Iranian Man in local restaurant: there are two parts to Iran, the people and the government – and they are like this . . . (indicating wide and widening split).
Lady at the airport the female dress code: that they hate it and so they wear more and more makeup . but they are taken off in busloads, made to swear they won’t do it again and fined.
On October 14 2011 Ayatollah Seyyid Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution and of the Islamic Republic of Iran addressed a gathering of commanders and soldiers of the Armed Forces of Iran, a gathering held in the city and region of Kermanshah (Tehran Times 15 October 2011). After the usual vigorous denunciation of the ‘arrogant and aggressive’ practices of the USA, he described Iran’s policies as based on ‘logic, wisdom, and spirituality’, ascribing this to in part due to the activities of the basiji, a force created at the behest of Imam Khomeini, who wanted to see 20 000 000 of these men and women dedicated to the defence of the 1979 Islamic Revolution: ‘the Basij volunteer forces will stand up to any deviation in the movement of the Islamic system toward the realisation of the causes of the Islamic Revolution’, said the Supreme Leader to the commanders and soldiers at Kermanshah. Perhaps this explains the relatively small crowds who tried earlier this year to kick-start an Iranian version of the ‘Arab Spring’: after all, 20 000 000 guardians over a nation of 80 000 000 is a lot of guardianship . . . .
Welcome to Iran: How brave you are for coming here. I wish I could leave with you
Are you ashamed of Iran? I love my country but I must leave it . . . and they (the Mullahs) are glad to see us all go . . .
There may or not be 20 000 000 members of the Basij force: but travellers around Iran are only too well aware of a variety of ‘police’ checking (primarily) women for transgressions of the Islamic dress code (a mode of dress very rapidly dumped by most of the Iranian women on the flight out of Tehran’s Ayatollah Khomeini Airport): and for this reason, and to protect the various people who talked to us, I will not sign this ‘blog’. If I name myself, now that I am out of Iran, I might well be naming other people, still in Iran. The people are of course most pleasant. Time after time, people would stop you on the street or in a park and say ‘Welcome to Iran’: occasionally we would get a rather longer and usually highly critical comment about the government and/or the religious regime whose leaders stared down from many a building and gable end. Our interlocutors, who appear anonymously in italics in this article, were taking a chance: and it would be wrong to leave ‘identifiers’ of my identity, and therefore of theirs, by being too specific about who, where and when. There are simply too many ‘police’ about. It is, for example, the case that at every hotel our passports were taken by the Reception desk because, we were told, they would be inspected by ‘the police’. I know that hotels in countries other than Iran insist on taking our passports: but for whose surveillance? Which kind of ‘police’? The same people who closed down bookshops in Tehran? Who tapped our female fellow tourists on the back to tell them off for showing too much hair – but who then wandered off, muttering how much they hated what they were doing? The same people – the Culture and Islamic Guidance Ministry – who demanded so many changes in a book on ‘the deviant current’ by Mohammed-Reza Qomsheh that the author withdrew the book saying that ‘if we make these amendments the book will no longer be effective and that’s why I’ve let it down’ (Iran News October 17 2011). In the NW province of Iran the small city of Bonab, a city which has an atomic energy research centre and an Islamic University, police between January and June 2011 seized 13,000 satellite receivers. Bonab has a population of 80,000, which gives about 13,000 families – a clean sweep! Apparently, Iranians prefer satellite channels, as the state-run TV is getting ‘more and more boring’ (KHABAR news agency, of Kazakhstan, in Iran News, October 11 2011). However the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that Face book was allowed only as long as it did not boost the enemies of Islam: ‘It is not allowed as long as it promotes corruption and spreads falsehoods and lies and bolsters the enemies of Islam’ (AYANDE independent news channel, in Iran News October 11 2011).
Under a heading of POLICE CHIEF REJECTS STATISTICS ON BOY-GIRL RELATIONSHIPS, On October 10 Iran News reported that Police Chief Brigadier General Esmaeel Ahmadi Moghaddam rejected a university professor’s finding that 80% of boys and girls in Tehran have ‘close relationship’. The Brigadier said that ‘such statistics [are] against the security of the society . . aimed at causing social disorder [providing] the media with gloomy picture of the country’ and he offered to ‘hold a public debate with those who publish such statistics they are absolutely baseless and I am ready to resign if they are proven to be true’. His offer of peer review seems to have not been taken up.
