This what happens when nice little Hitler Youth boys grow up.
TEHRAN -- When the protests broke out here last month, Mehdi Moradani answered the call to crush them.
On the first day of the unrest, the 24-year-old volunteer member of Iran's paramilitary Basij force mounted his motorcycle and chased reformist protesters through the streets, shouting out the names of Shiite saints as he revved his engine. On the fourth day, he picked up a thick wooden stick issued by his Basij neighborhood task force and beat demonstrators who refused to disperse.
Anyone think of grabbing the stick from him and beating him over the head with it?
By the eighth day, demonstrators alleging that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had rigged his re-election were out by the hundreds of thousands. Mr. Moradani says he mobilized in a 12-man motorcycle crew, scouting out restive neighborhoods across Tehran. He battled protesters with a baton and tear gas. The demonstrators fought back with rocks, bricks and bottles.
The story of Mr. Moradani, a midranking Basij member, offers a rare glimpse into one of the most mysterious and feared arms of Iran's regime -- and into the group's most significant mobilization since the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. This portrait of Mr. Moradani is based on interviews with him conducted in person and by phone, both before the uprising and after the crackdown began.
The Basij became the most visible target of the opposition's fury. In some neighborhoods, protesters covered streets with oil to thwart Basij motorbikes, surrounding and beating fallen Basij riders.
Before the election, Mr. Moradani campaigned for Mr. Ahmadinejad. He printed campaign posters and pasted them on walls. The day after the vote, with his candidate declared the winner, Mr. Moradani bought a box of chocolate cupcakes and drove his motorcycle to one of Mr. Ahmadinejad's campaign offices to celebrate.
A few hours later, he recalls, he was shocked to see demonstrators filling the streets. They set plastic trash bins afire along Tehran's long Vali Asr Avenue. Men and women, gathered in clusters across town, shouted "Death to the Dictator."
Riot police chased them away. The demonstrators regrouped and began chanting again -- a cat-and-mouse game that played out for days.
"I never expected the protests to be so intense and last so long," said Mr. Moradani in a phone interview from Tehran this week. "I thought it would be over in a few days."
Basij members organized to support riot police and other security officials across Tehran. Protesters, most of them young, fought back. "You saw young people on both sides mobilizing with vengeance and willing to kill," said Issa Saharkheez, a political analyst in Tehran, in an interview shortly after the election. Mr. Saharkheez was subsequently arrested in detentions that followed the unrest.
At the height of the street battles, in Sadaat Abad, a middle-class neighborhood in east Tehran, young men and women organized themselves into an unofficial militia to fight the Basij, with a "commander" taking responsibility for each street. Every afternoon, they would meet to prepare for the evening's expected battle, according to a 25-year-old student who was involved with the group.
They collected rocks, tiles and bricks from construction sites and spilled oil on the roads, an attempt to sideline the Basij's motorcycles. When a Basij rider would go down, the young men would beat him, according to the student. Women stood back, screaming "Death to the Dictator" and stoking bonfires in the street. Older supporters remained indoors, throwing ashtrays, vases and other household items from their balconies and windows onto the Basij motorcycle riders below.
"There was a war going on here every night," the student says. "We are not going to stand and let them beat us."
At the end of the first week of protests, Mr. Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, led Friday prayers and endorsed Mr. Ahmadinejad's victory. He ordered all demonstrators off the streets.
A few hours after Mr. Khamenei's sermon, Mr. Moradani got a call at home. The local Basij headquarters was holding an emergency meeting. About four hundred members showed up. A top Basij commander briefed them on the riots and their responsibilities going forward. He called protesters "havoc makers" and accused them of having ties to Western countries aiming to sow chaos in Iran. The commander said the protests were no longer a matter of election unrest, but had become a serious, national-security threat.
"It is now everyone's Islamic and revolutionary duty to crush these antirevolutionary forces," Hossam Gholami, the 27-year-old chief of Shahr Rey Basij, told members, he recalled in a telephone interview this week. "You are not dealing with ordinary people. They are our enemy," he said he told them.
Mr. Moradani lined up with his comrades to receive an official letter of deployment, signed and bearing the seal of the Revolutionary Guard. He was given new equipment: a camouflage vest to wear over his clothes, a plastic baton, handcuffs and a hand-held radio.
On the streets the next day, a Saturday, the Basij and other security services cracked down, resulting in some of the bloodiest clashes with protesters. Mr. Moradani says he and his brigade roamed the streets, attacking what he says were violent protesters. Alerted about a burnt-out mosque, he rushed to the scene to secure the area.
One day, Mr. Moradani says, a mob chased him. He fell off his motorcycle and the crowd beat him with sticks and rocks, he says. His leg was bandaged for a few days, and he still walks with a limp, he says. Dozens of Basij militia have been killed and injured, he says. Protesters have attacked his friends by throwing acid on their faces, he says.
