Ten tumultuous days
by Ardeshir Ommani
The ten days of turmoil in the aftermath of Iran’s
presidential election sharply divided world public opinion into two opposite
poles: those who believed in and supported Iran’s sovereignty and
independence, mainly the working people of Iran and the peoples of the
developing countries, on one hand, and those whose interests lie in believing
in U.S. hegemony in the Middle East and the domination of monopoly capital over
the world’s human and natural resources, on the other.
The latter camp consisting of the White House and the
State Department spokespersons, the reporters and so-called “Iran
Experts” of the corporate and liberal media outlets, the gurus of the
financial establishments, the Trotskyites of the Fourth International, the
neo-conservatives and the world Zionist entities, the infamous Iranian
terrorist group, Mojahedin Khalq (MKO), and the remnants of the late
Shah’s monarchial regime, all in unison hailed the defeated Iranian
Presidential candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi, as winner and heralded his raucous
and revolting supporters as the champions of freedom, human rights and
progress.
During those ten tumultuous days, the domestic supporters
of Mousavi shut down a large part of the city of Tehran, the capital, and as a
consequence forced the business establishment, the lifeline of the
country’s economy, to close and a minority of the demonstrators brought
about considerable destruction and human casualties by putting the cars,
trucks, buildings and police precincts on fire and as a result of confronting
pro-Ahmadinejad supporters, caused the deaths of twenty persons, including
eight security personnel who were not equipped with fire arms, unlike the
heavily armed machine gun-toting U.S. riot-control SWAT teams.
Pre-Emption, A La Bush
Although the legal avenues and lawful channels suggested
to Mousavi by the Guardian Council, the highest judicial institution of the
land, to investigate his alleged discrepancies in the electoral process, data
collection and reporting the final results, he seemingly preferred to reach a
solution by the weight of demonstrations and sheer use of pressure on the
streets. Through the use of violence by some of his supporters, Mousavi
intended to force the government to annul the election result and hold another
election.
The reasons for refusing to attend the meeting of the
Guardian Council held specifically for the purpose of discussing his frivolous
claims of “wide-spread electoral fraud” were his awareness that
such charges had already been leveled by him and his domestic and foreign
supporters well before the actual election which was held on June 12th, and
secondly, he declared himself the winner of the election sixteen hours before
the election results were announced on national media by the Office of the
Interior Ministry. Hossein Mousavi and his domestic and foreign
enthusiasts in Washington, D.C., London, and Paris knew well before the
election that judged by the sense and socio-economic interests of the Iranian
working people, including the vast population of small farmers and
manufacturing entrepreneurs, the incumbent President Ahmadinejad would be far
ahead of Mousavi by at least ten million votes. They resorted to
pre-emption, a la George Bush.
Therefore, Mousavi and his cohorts decided to follow the
examples of power grabs in Ukraine, Georgia, and the lately unsuccessful
attempts in Zimbabwe and Moldova, hoping that a long enough period of social
tensions coupled with U.S.-U.K. supports for Mousavi would split the body of
clerical hierarchy – the Society of Scholars of Qom Seminary – the
Guardian Council and the Revolutionary Guard, which would ultimately, they
wished, draw in some layers of Iran’s lower middle class to the
western-reformist camp. This was a major element in their plan that never
materialized, leaving them instead with just wishful thinking.
But in general, all social and political upheavals in a
single country or in a region involving several nations, tend to polarize the
societies into two or more distinct and antagonistic forces with certain class
characteristics. In the epoch of imperialism, the splits take shape
simultaneously along the class lines and the relations of these social forces
to imperialism. From long before the Iranian presidential election, two
of the most pronounced criticisms of Ahmadinejad’s administration by the
reformist camp and its neo-liberal newspapers were centered around Iran-U.S.
foreign policy and the allocation of economic resources in Iran.
As to Iran’s policy toward the U.S., the objection
of the reformists to Ahmadinejad was that as a result of his inflexible foreign
policy, the country is suffering from isolation in the international
community. Doesn’t this criticism sound like George W. Bush’s
rhetoric? By “inflexible” foreign policy the reformist in
fact were advocating that Iran should have accepted the conditions laid down by
George Bush for having dialogue with Iran, meaning Iran would have been popular
in the eyes of the U.S., the Europeans, and the reformists if it had suspended
its uranium enrichment process and given up its right to independent
development of nuclear science and technology.
Is Iran Isolated?
