RUTHFULLY YOURS

Security forces, such as agents of the Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), are photographing the protests, enabling police later to arrest leaders of the protests, violence-prone demonstrators, and those holding aloft political and anti-regime placards.

The regime will, of course, try to weather this latest round of protests while arresting leading agitators, to be followed by torture, “recanting” show-trials, and executions.

For the past several days, Iranians have demonstrated against a government that has not delivered on promised economic improvement and against a regime whose ruling clerical class they despise.

The public’s animosity against the existing order, as past protests indicate, is no surprise. Particular aspects of this latest series of demonstrations, however, invite a critical eye by Iran-watchers.

The current protests began, not as usual, in the Iran’s capital, Tehran. The protests began in Mashhad, center of the wealthiest and most powerful religious foundation in the country. At first, the crowds were demonstrating for the long-promised but undelivered economic benefits that were supposed to follow the roll-back of internationally-applied sanctions against Iran, after the Obama administration delivered more than $150 billion to the Islamic Republic.

By the second night of protests, the demonstrators became more hostile and began to focus on political complaints. As a consequence, the regime may have viewed the spreading demonstrations more ominously.

In the past, demonstrations beginning in Tehran would then spread to smaller cities, provinces where non-Persian minorities were dominant, and then to rural regions. This time, it appears that rural citizens were in the streets early on. Also, the ongoing protests are not led or limited in large part to students and middle-class professionals, centered in northern Tehran. These protests also reportedly include laborers from South Tehran, usually the constituency of populist candidates such as former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (term: 2005-2013).

The regime, for its part, while quick to mobilize security forces and counter-demonstrations, has been slow to employ lethal suppressive measures. However, security forces, such as agents of the Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), are photographing the protests, enabling police later to arrest leaders of the protests, violence-prone demonstrators, and those holding aloft political and anti-regime placards.

Iranian women, like many others, are sick and tired of living in layers upon layers of imprisonment.

Take note, those of you who want to see real women freedom-fighters. Look into the streets of Iran or listen to the chess champion Anna Muzychuk.

Iranian women, by risking their lives, have unmasked the faces of those trying to promote burqas and hijabs as supposed “symbols of liberation”.

The desperate attempt of Iranian people pouring out onto the streets against the Islamist regime exposes the bitter life that Iran’s citizens, especially women, have been forced to live for nearly forty years in the name of Islamic law, (sharia).

These demonstrations have also shown the ugly face of Islamists who take their own people hostage to quench their thirst for power — by repression, jail, torture, executions — any way they can.

Iranian women, like many others, are sick and tired of living in layers upon layers of imprisonment.

The regime in Iran clearly feels shaken by the resolve of these protestors: Iran’s leaders have promised to soften their misogynistic laws by not imprisoning women in Tehran who appear in public without their veils on.

The protesters, however, do not seem to be buying this offer: they are seeking the full elimination of extremism in the country. There is clearly no more trust in the promises of this regime.

The skeptics, in fact, are right. There is a catch. Although the regime announced that it would not arrest women who set aside Iran’s strict dress code, the regime also stated that these women would have to attend special “morality classes” by the sharia police.

Now why would a regime want that? Could it be so that the regime can document these women to keep a watch on them?

The shackles Iranians are trying to break are exactly the same ones that organizations such as CAIR, and cohorts of Islamist regimes such as Linda Sarsour, have been trying to sell to the Western public as symbols of “fashion” and “liberation”.

Such apologists simply serve as mouthpieces for these extremist regimes, which not only enslave their own people but also distort the economic and intellectual development of their people through a mindset of supremacy and hatred throughout global arena.

When the organizers of the Women’s March in the U.S. cherry-picked “abuses,” they left a vast number of women behind, unnoticed and unwelcome, who have been subjected to inhuman treatment for centuries.

For Mansour Osanlou, the former head of the bus driver’s union in Tehran, a “new revolution” has begun in Iran.

The protests, which began on Thursday in Iran’s most religious cities and spread throughout the country within twenty four hours, now bring together workers and intellectuals, the unemployed, and the elites – a combination not seen since the 1979 revolution that toppled the Shah.

On Saturday, security forces in Tehran used rubber bullets and truck-mounted water canon in an unsuccessful attempt to disperse protesters at Tehran University who were seeking to march on the Supreme Leader’s compound, Osanloo told me in a telephone interview.

They were chanting, “Death to the Dictator,” and “Khamenei should go.” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has been Iran’s Supreme Leader since 1989, and until now, he has been portrayed as unassailable by friend and foe alike.

“We thank President Trump for his support, and call on the United States to hold the Islamic regime accountable if they kill or beat protestors or conduct mass arrests, as they did in 2009,” he told me.

