Interesting material. As an outsider I find it difficult to know what is happening behind the scenes but it would seem observers in Iran have the same difficulty. In his speech I was surprised to find Khameni praising Rafsanjani lavishly and lambasting Ahmadinejad for accusing Rafsanjani's relatives of corruption. At the same time Khameni supported Ahmadinejad and claimed he was duly elected leader. Although Rafsanjani is head of the Assembly of Experts that group confirmed Khameni's guidelines in his speech. Later some of Rafsanjani's relatives were briefly arrested. Rafsanjani seems to be rather quiet although he moved from Tehran to Qom where he conferred with clerics possibly with a view to forming a new anti-Khameni group but with no word on what if anything has happened.
Is the correct spelling of the Supreme Leader Khamenei or Khameni?
Blog: http://kenthink7.blogspot.com/index.html Blog: http://kencan7.blogspot.com/index.html
--- On Tue, 6/23/09, shag carpet bomb <shag at cleandraws.com> wrote:
> From: shag carpet bomb <shag at cleandraws.com>
> Subject: [lbo-talk] who really runs Iran?
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Tuesday, June 23, 2009, 11:14 PM
> enough people have asked that I
> figured I'd offer some key passages to illustrate some of
> Azedah Moaveni's arguments in both _Lipstick Jihad_ and
> _Honeymoon in Iran_. This passage comes at the end of the
> latter, after she's been told by her government minder that
> she is under investigation, an ominous piece of news given
> that, by the thousands, professors and journalists had been
> forced out of jobs, replaced by Imadickinjar's theocratic
> cronies. The mind, Mr X., is a sleazy bully, to whom she
> must report all her activities, often forcing her to meet
> him with a half hour's notice in some unoccupied home or
> apartment somewhere. Generally, these were the homes of
> people who'd been murdered or jailed by the government, now
> confiscated and used as locations for conducting such
> business. There, he would intimidate and threaten, trying to
> bully her into covering stories in a certain way.
>
> Trying to suss out what it all means, if she has half a
> chance of going back to work, deciding to, for awhile,
> voluntarily retire under the threat of an ongoing
> investigation, she writes about how her skills as an
> investigative journalist covering the question (who runs
> Iran?)s ended up being useful to her personal situation as
> to how to interpret the government's shady, opaque
> dealings:
>
> "When dealing with an opaque, secretive system, there is no
> such thing as "inside information" or real political
> analysis. This holds as true for journalistic analysis as it
> did for my dilemma. Every year or so, some American
> publication runs .... a "Who Really Runs Iran?" story, the
> answer being the Supreme Leader, the president, the
> Revolutionary Guards, or unelected clerical bodies.
>
> But the reality is no one knows, ever."
>
> I pulled that line out, to highlight it.
>
> "the closest approximation of the truth is that many people
> run Iran, but that at no given moment is it entirely clear
> who has the upper hand and why. We can guess at this
> clique's broad motivations and at the internal dynamics that
> shape their behavior. But to go beyond that was just
> speculation. I knew this b/c I had spent years writing such
> pieces..., I was a Farsi-speaker with better connections and
> sources inside the regime than most. Along the way, I had
> honed my detective skills,..., trying to devise an
> interpretation that would, Ihoped, hint at the regime's
> reality. I never imagined I would be applying these
> skills to my own life, and in doing so I was forced to
> confront what a hack job it was, the fumbling effort to
> determine the contours of what lurked behind the curtain."
> (pp 297-8, Honeymoon in Tehran)
>
> She details how she tried to protect herself from the
> investigation, not by remaining in retirement, but pursuing
> soft stories that would allow her to honestly highlight
> Iran's success stories. And yet....
>
> "Once I had put this mentality (muckraking in the tradition
> of I.F.STone) aside, my consciousness found room for other
> topics. Everyone knew that Iran forced women to cover, but
> who knew that it also ran the most progressive HIV program
> in the Middle East, ahead of other Muslim countries with
> less puritanical image? who knew that many of its
> undergraduate programs numbered among the best in the
> world?"
>
> And yet...
>
> "In covering event he most benign subject, there was no
> avoiding mention of the regime's flaws. I wrote a story
> about the renaissance of Persian classical music, but then
> had to detail how f or years musical instruments had been
> illegal. (nb, shag: The also refused to let women sing - it
> was considered immoral -- and, if women played instruments
> at all in 2006-7, the insisted that they play behind a
> curtain if they allowed them to play instruments at all.)
