THE PLANK JUNE 18, 2009
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Andrew Apostolou is a Senior Program Manager at Freedom House.
**Iranian TV, which is state-controlled, is calling for people to attend prayers to demonstrate their support for the regime. Ayatollah Khamenei will lead prayers in Tehran. In West Azerbaijan province, which Musavi feels was stolen from him during the election, Khamenei’s representative will lead prayers. It’s a detail that suggests why Khamenei is so difficult to unseat: He has an entire shadow government under his control, with representatives in all ministries, provinces, and Iranian embassies abroad.
**Regime media are telling Iranians that the Musavi protests are being organized by foreign broadcasters, like the BBC and VOA. On state media and radio, the protestors are being called: “treacherous,” “ignorant,” “opportunistic,” “mischievous,” “simple-minded,” and “servants of global arrogance and the great Satan."
**Regime media are also claiming today that Israeli intelligence-linked terrorists have “confessed” to planning to bomb mosques and other public places on Election Day. The insinuation is that those who oppose the election “epic” that gave Ahmadinejad another term are acting just like terrorists.
9 comments
This isn't going to end well...
- DC Spence
June 18, 2009 at 9:19pm
**Regime media are telling Iranians that the Musavi protests are being organized by foreign broadcasters, like the BBC and VOA. On state media and radio, the protestors are being called: “treacherous,” “ignorant,” “opportunistic,” “mischievous,” “simple-minded,” and “servants of global arrogance and the great Satan.""
and the Zionists, don't forget the "Zionists." We are responsible for the fact that Iranians don't like Ahmadinejad.
"Is JPost behind the 'Iranian Twitter Revolution'?"
Jun. 17, 2009
Ricky Ben-David and Rachel Geizhals , THE JERUSALEM POST
www.jpost.com/.../Satellite
- J. Dyer
June 18, 2009 at 9:33pm
Regarding the events unfolding in Iran, some choice observations from George Orwell follow below. I think most folks will recognize the relevance to Tehran but how many wil recognize the relevance to Washington?
Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.
Myths which are believed in tend to become true.
Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.
War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.
War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.
What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?
All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.
As with....religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.
Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.
The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.
In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.
In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.
People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.
gw
- iambiguous
June 18, 2009 at 9:44pm
Looks like the mullahs are grasping at straws. I find it hard to believe that most Iranians would take these rants seriously.
- nbarry
June 18, 2009 at 10:00pm
I swear it is like holding a mirror up to America, 2004. During the debates, I read of A'jad and Mousavi analyzing domestic unemployment through the lens of current unemployment rate vs. relative unemployment rate. Naturally, A'jad's 14% described a rosier picture than M's 23%, much as Bush saw a boom where Kerry saw a bust.
- dylanposer
June 18, 2009 at 11:10pm
So even in Iran, which actively supports terrorists, hardline conservatives attack their opponents for being associated with terrorists?
- JEFF FREY
June 19, 2009 at 3:07am
"So even in Iran, which actively supports terrorists, hardline conservatives attack their opponents for being associated with terrorists?"
george:
Indeed.
You begin to grasp how this all unfolds on the day you begin to understand that Alice In Wonderland is not a fairy tale for children.
It is, instead, a bleak commentary on how those in power [anywhere, anytime] maintain control of the polity by controlling language itself.
george
- iambiguous
June 19, 2009 at 4:18am
"So even in Iran, which actively supports terrorists, hardline conservatives attack their opponents for being associated with terrorists?"
george:
Indeed.
You begin to grasp how this all unfolds on the day you begin to understand that Alice In Wonderland is not a fairy tale for children.
It is, instead, a rather bleak commentary on how those in power [anywhere, anytime] maintain control over minds by maintaining control over language itself.
And few are more susceptible....more credulous...than those who anchor themselves to one or another totalitarian prophet.
george
- iambiguous
June 19, 2009 at 4:32am
JEFF FREY said:
"So even in Iran, which actively supports terrorists, hardline conservatives attack their opponents for being associated with terrorists?"
All antisemites use the same arguments? Reading this one would think that Lyndon Larouche (or George Walton) was in Teheran.
www.jpost.com/.../Satellite
"Khamenei defends ballot count, calls vote 'definitive victory'"
jpost.com staff and AP , THE JERUSALEM POST
"Iran's supreme leader was addressing the nation Friday in his first public comments since opposition supporters flooded Teheran's streets in an unprecedented challenge to the country's ruling clerics.
In one part of his speech, Khamenei slammed "Zionist radio," referring to the Israel Broadcast Authority's Persian language station, for "planting doubts" in the hearts of Iranians.
Later, when Khamenei said the United Kingdom's government was the "most treacherous," the crowd responded with chants of "Death to the UK, Israel and America."
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has already approved the June 12 election results that gave hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a landslide victory, but he has not been able to ignore the powerful defiance of the opposition, which has called the vote rigged, of his authority.
Khamenei is making his address as part of Friday prayers at Teheran University. It was not known if Mir Hossein Mousavi, the opposition leader, or Ahmadinejad would attend the address, which are being broadcast live on state television......"
- J. Dyer
June 19, 2009 at 9:39am