Western support and the extremely violent behavior of some armed post-election demonstrators have probably had a damaging effect on the efforts of Iranian women-rights- and other reform-movements. Their efforts might have been discredited so much, that a backslide of Iran into earlier hard-line positions in the matters of women´s rights might occur. Hopefully it won´t. Continue reading

Iran is having an identity crisis. Since the Iranian revolution turned into an Islamic Republic few voices other than the party line have been accepted in the public realm. Nonetheless, the vacuum left by the flight of the wealthy elite after the revolution (now mostly in Los Angeles) has led to the rise of an… Continue reading

Obama has said openly that what he wanted to avoid was making himself and the U.S. the subject of the Iranian political struggle. Good thinking. What has happened, however, is that Iran has become the subject of political struggle in the U.S. – or, rather a weapon in the hand of those sought to destroy… Continue reading

I for one can state without qualifications that ‘elections’ cannot mean anything but a contest between candidates that are absolutely acceptable to a theocratic establishment. This, in turn, means that ALL elections, to varying degrees, are stolen elections, since the participation of a huge majority of Iranians as candidates, by the theocratic Constitution, has been… Continue reading

For now, the Iranian establishment has spoken unambiguously for the continuation of the Ahmadinejad presidency. So, welcome to four more years of back and forth on ‘to bomb or not to bomb’, four more years of sanctions, talk of more severe sanctions, and reports of covert ops and infiltrations, four more years of seeing Ahmadinejad… Continue reading