> When I reported an essay on people's taste in reading,
> censorship asserted itself as a theme throughout the story.
> .. I confessed to Lily.. "I want so badly not to write a
> grim Iran book," I told here. "Why is it turning out this
> way?"
>
> "It's not your fault," she said with a knowing smile. "You
> can't write the sadness out of Iran's story."
>
> At this point, the raids knocking down satellites begin.
> What follows is the crackdown on women's dress. (Please
> remember that when you assume that women have always been
> covered, this is *not* so. [1])
> she relates this day, via a story of her friend, Solmaz,
> who lives in a middle class (i.e., struggling and not like
> our middle class at all) neighborhood.
>
> "solmaz was walking Aryo to school one morning when three
> police officers... stopped a car that was idling in traffic.
> The woman behind the wheel wore a fuscia headscarf and
> Jackie O sunglasses, and the officers motioned for her to
> pull over and roll down her window. One leaned over to
> inspect her appearance, informed her she was "badly veiled,"
> and proceeded to issue a formal warning for violating the
> Islamic dress code. When the woman protested, they told her
> she could neither sign the warning or be detained. ....
>
> it was not the most terrible incident that occurred that
> day, but it was the one Solmaz witnessed and would recall as
> the moment after which everything changed. That Monday, for
> no apparent reason, the authorities launched the most
> ferocious crackdown on "un-Islamic" dress in over a decade.
> Overnight, they revised the rules governing women's dress.
> The closets of millions of women across the country
> contained nothing but short, tailored coats, ankle-length
> pants, and bright head scarves. Suddenly, these styles were
> grounds for arrest. In the days that followed, the police
> detained 150,000 women for failing to abide by the official
> dress code. We were all afraid to leave the house, because
> it was obvious the authorities were out to make a point,
> arresting even women who were "sufficiently" covered.
>
> ...
>
> The broadcaster who read the state's evening news
> bulletin... informed us that 86 percent of Iranians
> supported the crackdown. By that time, however, we had
> installed the new mini-satellite dishes on our balconies so
> we could see footage on foreign news channels of angry
> scuffles, of police forcing screaming, kicking women into
> their cars. During the height of the crackdown, Arash told
> me that sales at Laico's linen stores had dropped
> precipitously: women were afraid to go out to buy bed
> linen."
>
> She complains to a friend in California, about having to
> wear the shapeless cloaks worn by women in Saudi Arabia. Her
> friend wrote back, confused. Like a lot of u.s.ers, she has
> no idea that dress codes had been relaxed for quite some
> time, and the government was reneging on what Imadickinjar
> had *claimed* was, at one time, not nearly as important as
> the economy.
>
> "The regime appeared divided over the crackdown.
> Conservatives in parliament issued a letter thanking the
> Interior Ministry and the police for their fine work and
> suggesting that the United States and Israel were
> responsible for women's immodest dress. But the same week,
> the head of the judiciary argued that such "tough measures
> [would] backfire." It seemed that the Islamic Republic's
> institutions were at war, as usual, and ordinary people
> suffered the consequences. ... In Iran, sometimes internal
> rifts produced the most unexpected openings sometimes they
> produced violence and chaos. Usually, I was at my busiest
> during such fraught times, reporting analytical pieces and
> accounts of how the turbulence affected women's daily lives.
> This time, though, I did not write a word. The Ministry of
> Culture and Islamic Guidance told reporters not to
> "undermine" the police's "public decency" drive with
> criticism, and threatened repercussions for those who
> engaged in such "divisive" journalism." (pp. 304-8)
>
>
> [1] When you think that veiling has always existed in Iran,
> you are hypostatizing Iran such that it's current
> incarnation is the way it has always been. This is wrong. In
> the 1930s, they were actually forced to unveil, to which
> some pious women rebelled! It really fucking irritates me,
> this crap about how there is and has always been a singular,
> uniform culture of veiling in Iran! Or any singular
> hypostatized culture of anything. It's a culture: it lives,
> it breathes, it changes. Sweet baybaby jaysus.)
>
>
>
> "let's be civil and nice, but not to the point of obeying
> the rules of debate as defined by liberal blackmail (in
> which, discomfort caused by a challenge is seen as some
> vague form of harassment)."
>
>
> -- Dwayne Monroe, 11/19/08
>
> --
> http://cleandraws.com
> Wear Clean Draws
>
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