RE: [CASMII-Discussion] Re: Daniel Pipes is FOR Ahmadinejad !!!
Soraya Sepahpour- Ulrich
Thank you for these links. I think that Moji likes to serve his belief by taking things out of context. Sad.
From: mojgan jana
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Sent: Thursday, August 13, 2009
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Subject: Re: [CASMII-Discussion]
Re: Daniel Pipes is FOR Ahmadinejad !!!
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Daniel Pipe and the rest of Zionists love all IRI members equally ! They conceder all of them to be anti-Semite and a terrorist.
http://www.danielpipes.org/301/salman-rushdies-delusion-and-ours http://www.meforum.org/2106/khatami-is-just-ahmadinejad-with-a-silver-tongue =================================================================== Governmental policy. At one point in 1997, Iran's chief negotiator with London, Muhammad Javad Larijani, sought to dissociate the regime from Khomeini's edict by quoting Khomeini; "I have expressed my views as a seminarian, and the government should pursue its own path on the basis of its own calculations." In retort, the prime minister at the time of the edict in 1989, Mir-Hoseyn Musavi, vehemently replied; "Not only did the imam not say such a thing to the government, on the contrary, he sent a message to me urging the government also to adopt a position on this issue…on the very day when the imam's edict was issued." Musavi went on to chronicle how he fulfilled Khomeini's orders and put his government on record to "implement any appropriate action" against Rushdie. http://www.danielpipes.org/5746/is-salman-rushdie-a-free-man ===================================================== Accordingly, I no longer want Ahmadinejad to serve as president for a second term but prefer Mousavi in that position. Better yet, of course, would be for neither of them to hold power but for the entire fetid Islamic Republic of Iran to collapse. While confident that process is underway, I have no idea if it is weeks or decades ahead. Whatever it requires, Mousavi as president hastens the process. (June 20, 2009) http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2009/06/ahmadinejad-or-mousavi ======================================================== later this January , Iranian prime minister mir Hussein Musavi , belived by some intelligence analyst to direct Iran’s overseas terrorist activities paid three day visit to Nicaragua.
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Massy Homayouni
Demonizing Iran will not stop. It would not matter whether it is Ahmadinejad, Mousavi, or Mahatma Gandhi unless an Iranian leader is willing to bow down and give in to all the demands in order to appease the Zionists, the neocons, and the global hegemons, Iran and its presidents will continue to be demonized.
Resistance by any leader or any group (i.e. Hamas, Hezbullah, etc..) is simply not acceptable!!
Massy
I've studied Chomsky Soraya. He borrowed the phrase manufacturing consent from Lippman. See page 16 of the following article:I will reiterate what I said in my response to Sid - The mere fact that the neo-cons' born again Hitler (Ahmadinejad) got voted out of office would have been enough to discredit them. How could a Hitler be voted out of office!?Shahram
To: Shahram Mostarshed <smos...@sbcglobal.net>; Moji Agha <moji...@yahoo.com>; laal....@gmail.com; kam...@googlegroups.com; la...@googlegroups.com; casmii-d...@yahoogroups.com; dd...@iic.org; IA Mossadegh <drmos...@iic.org>; trait...@yahoogroups.com; di...@iic.org; Pirouz Mojtahed-Zadeh <pirouz_moj...@hotmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, August 13, 2009 8:37:12 PM
Subject: RE: Daniel Pipes is FOR Ahmadinejad !!!
Shahram, have you by chance studied Lippmann? I would be interested to know your source. Although Lippmann is not on trial here, but just to shed some light on what you said – and again, the source of any information is very important and not isolated sentences. I know I gave you the one sentence about the truth, but that was not condemning a man for his ideals. Perhaps if you read *Walter Lippmann and the American Century* by Ronald Steel you will see differently. This book is by my former professor, retired, and now friend. He met Lippmann on many occasions and finally Lippmann gave him notes and allowed him to write this book.
Lippmann became a follower of Wilson and supported the war because he thought it would make the world “safe for democracy”. He bitterly denounced the peace that within a generation spawned an even more terrible conflict. Lippmann reached his prime when he was nearly 80. he turned his back on the conservatism he had espoused during the 1930s and the follies of 40s and 50s. The war in Vietnam rekindled his sense of outrage. It is wrong to cite the sentence out of context.
More to the point.
So bottom line - the Zionists see Mousavi as a bigger threat because they cannot convince the world as easily that he is a threat.
Is A-nejad apocalyptic ? Let’s face it, he does smile. Just does not have charisma. Look at the dirt they have already dug out on Mousavi – manufactured and or otherwise. He is responsible for murder and purges at the bloodiest time of the revolution. He has been blamed for the 1982 marine barrack bombings, he has been made responsible for contacting A.Q. Khan. So how do you think the ruling elite can persuade the ‘bewildered herd’ into interpreting the truth in a way which is consistent with their policies (i.e manufacture of consent) with regards to Mousavi? Don’t you think that this little opinion piece in itself may be aimed at ‘bewildering the herd’ – us? As long as garbage like this comes out of hateful people like him, we continue to contest each other. They win.
Incidentally, Daniel Piples and Kaufman also wrote a very nice piece about Hamid Dabashi. This is only an insult to Dabashi. What does that tell you?
