Maybe there is still hope."