The second criticism launched by Iran’s reformists
against Ahmadinejad’s management of the economy was that he favors the
working families and small farmers over big business interests. We
clearly see, the reformists have been pro-West internationally and pro-haves
domestically. Furthermore, the claim by the defeated presidential
candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi and former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami,
that Iran is internationally isolated is baseless and could only serve the
U.S.-Israeli rhetoric and hegemony in the Middle East region. According to a
June 23, 2009 report by AP, from Frankfurt, Germany, Europe is a major trading
partner of Iran, exporting everything from rail equipment, machinery, transport
goods, including trains and automobiles worth Euro 14.1 Billion worth of goods
in 2008, up nearly 1.5% from the year before. For Europe, Iran is a
crucial partner for energy, which accounted for 90% of the Euro 11.3 Billion in
EU imports from Iran.
The reformists are fully cognizant of the fact that Iran
can always look eastward to Russia and China for goods, stoking fears of
competition and lost profits for Europe. China is already Iran’s
largest single trading partner, responsible for 14.3% of exports to Iran, and
14.5% of imports from Iran in 2008. Russia is Iran’s seventh
largest trade partner and Russian-Iranian trade turnover was worth $3.2 Billion
in 2008. Russia buys about 5% of Iran’s export, mainly food-stuffs, and
supplies steel and non-ferrous metals, wood and machinery to Iran, according to
Russian officials.
To test the veracity of their accusations, Mr. Mousavi and
Mr. Karoubi should travel abroad and ask the working peoples of the Arab
countries, Turkey, China, Russia, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Sudan, People’s
Republic of the Congo, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and many more to find out the
truth about Iran’s extensive international relations, which have improved
during the four year term of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s presidency.
The recent post-election unrest in Iran not only polarized
the economically top half of the population inside Iran, but also had a similar
impact on the well-to-do Iranians living in the West. Put generally, most
of the Iranians who, until a year ago, to some degree, opposed U.S. war threats
against Iran, this time around they sided with the western foreign policy
objectives of meddling in Iran’s internal affairs and possibly placing a
pro-U.S. regime in power. The Iranian western intellectuals who in a span
of a few decades have been able to climb up the socio-economic ladder in the
former colonial citadels of Britain and France and par excellence in the United
States, and occupied, generally speaking, privileged positions in these
societies, naturally sided with not only Hossein Mousavi, but also his domestic
and international backers who for a long time have been waiting for any kind of
unrest in Iran to take shape.
Behind the Human Rights Agenda
The western media had found a gold mine to be exploited at
the utmost. Overnight, the care-takers of the media corporate interests
turned to up-to-then unknown individuals who had not even visited their
motherland for decades into “Iran experts” and coached them on
prime time TV shows to say anything, whether substantiated or not was
irrelevant, to show their opposition to the Islamic Republic of Iran and
support for the U.S. standard of “human rights”. These were
the kind of Iranians, most of who never appeared in public gatherings to oppose
the U.S. maneuvers in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Pakistan. Maybe we
can’t blame them, because they are only “experts” on Iran and
don’t care about the rest of humanity.
Among others, Trita Parsi, the president of the National
Iranian American Council (NIAC) appeared on CNN every day at the beginning of
the election struggle to supposedly analyze, but mainly approve the U.S.
interpretations of the events taking place in Iran. Parsi expressed all
the views that the interviewer was expecting to receive and “safe”
for the viewers to see and hear. He did his best to construct an image
for the American listeners that the demonstrators represent the opinion and the
ideals of the entire population of 72 million people, that the government of
Iran is brutally repressing the rights of “peaceful” demonstrators
and Tehran does not have respect for human rights. Hopefully, CNN, NBC,
MSNBC, BBC and many other corporate media received their money’s
worth.
Professor Hamid Dabashi of Columbia University was another
“Iran specialist”, appearing on ABC’s NightLine
special, as well as CNN, WNYC Radio, NPR, ABC Radio and not to mention the
West’s superstar, Reza Pahlavi, the son of the late Shah of Iran, who was
interviewed by Radio Canada, The National Interests, Justin Rosenthal, Media
Line, CNN, The New York Times, Talk Radio News Service, CNN’s Wolf
Blitzer, Der Spiegel Online, and the Nation Press Club, just to mention a
few.