Mr. Moradani says a young man in his group was killed when a protester in a black sports car ran over him, he says. The driver, he says, was arrested and confessed to driving over 11 Basij members. Mr. Moradani's account was impossible to independently verify.
For Mr. Moradani, the biggest shock during the election turmoil came in his personal life. He had recently gotten engaged to a young woman from a devout, conservative family. A week into the protests, he says, his fiancée called him with an ultimatum. If he didn't leave the Basij and stop supporting Mr. Ahmadinejad, he recalls her saying, she wouldn't marry him.
He told her that was impossible. "I suffered a real emotional blow," he says. "She said to me, 'Go beat other people's children then,' and 'I don't want to have anything to do with you,' and hung up on me."
She returned the ring he gave her, and hasn't returned his phone calls. "The opposition has even fooled my fiancée," he says.
More background information at the link. Poor Mr. Moradani joined the Basij youth group at age fourteen, then moved to the adult branch later. As of 4:47 pm there are 91 comments attached to the article.
#9
But ambitious, OldSpook. He only need pass the all-day interview to get into the Republican Guards, where his daddy used to be a commander. He's already passed the written tests, although he failed the interview twice already.
In a very important development, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, the most senior cleric living in Iran, and one of the top two* marja' taghlid (source of emulation) in Shiite Islam, issued a series of Fatwas, calling the Supreme Leader illegitimate and saying that he was working with the government against religion.
Montazeri has called on people to take action against this injustice, even if they have to pay a heavy price for it.
Ayatollah Motazeri, who has long been one of the most outspoken critics of Iran's hard-liners, issued the Fatwas in response to a letter that Dr. Mohsen Kadivar, a progressive cleric and a former student of his, wrote asking for answers to several pointed questions. (Dr. Kadivar was jailed a few years ago for his outspoken criticism of the hard-liners and now lives in the United States.)
The letter congratulates the Grand Ayatollah on the occasion of last week's anniversary of the birth of Imam Ali, the Shiites' first Imam, and a cousin and a son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammad.
The letter says that the anniversary has fallen at a time when peaceful protests against rigged elections have been met by injustice by the government, which has resulted in tens of deaths, hundreds of injured, and thousands of arrests -- all carried out in the name of Islam and Shiism by those who use Imam Ali's name but take the path of his enemies instead.
#4
The guy actually makes sense theologically with regards to how a government should function, which is totally unacceptable to the current theocratic rulers in Iran today.
I look for Ayatollah Montazeri to be under 'house arrest' (or worse) again very soon.
Posted by: Mullah Richard ||
07/13/2009 9:47 Comments ||
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#5
I believe the current "Supreme Leader" isn't long for that position.
Hmmm.... Someone get the keys to the crane? Or is it too soon to talk about that?
Reporting from Beirut -- A powerful cleric who has been a driving force behind the opposition movement challenging the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will lead Friday prayers this week after a two-month absence that was considered a sign of conflict within the Iranian establishment.
The semiofficial Iranian Labor News Agency reported Sunday that Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani will deliver the nation's weekly keynote religious sermon. Rafsanjani, who chairs powerful boards that oversee the office of the supreme leader and adjudicate disputes between government bodies, is the highest-profile backer of opposition candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, who lost to Ahmadinejad in an election marred by allegations of vote-rigging.
Mousavi's Facebook page said that he and his ally, former President Mohammad Khatami, would attend the prayer sermon. The Facebook page invited supporters who poured into the streets in recent weeks to attend, though Mousavi's website carried no such announcement.
News of the return of reformists and moderates to the official Friday prayer ceremony could serve as a challenge to hard-liners, led by supreme leader Ali Khamenei, on their home turf. Alternately, it could be a sign that the two sides have brokered a truce in their continuing political conflict. The election and subsequent demonstrations, attended by hundreds of thousands of Iranians, have led to numerous deaths and arrests. On Sunday, news websites and human rights groups reported the killing of Sohrab Arabi, a 19-year-old who was apparently shot in the chest by government security forces or allied Basiji militiamen during a June 15 demonstration and had been missing since. His funeral is to be held today. On Sunday, Maj. Gen. Hassan Firouzabadi, army chief of staff, blamed such deaths on unruly demonstrators.
"The rioters, armed with weapons from the U.S., Israel and England, opened fire on people in a futile attempt to accuse the police and the Basiji, with the cooperation of foreign media," Firouzabadi said in an open letter addressed to Imam Mahdi, a venerated Shiite Muslim who disappeared hundreds of years ago and whose messianic return, it is believed, will herald a new age.