A young woman stood with us in front of the tombs of Cyrus, Darius etc: that I am a Zoroastrian and proud of the ancient history. It is being cut out in schools; and ‘all that Islam had added was lying pretence – and violence
Enough of this, I think: Iran, for all the beauty of its people and scenery, is a rather terrifying theocratic state – with added police.
IRAN IN THE WORLD
The Iranian English-language Press was quite keen to equate the various street demonstrations in Western cities with the ‘Arab Spring’, presenting them as heralding the downfall of the West. An example: ‘people in at least 80 countries have supported such a widespread movement – [the Wall Street movement] . . a highly bitter and hard experience for the US statesmen’, said the Supreme Leader to a gathering of academics in western Kermanshah (Iran News October 17 2011). He went on:
The American police or army might try to suppress the movement but to no avail. He warned American and European officials and states of the influence of Zionism – ‘the day will come for your nations to find out the root cause of your misery and problems i.e. your humiliation before Zionists and that day the flames of their wrath will definitely burn capitalist system into ashes. You have turned your back to your public and are hated by the majority. The situation is vice-versa in the Islamic Republic of Iran and huge congregation of people indicate the firm determination of the nation to confront any plot. In the region there was an Islamic awakening and under such sensitive conditions the Islamic Republic established in Iran would influence both present and future of the region. The Supreme Leader scoffed at Western slogans of justice and freedom, they are mottos, ‘following their sinister goal of control over key economic and strategic parts of the world as well as support for Zionism: ‘Base on realities on the ground we declare that the so-called western democracy is false and empty in nature’ (ibid).
Israel is a problem for the Iranian leaders – a problem for which they have a very clear answer. An International Conference in Support for Palestine’s Intifada held in Tehran rejected the two-state solution, saying that:
There should be one state on all the Palestinian lands: Muslim governments, Islamic Parliaments, parties and organizations and all freethinkers in the world should adopt a united stance and pool their
Efforts to help restore the historic, national and legal rights of the resistant nation of Palestine so that the Palestinian land would be liberated and an independent and united government would be established on all the Palestinian territory, with the holy Qods as its capital. The Conference condemned the warmongering and naked aggression of Israel . .the criminal officials of the Zionist regime should be put on trial . . (TT October 3 2011)
Earlier, the Supreme Leader had urged the rejection of any two-state solution as being nothing other than
a capitulation to the demand of the Zionist . . a cancerous tumour . . a constant threat to he body of the Islamic ummah . . trampling on the blood of martyrs . . We do not propose a classic war by the armies of Muslim countries, or throwing immigrant Jews into the sea, but a referendum of the Palestinian nation . . the West must stop the bullying and antihuman Zionists or await heavier blows in the not-to distant future . . . What is posing a threat to the Zionist regime is not the missiles of Iran . . . but the strong will of men women and youth h in Muslim countries . . However if a threat is posed by the enemy then those missiles will fulfil their function (TT October 2).
A week later, President Ahmadinejad called the US and the Zionist regime ‘the main roots of the misery of nations and everybody should shout at them at the top of their voices . . . He said that the difficulties being experienced by the Egyptians are due to the ‘enemies of the nations’ as they know that in ‘a free election the next government of the country would be an ant-Zionist one’ (Iran News 13 October 2011).
In all of this, the various newspapers reported on the efforts of the Iranian regime to consolidate its position and power in its region: various kinds of trade, cultural and political relationships are being built up with Algeria, Turkey, Myanmar, Austria, Italy Kazakhstan, Egypt, Vietnam Myanmar, Algeria, South Korea, etc etc .
We are not Arabs and we have nothing to do with Arabs thank God
Relationships with Turkey, a country moving slowly towards greater Islamic orthodoxy, are somewhat strained because of Turkish agreement to deploy US missile defence shield on its soil – ‘a mistake’, in Iranian view: and a mistake perhaps balanced by an Iranian naval Commander’ announcement that Iran is capable of deploying naval forces in far-off waters and that ‘the Iran Navy intends to deploy naval vessels in the Atlantic Ocean near the maritime borders of the USA (TT October 6 2011). Time after time, Iranian leaders express powerful contempt for and hatred of the USA, the West - and the Zionists who allegedly manipulate American and Western leaders. And yet:
Man in palace: I want you to know that the present government hostility to foreigners is not in the Iranian tradition.