We venture to ask if any of these major media outlets is
brave enough to invite analysts holding the opposite views about Iran and the
elections? To our knowledge this has not happened and raises the issue
about the so-called free press, which appears to be entirely a monopoly outlet
serving one class’s view of the world.
Clashes with no Class Interest?
Hamid Dabashi, Professor of Iranian Studies and
Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York in his article
titled: Iran Conflict isn’t Class Warfare, which appeared on CNN online,
tries to show that the current upheaval has no roots in class nature of the
Iranian society and the existence of the U.S. as a heavy-weight and the most
developed capitalist country has no influence on the aspirations of
Iran’s capitalist class. To prove his hypothesis, Dabashi borrows
from another scholar of 19th century Iran, Abbas Amanat, that the current
clashes between close to a million people living in northern Tehran, where a
single family house is marketed for over 3 million U.S. dollars, is the result
of the “rise of a new middle class whose demands stand in contrast to the
radicalism of the incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the core
conservative values of the clerical elite…” Framed as such, Hamid
Dabashi tries his best to hide the class nature of the struggle by limiting it
to the sphere of culture and superstructure in general.
However, according to a May 2008 Business report in Gulf
Daily News, “A luxury 1,400-square-metre penthouse sold recently for $21
million at $15,000 per square metre in swanky northern Tehran, while the
average monthly salary of Iranians stands at $300 to $460. Property
prices there compete with upmarket neighbourhoods in Paris at a range of 60m to
100m rials per sqm ($6,500 to $10,700). "You have to spend at least
$1m to buy an apartment in northern Tehran where the average property is 200
sqm," says real estate agent Ali Meshkini.” Mr. Dabashi, to us
Northern Tehran seems pretty “classy”.
Secondly, no one has claimed that a mass demonstration,
albeit rough and tumble, is warfare. The term “class warfare”
is usually cried out in the halls of Congress by the most conservative U.S.
senators, whenever issues are laid out that involve, however modest, demands of
the American working class. The use of the term in the classless society
of Columbia University is intended to deny the existence of class altogether
and secondly intimidate those who even speak of class interests and class
conflict. For Hamid Dabashi’s information, the use of
“class” as an economic category is used daily in a less
conservative school of higher education, like the Universitat Frankfurt am
Main, in Germany.
Corporate Media and “Iran
Experts”
Professor Dabashi is a turncoat. Until recently he
supported Iran’s right to nuclear technology, sovereignty, and
independence. When he appeared on ABC and CNN four different times and
began attacking the Iranian government for its “repressive and
bloody” response to “totally peaceful” demonstrators (at the
same time covering his tracks by off-handedly mentioning that he knew there
were ‘some individuals whose anger got the best of them and were not
behaving peacefully’), he was fully aware that by characterizing the
Islamic Republic with hot-button slanders used during the Bush Administration
Axis of Evil days, terms as “oppressive, dictatorial, brutal, bloody,
etc.), his views were in line with the U.S. foreign policy objectives of
de-stabilizing the Islamic Republic. People who knew Dabashi in the
Palestinian movement were stunned and baffled at his complete turnaround,
asking themselves “What has happened to this man?”
Individuals like Hamid Dabashi and certain Iranian
historians like Ervand Abrahamian, who are brought to the front of the
media’s cameras and are introduced as “Iran experts” have an
important role to play that assists the system in carrying out its
objectives. It doesn’t matter that for all practical purposes,
these professors have no followers or legitimacy among the Iranians in the U.S.
in general, and certainly much less among Iranian masses inside Iran.
With the exception of infinitesimally small circles in academia, the common men
and women have not heard the names of these “scholars” let alone
are listening and acting upon their conjectures.
Mr. Dabashi’s prescription of “human
rights”, which are devoid of any class content, solely pleases the pipers
in the State Department and the liberal mass media, not excluding such layers
of population as neo-liberals and neo-conservatives, who eternally seek to
prove the supremacy of the U.S. liberal-democratic system of government.
These bourgeois intellectuals presume that by the force of
their “expertise and position in the universities” and with a
little assistance, financial or otherwise, from the official establishment and
corporate-media backers, they will be empowered in cyberspace, to export their
brand of human rights to Iran, not recognizing that the real battles among the
social classes and within the organs of the government of the Islamic Republic
are fought for much more worldly and tangible issues, namely taxes on profit,
allocation of money for first-time home buyers or for builders in housing
construction, offering salary increases to teachers, nurses and civil servants,
division of the shares of the privatized state industrial and financial assets
between workers or between the owners of capital, the level of rents, rent
stabilization, monopoly of trades in control of a small number of domestic and
foreign traders, which often contributes to higher rates of inflation rather
than excess liquidity, etc.