The last time the Iranian people rose up, in June 2009, President Obama kept a shameful silence, allowing the regime to kill protesters in silence.

President Trump has the opportunity to change history by using his bully pulpit, which he began to do late Friday night through twitter.

“Many reports of peaceful protests by Iranian citizens fed up with regime’s corruption & its squandering of the nation’s wealth to fund terrorism abroad,” the President tweeted initially. “Iranian govt should respect people’s rights, including right to express themselves. The world is watching!”

And then he added the hashtag that has spread worldwide, #IranProtests.

The State Department followed with a more mildly-worded tweet on Saturday. “We are following reports of multiple peaceful reports by Iranian citizens. The United States condemns the arrest of peaceful protests in #Iran.”

There are many reasons to fear that the protests will fail to achieve their goal of overthrowing the regime.

If the Iranian regime is unable to brutally stomp out the countrywide protests raging through the country, and if the protesters achieve their goal of bringing down the regime, they will go down in history as the saviors of millions of people not just in Iran but throughout the world.

Given the earth shattering potential of the protests it is extraordinary to see the liberal media in the US and Europe struggle to downplay their significance.

Aside from a lukewarm statement on Twitter from British Foreign Minister Boris Johnson, as of Monday morning – five days into the protests – no senior European official had spoken in favor of the hundreds of thousands of Iranians marching throughout their country demanding freedom.

In the US, former members of the Obama administration and the liberal media have determinedly downplayed the importance of the protests. They have insisted that President Donald Trump should stop openly supporting the protesters and so adopt former president Barack Obama’s policy of effectively siding with the Iranian regime against the Iranian people who seek its overthrow.

These talking points have been pushed out into the media echo chamber by Obama’s former deputy national security adviser and strategic communications chief Ben Rhodes, his former national security adviser Susan Rice and former secretary of state John Kerry.

Obama’s Middle East coordinator Philip Gordon stated them outright in an op-ed in The New York Times on Saturday. Gordon called on Trump “to keep quiet and do nothing” in response to the protests.

In Gordon’s view, no matter how big their beef with the regime, the protesters hate the US more. And they really hate Trump.

Ryszard Legutko, a Polish political philosopher and member of the European Parliament, voiced his frustration with Brussels in late December as it gathered itself to start proceedings against his home country for undermining the rule of law. He complained of an “unprecedented obsession” with Poland among Eurocrats, even as the same turned a blind eye to what happened in Catalonia last year.

It is hard not to have some sympathy with him. Just before Christmas, the European Commission decided to go after the elected government of Poland, invoking Article Seven of the Lisbon Treaty, which if followed all the way through would strip Poland of its voting rights within the European Union. The EU has never done this before. Even when it complained about 2011 reforms in Hungary, to which the current reforms in Poland are often compared, it made no move to strip that country of its voting rights. It has taken no concrete action against EU candidate Turkey, despite the Erdogan regime’s much more worrisome descent into authoritarianism.

Europe’s leaders were supposedly invoking Article Seven for high-minded reasons, but during the session of European Parliament, Legutko found himself beating back rhetorical taunts that his post-Communist society was selfishly using the European Union as a “milk-cow” and disregarding the rules.

The Hungarian novelist Tibor Fischer, nobody’s idea of a right-winger or populist, is a keen observer of European politics. He recently wrote an essay about the newfound political assertiveness of the former members of the Habsburg Empire, and the baffled, offended reaction of Western Europe to that assertiveness. Throughout the Visegrád Four — Czechia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia — there is frustration with “double standards,” Fisher wrote. “If you’re a former Soviet Bloc country you are subjected to frequent cavity searches, while older members of the EU don’t even have to turn out their pockets.”

Former Catalan President Carles Puigdemont has called on the Spanish government to finally and officially recognize last month’s election results in Catalonia.

From his safe haven in Brussels, the city where he’s hiding from the tyrannical Madrid government, Puigdemont said that the regional government, which was disposed of by the Spanish government, has to be reinstated. And yes, he wants to once again lead his people (to independence). “What is Prime Minister Rajoy waiting for to acknowledge the result?” Puigdemont asked out loud on Old Year’s Day.

The answer, of course, is that Rajoy is simply hoping and praying that this problem disappears all by itself. He wants to prolong possible negotiations, hoping that this will eventually enable him to ignore the election results altogether. Rajoy plans to bring pro-unity party Ciudadanos and its leader Inés Arrimadas to power.

It’s now time for the international community — and especially for the European Union — to force Madrid to take the Catalonian election results seriously and to abide by them. All EU countries have signed the UN treaties guaranteeing people “the right to self-determination.” And the EU presidency has emphasized this right several times, describing it as one of the most fundamental rights “peoples” have:

The right of peoples to self-determination features prominently in the main instruments concerning human rights, such as the United Nations Charter or the two International Covenants on civil and political rights and on economic, social and cultural rights respectively.