"Our security forces never used any arms and they were beaten up, injured, martyred and crushed under wheels," he wrote in the letter, published in multiple news outlets. "On the other hand, the rioters mourned their fake dead."
Meanwhile, five Iranian officials described as diplomats by Tehran arrived in the capital Sunday after spending 30 months in U.S. custody in Iraq after their arrest early in 2007. They were freed after U.S. forces handed them over to Iraq in recent days.
Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said the Iranian government was entitled to sue the Bush administration "for this savage act."
Continued on Page 47
Posted by: Steve White ||
07/13/2009 00:00 ||
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[Iran Press TV Latest] Iran's Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki has arrived in Egypt to attend the 15th ministerial meeting of the Non-aligned Movement (NAM).
Mottaki arrived in the Egyptian resort city of Sharm al-Sheikh in the early hours of Monday to take part in a two-day ministerial meeting of NAM members scheduled for July 13-14, IRIB reported.
The Non-aligned Movement summit will start on July 11 and run through July 16. The summit will also be attended by the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.
The NAM comprises of 118 countries and is an international organization of states considering themselves not formally aligned with or against any major power bloc. It represents nearly two-thirds of the UN members.
The organization has so far issued several statements in support of Iran's nuclear activities.
The West, spearheaded by the US and Israel, the sole possessor of a nuclear arsenal in the Middle East, accuse Iran of pursuing a nuclear weapons program - a charge repeatedly denied by Tehran.
The nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), to which Iran is a signatory, grants its members the right to develop a civilian nuclear program.
[Al Arabiya Latest] The new U.S. administration has deluded Arabs and Muslims into believing it would chart a course away from the policies of the Bush era, one of the leading religious authorities in Shi'ite Islam said.
Grand Ayatollah Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, who spoke earlier this year of the "sincerity" of U.S. President Barack Obama's message to the Muslim world, criticized U.S. policies across the Middle East and in Afghanistan and urged Arabs and Muslims to forget the U.S. president's "foggy" words. "It appears that the American administration, which deluded Arabs and Muslims into believing it would tread a path different to that of the previous administration...has begun, bit by bit, to reveal its true face," Fadlallah said.
" The American president's speech, in Turkey or Cairo, is behind us "
Grand Ayatollah Sayyed Mohammed Hussein
Fadlallah
"The American president's speech, in Turkey or Cairo, is behind us," Fadlallah said in a statement received on Sunday. "Practical American steps have begun to define the course the new administration is taking in dealing with our issues."
Fadlallah accused the United States of involvement in events in Iran after its disputed presidential election, adding that it aimed "to bring about a deep fracture in the Islamic Republic," where the disputed vote triggered mass protests. Fadlallah said the region had entered a new phase after events in Iran.
He also spoke of U.S. "interference" in Lebanon during and after its June election, and "negative American movement" in Iraq. In Afghanistan, Fadlallah said the U.S. administration was attempting "to show the face of America the warrior."
On the Palestinian issue, Fadlallah, who is from south Lebanon, spoke of "complete collusion" with Israel.
[Al Arabiya Latest] Iran played down Saturday G8 concerns about its recent crackdown on dissident and its nuclear program while a group of Iranians protested outside the German embassy in Tehran over the murder of an Egyptian woman.
At a press conference, Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said Iran is preparing a new package of "political, security and international" issues to put to the West.
"The package can be a good basis for talks with the West. The package will contain Iran's stances on political, security and international issues," Mottaki told a news conference.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy said on Wednesday that the Group of Eight major powers would give Iran until September to accept negotiations over its nuclear ambitions or else face tougher sanctions.
But will he be able to persuade the U.S. to go along?
In Iran's first reaction to Sarkozy's statement at the G8 summit in Italy, Mottaki said the Islamic state had not received "any new message" from the summit.
"We have not received any new message from the G8. But based on the news we have received, they had different views on different issues which did not lead to a unanimous agreement in some areas," Mottaki said.
U.S. President Barack Obama warned Iran on Friday that the world would not wait indefinitely for it to end its nuclear defiance, saying Tehran had until September to comply or else face consequences.
Continued on Page 47
Posted by: Fred ||
07/13/2009 00:00 ||
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In a very important development, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, the most senior cleric living in Iran, and one of the top two* marja' taghlid (source of emulation) in Shiite Islam, issued a series of Fatwas, calling the Supreme Leader illegitimate and saying that he was working with the government against religion. 
Reporting from Beirut -- A powerful cleric who has been a driving force behind the opposition movement challenging the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will lead Friday prayers this week after a two-month absence that was considered a sign of conflict within the Iranian establishment.
[Al Arabiya Latest] The new U.S. administration has deluded Arabs and Muslims into believing it would chart a course away from the policies of the Bush era, one of the leading religious authorities in Shi'ite Islam said.