What Factors Influence Price Levels and
Inflation?
In other words, price levels come under the influence of
many more factors, such as the sophistication of technology, the rate of labor
productivity, the availability of materials, the expanse or dimensions of the
market, the price of commodities imported and the value of the currency, than
simply the volume of liquidity in the market. To say that the price
levels are simply a function of liquidity in the market is not understanding
how under capitalism the prices are formed. Unfortunately, many of these
experts, scholars, social analysts, historians and human rights
advocates, do not have a basic understanding of the law of value.
Our esteemed professors may quickly retort that the
“Green” masses either do not understand or they are not affected by
these earthly issues, and are more interested in the concepts of “social
freedoms and dressing choices, etc”. Quite wrong, Professors!
Every thoughtful worker, farmer, shop-keeper and student and teacher in higher
education will line up these issues in their conversations with Iranian
American tourists visiting the country for even a short time. Our
Western-educated intellectuals, especially historians, who pay very little or
no attention to the subject of political economy and the evolution of social
classes under capitalism and the essential requirements of normal life, make a
caricature out of a real social movement.
--Ardeshir Ommani is an Iranian-born writer and an
activist in the U.S. anti-war and anti-imperialist struggle for over 40 years,
including against the Vietnam War, and now the Iraq war. During the past seven
years, he has participated in the U.S. peace movement, working to promote
dialogue and peace among nations and to prevent a U.S.-spurred war on Iran. He
holds two Masters Degrees: one in Political Economy and another in Mathematics
Education. Co-founder of the American Iranian Friendship Committee,
(AIFC), he writes articles of analysis on Iran -U.S. relations, the U.S.
economy and has translated articles and books from English into Farsi, the
Persian language.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Fight Back News: Imperialism and Iran’s
Elections
Commentary by Kosta Harlan
A struggle has broken out over the results of Iran’s presidential
elections, held Friday June 12, which resulted in the apparent landslide
victory of incumbent President Ahmadinejad. On Friday night, before the results
had been announced, the main opposition candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi,
declared himself the winner. The following day, Iran's election commission
announced that Ahmadinejad had won with 62% of the vote. Mousavi responded with
allegations of vote-rigging. This set into motion a chain of events that has
resulted in hundreds of thousands coming out to the streets in protest. Some of
the protests turned into riots, with protesters attacking police, government
offices and banks and burning cars. 19 people are reported to have died in
clashes with the government.
The subsequent media barrage has been so deafening that some of the basic facts
and issues surrounding the election have been completely obscured. The
unquestioned assumption propagated by the mainstream media is that the election
was stolen.
The problem is, the only independent poll conducted four weeks before the
election predicted a result very much akin to the official results from
Iran's election commission. The poll, conducted by Terror Free Tomorrow,
surveyed opinion in all 30 of Iran's provinces. It showed Ahmadinejad with
a 2 to 1 lead over Mousavi (Washington Post, 6/15/09), which corresponds to the
official tally of 63% for Ahmadinejad and 34% for Mousavi. As for Mohsen Rezai
and Mehdi Karroubi, the other opposition candidates, the poll predicted they
would earn 1% and 2% of the vote, respectively; while the official tally shows
them winning 1.73% and 0.85%. It is clear that the poll was remarkably accurate
in its predictions.
The poll also highlighted some of the class divisions around the elections. For
example, Mousavi had majority support only among university students and the
highest-income Iranians, while those who identified as working-class and poor
favored Ahmadinejad. Thus while hundreds of thousands of university students,
professionals and better-educated Iranians can be seen protesting in the
affluent suburbs of Tehran and other cities, rural poor and workers have not
been reported in large numbers at the opposition rallies. This reflects the
fact that Mousavi's program of greater western investment, privatization
and de-regulation played well with some of Iran's more privileged social
classes.
Those who allege voter fraud either ignore this poll or attempt to come up with
all kinds of misleading arguments as to why it was inaccurate. On the other
hand, one can imagine that if the poll had shown Mousavi with a 2-1 lead, every
corporate news commentator on the planet would be holding up this poll as
decisive evidence.