As the United Nations Charter points out, the development of good relations between nations must be founded on the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples. This right has lost none of its relevance in the present international context and continues to claim the attention of the international community as an integral part of those human rights the observance and protection of which must be ensured by States.

This right, in accordance with which peoples freely determine their own political status and freely provide for their own economic, social and cultural development, illustrates clearly the interdependence and indivisibility of human rights recognized at the Vienna Conference on Human Rights in 1993. Making this right a reality requires full observance of all human rights and fundamental freedoms on the part of States.

That’s an official statement from the EU presidency on the right to self-determination. It was followed up by:

For this right to be effectively applied, a number of conditions need to be fulfilled. Freedom of expression and of opinion must be guaranteed to allow all individuals to debate public affairs and express themselves freely on the choices made by the State. Freedom of conscience and of religion must be ensured. And the importance of free and independent media becomes evident here. The opportunity to participate freely and fully in public life is also indispensable for the exercise of this right.

A further expression of the right of peoples to self-determination is the holding of free, regular and fair elections, which within the framework of a democratic society allow a country’s nationals to follow and support the action of the political institutions mandated by them to manage their interests and provide for public welfare. In this respect, each individual must be able to benefit from the right to assemble with others to defend his or her convictions. CONTINUE AT SITE

All a group has to say to garner the support of many European politicians is that its mission is to promote human rights. The words have a “halo effect,” a term used in psychology to describe the tendency to favorably judge people, companies, groups, products, and so forth, based on the image of morality or some other positive factor. In the context of NGOs, groups that claim to promote values seen as universally good — such as peace, human rights, justice and coexistence — are automatically perceived as credible and above criticism or investigation.

After World War II and the Communist period, the concept of “civil society” — later called “NGOs” by the UN — became holy in Europe. Civil society was supposed to be the antidote to manipulative democracy, like that of the Weimar Republic. But they forgot to ask what happens when civil society is itself the manipulating force. There are no checks and balances imposed on it.

The NGO lobby at the UN plays a crucial role, because it is a multi-billion-dollar-a-year business. It is an industry, and it needs to be called just that.

Last week, Professor Gerald Steinberg, founder and president of the Jerusalem-based research organization NGO Monitor, had “breaking news”: The Danish government had formalized a decision to stop funding the Human Rights International Humanitarian Law Secretariat, an NGO framework established in 2013 at Birzeit University in Ramallah, with an annual budget of millions of euros, paid for by the governments of Sweden, Holland, Denmark and Switzerland.

Steinberg’s research had revealed that of the 24 core NGOs funded by the Secretariat, six have ties to the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) – which is on the EU’s official list of terrorist organizations — and 15 are involved in worldwide campaigns to destroy Israel by economic means.

Denmark’s decision, according to Steinberg, came on the heels of votes in the Swiss Parliament calling on the government to cease funding “projects carried out by NGOs involved in racist, anti-Semitic or hate incitement actions.” Denmark’s decision also coincided with an investigation launched by The Netherlands into the Secretariat funding. “The Danish example is the most important,” he said, “as it is the largest chunk that has been cut in one fell swoop, and Danes were among the Secretariat’s founders.”

Now, people in Iran are demanding not just limited reforms but regime change. The government has been doing all it can to stoke the flames of hatred, but has been trying to deflect it to “Death to America” and “Death to Israel”.

The Trump administration is taking the right side by supporting the Iranian people; they are the principal victims of the Iranian regime and its Islamist agenda.

Let us not be on the side of history that would remain silent in the face of such crimes against humanity, let us not join the ranks of other dictators, terrorists, and criminals, that turned a blind eye to violence, and the will of brave, innocent people.

Protests have grown and have spread across Iran in cities such as Tehran, Kermanshah, Shiraz, Rasht, Qom, Hamedan, Ahvaz, Isfahan, Zahedan, Qazvin, and Sari.

The political nature of the protests has been made clear from the outset and the regime is experiencing a political earthquake. The regime’s gunmen have been out in full force. Despite the brutal power being deployed to crush these peaceful demonstrators — four protestors have already been reported killed — more people are flooding the streets in defiance of the regime.

The scale of these sudden protests is unprecedented during the last four decades of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s rule.

These demonstrations, however, are different from other protests in Iran since 1979, when the theocratic regime was established. In 2009, during the popular uprising in the name of the “Green Movement,” people were protesting against rigged elections and the presidency of the anti-Semitic politician Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Chants echoed through the streets, “Where is my vote?” while the government ratcheted up its power to silence the protestors.