It is no small matter that not a shred of hard evidence has been produced to
indicate that the vote was manipulated. Abbas Barzegar, writing in the Guardian
newspaper, puts it this way:
"One should recall that in three decades of presidential elections, the
accusations of rigging have rarely been levied against the vote count.
Elections here are typically controlled by banning candidates from the start or
closing opposition newspapers in advance.
In this election moreover, there were two separate governmental election
monitors in addition to observers from each camp to prevent mass voter fraud.
The sentimental implausibility of Ahmedinejad's victory that Mousavi's
supporters set forth as the evidence of state corruption must be met by the
equal implausibility that such widespread corruption could take place under
clear daylight." (Guardian, 6/13/09)
Barzegar concludes, “It seems that wishful thinking got the better of
credible reporting.”
Anyone who takes a serious look at the facts and conditions in Iran would have
to agree. There is a very good reason why the Mousavi protests have received
such tremendous coverage in CNN, BBC, FOX and all the major mainstream
television, radio, internet and other media outlets. It is the same reason why
the Obama administration intervened in preventing a temporary shutdown of the
internet communication site Twitter, which is being used supposedly by Iranian
students (although the evidence suggests that much of this content originates
outside of Iran) to coordinate protest information and share information. Or
why the leaders of the big imperialist powers have all hypocritically
“condemned” the Iranian election or expressed their “grave
concern” about its fairness.
The reason Mousavi and the so-called ‘pro-democracy movement’ in
Iran have received such lavish coverage is precisely because it is the
‘wishful thinking’ of the big imperial powers - the United States,
Britain, France, Germany, etc. - that Iran’s government will fall. Iran
is a thorn in the side of U.S. domination of the Middle East.
Despite being surrounded by hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops in Afghanistan
and Iraq, and facing the prospect of air strikes by Israel, the Iranian
government has been able to chart an independent course that is focused on
national development, independence and, most woeful to the imperial powers, the
use of oil revenues to better the lot of Iranian people, rather than the
profits of the multinational corporations. Iran has also provided significant
support to resistance movements, such as Hezbollah, and built alliances with
anti-imperialist governments such as Venezuela.
The United States has been looking to topple the leadership of Iran's
government for many years now. During one flare-up in tensions last year,
Seymour Hersh reported:
“Late last year [2007], Congress agreed to a request from President Bush
to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to
current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These
operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars,
were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to
destabilize the country’s religious leadership." (New Yorker,
7/08/2008)
One has to ask: what did the Central Intelligence Agency and Joint Special
Operations Command do with $400 million over the past year? Could it have
something to do with the spectacularly publicized, internationally coordinated
and well-funded protest activity in Iran? Instead of investigating this aspect
of the story, the corporate media continue to trash Iran's government and
sovereignty.
Iran’s election cannot be seen in isolation from the broader context of
the Middle East - a region where invasion and occupation uprooted an
anti-imperialist, independent government in Iraq, where millions live under a
deadly U.S.-backed occupation in Palestine and where puppet regimes backed by
the United States oppress and exploit hundreds of millions of people. In this
context, there is nothing more hypocritical than for the big imperial powers -
which for decades have strangled democracies and rigged elections so that
‘their’ pro-Western candidates come out on top - to condemn the
Iranian elections. The U.S. should stop interfering in Iran's internal
affairs and respect Iran's right to sovereignty and self-determination.
Fight Back Newspaper, Voice of Freedom Road Socialist Organization
Vancouver Movement Against War
and Occupation says:
HANDS OFF IRAN
June 23, 2009
Vancouver, Canada
Since the June 12th 2009 Iranian election results, there
has been constant coverage of opposition protests in Iran on every major
Western news source, with all sorts of “experts” on the situation
in Iran and statements from the leaders of imperialist countries, as well as
countless cell phone videos replayed despite their origin and authenticity
being unconfirmed. As the internal issues of the Iranian people are suddenly
the prime concern of media outlets and imperialist governments, this begs the
question, where is the coverage of the US atrocities in Iraq, or the
Canada/US/NATO crimes in Afghanistan? Why do protests of civil dispute warrant
a media frenzy, but there is barely any reporting on the US drone attack on
Northwest Pakistan which on Tuesday June 22nd killed at least 80 Pakistani
people? As was done with the May 4th US air strikes in Afghanistan which killed
over 140 Afghan people, will this be excused by the US government with another
claim of “mistakes?”
One only needs to look at the progression (or regression)
of US, EU and UN policy towards Iran in the last few years. While crocodile
tears are being wept for the Iranian opposition protesters now, the US
government and their EU allies and UN lackey have no problem imposing four sets
of crippling sanctions against the people of Iran. Remember the impact of the
US/UK/UN sanctions on Iraq, and the over 1.5 Million Iraqis, mainly women and
children, who suffered and died under these sanctions? This does not sound like
they really have the interests of the Iranian people at heart. Furthermore, the
bloody occupation of surrounding countries of Iran’s neighbours Iraq and
Afghanistan, military bases in every surrounding country and a massive build up
of military in the Persian gulf, show more and more that the US is acting upon
their agenda of having complete hegemony in the Middle East, a goal that is
only possible with the control of Iran.
The hypocrisy of the heads of imperialist countries is
staggering, as they condemn the actions of the Iranian government while
sweeping their own crimes under the rug. On Tuesday June 23rd, US president
Obama said to the press that the Iranian government "must govern through
consent, and not coercion," and that “We mourn each and every
innocent life that is lost." Where is the consent of the American people,
who have seen over 5000 American soldiers killed in the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, wars carried out without the consent of the American people and
despite not only protests in the US but protests world wide. While Obama claims
to mourn the reported 17 lives lost in Iran, where is his conscious for the 1.2
million Iraqi lives cut short by US war and occupation?
The government of Canada is also participating in this
increased campaign to demonize the Iranian government. Foreign Affairs Minister
Lawrence Cannon issued a statement saying Canada "will continue to call
for a fully transparent investigation into electoral discrepancies," and
"The Iranian people deserve to have their voices heard.” Yet the
government of Canada upholds an illegitimate puppet government in Afghanistan,
whose election under the barrel of the gun of foreign occupation was wrought
with fraud and discrepancies. Not to mention, the illegal occupation of
Afghanistan itself undermines any legal and fair election. Where is the voice
of the majority of people in Canada, who for over three years, according to
many independent and official polls, oppose Canada’s war in
Afghanistan?
Perhaps most directly interfering of all was the statement
on Sunday from German chancellor Angela Merkel, who was the first leader of a
major Western power to publicly demand a recount. There are claims that there
were election discrepancies, and there are claims that there were not –
it isn’t the job of the German chancellor to judge which claim is
correct, and it is not her job to demand a recount. Not only does the German
chancellor have no clear evidence to claim a recount is in order, this is a
direct interference into the internal matters of a sovereign country! If Ms.
Merkel is suddenly so concerned about the votes of Iranians, why does she not
care about the racist and vicious attacks on Turks and Muslims in Germany, and
the 2.5 million out of 4 million Turks who can not vote because of
Germany’s undemocratic and reactionary laws?
While imperialist countries are playing out the situation
in Iran on an international stage, the rights of Iran, as a UN nation-state
member and sovereign nation, are being violated according to the UN’s own
charters and resolutions. According to resolution 52/119 adopted by the UN
general assembly in December 1997, the UN resolved “Recognizing that the
principles of national sovereignty and non-interference in the internal affairs
of any State should be respected in the holding of elections.”
Iran’s elections and disputes are an internal
matter, to be resolved by the Iranian people and not the governments of
imperialist countries with agendas of dominating Iran and a track record of
using internal issues to justify military invasion. The Iranian people and
government do not need “Big Brother” to tell them what to do.
Throughout history, the Iranian people have constantly been in movement for
change. Since the Tobacco Movement against the British empire in 1891 to the
present day, the great Iranian people have managed three revolutions and ten
mass movements or national movements in Iran. With such a track record for
Iran, what credibility does any imperialist country have to lecture the Iranian
people on how to fight for their rights and how to achieve change? One truly
wonders what arrogance, trickery and racism these imperialist countries
display.
In this current time, the Iranian people will determine
for themselves what they will do for the future of themselves and their nation.
As peace loving people, let us turn our attention to these civilized criminals
sitting in Washington and Ottawa, whose crimes in this new era of war and
occupation are committed every day against the people of Afghanistan, Iraq,
Palestine, Haiti, Pakistan, Cuba, Indigenous nations, and yes, also Iran. This
is where our human obligation lies, in pointing the finger at the governments
of the imperialist countries we live in, rather than countries under
imperialist attack.
Hands Off Iran!
No Imperialist Intervention in Iran!
Self-determination for Iranian People!
Mobilization Against War & Occupation
(MAWO)
www.mawovancouver.org