Dabashi has joined many of his colleagues in rooting for the right side for a change".
http://www.campus-watch.org/blog/2009/07/give-me-that-old-time-schadenfreude-dabashi-vs
From: Shahram Mostarshed [mailto:smos...@sbcglobal.net]
Sent: Thursday, August 13, 2009 7:45 PM
To: Soraya Sepahpour- Ulrich; Moji Agha; laal....@gmail.com; kam...@googlegroups.com; la...@googlegroups.com; casmii-d...@yahoogroups.com; dd...@iic.org; IA Mossadegh; trait...@yahoogroups.com; di...@iic.org; Pirouz Mojtahed-Zadeh
Subject: Re: Daniel Pipes is FOR Ahmadinejad !!!
Walter Lippman also proposed the following:
The phrase ‘manufacturing consent’ [comes] from the influential American journalist Walter Lippman, who advocated consent engineering early in the 20th century. For Lippman, the ‘manufacture of consent’ was both necessary and favourable, predominantly because, in Lippman’s view, ‘the common interests’ – meaning, presumably, issues of concern to all citizens in democratic societies – ‘very largely elude public opinion entirely’. Lippman postulated that ‘the common good’ ought to be ‘managed’ by a small ‘specialized class’ ... [and] recommended that the role of the electorate – the ‘bewildered herd’, as he called them – be restricted to that of ‘interested
spectators of action’...
What Lippman is saying with regards to "interpretation" is that the ruling elite can persuade the ‘bewildered herd’ into interpreting the truth in a way which is consistent with their policies (i.e manufacture of consent).
What Daniel Pipes is saying fits this model perfectly. Pipes is not interested in dealing with Ahmadinejad. What he has in mind is to manufacture consent in the West about an imminent threat from Iran . It would have been far more difficult for the neo-cons to portray Iran as a threat, had Ahmadinejad been removed from power.
Shahram
From: Soraya Sepahpour- Ulrich <sor...@earthlink.net>
To: Moji Agha <moji...@yahoo.com>; laal....@gmail.com; kam...@googlegroups.com; la...@googlegroups.com; casmii-d...@yahoogroups.com; dd...@iic.org; IA Mossadegh <drmos...@iic.org>; trait...@yahoogroups.com; di...@iic.org; Pirouz Mojtahed-Zadeh <pirouz_moj...@hotmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, August 13, 2009 5:09:46 PM
Subject: RE: Daniel Pipes is FOR Ahmadinejad !!!Walter Lippmann: 50% of the truth is what you what they tell you, the other 50% what you want to believe (i.e. interpretation). It seems some have a very odd interpretation to suit their needs.
What the notorious Daniel Pipes is saying is “better the devil we know”. At least with him, the world would not be fooled, but Mousavi’s sweet talk would disarm the world as they centrifuges continue to “whir away”.
Isn’t it time for Iranians to grow up?
Naiman should have paid up weeks ago. The British organization Chatham House found substantial evidence of irregularities--including a swing toward the right that simply beggars belief in view of previous elections, not to say the mass pro-Mousavi elections in Tehran and other cities before the election.
"The plausibility of Mr. Ahmadinejad's claimed victory is called into question by figures that show that in several provinces he would have had to attract the votes of all new voters, all the votes of his former centrist opponent and up to 44 percent of those who voted for reformist candidates in 2005," Chatham House said in a statement.
Critics say that because Chatham House receives funding from the British state, its findings must be suspect. But researchers were analyzing official Iranian government reports. Pro-Ahmadinejad leftists point to the fact that Iranian voters can cast ballots wherever they happen to be, so vote totals may exceed registered voters in a given area. But that hardly explains how two entire provinces-- Yazd and Mazandaran--could have turnout of greater than 100 percent.
And if Naiman is looking for "coherent stories" of how the election was stolen, he could avail himself of the numerous reports of Mousavi election monitors who reported results that sharply diverge from the official totals.
Ahmadinejad the pseudo-populist
James Petras, a leading left-wing author, vigorously supported the government's official election return. In a June 18 post on his Web site, he wrote: "In general, Ahmadinejad did very well in the oil- and chemical-producing provinces. This may be a reflection of the oil workers' opposition to the 'reformist' program, which included proposals to 'privatize' public enterprises."
In fact, Ahmadinejad has accelerated the privatization process begun under the previous administration of reformer Mohammad Khatami. The Iran Privatization Organization, a government ministry, reported that 247 state enterprises have been partly or fully privatized since Ahmadinejad took office in 2005. Ahmadinejad has already privatized the postal service, sold stocks in two state-owned banks and sold 5 percent of shares in a state-owned steel company.
Many of these state assets are sold through a "justice shares" program that puts the stock in the hands of the poor. But as the Iranian-American analyst Kaveh Ehsani points out, the poor, who need cash, are compelled by their circumstances to sell the shares to businessmen at low prices. The model is the rigged privatization process in Russia and Eastern Europe , where Stalinist apparatchiks bought up stocks initially sold to workers in order to create vast, private corporate empires.
Ahmadinejad's leading attorney on the U.S. left, Phil Wilayto, a longtime contributor to Workers World newspaper, shuts his eyes and ears to all this. In his "Open Letter to the Antiwar Movement" about Iran , Wilayto writes: "Ahmadinejad has retained this class support through his promotion of services and subsidies to the poor--programs which depend on the continued state ownership and control of the oil and gas industries."
In fact, as Ahmadinejad's second inauguration day neared, state-controlled media announced that the privatization plan would accelerate with the sale of 40 percent of government stock in 14 state-owned companies, including: "the National Iranian Gas Company, National Petrochemical Company, Iran Air, Iranian Oil Terminals Company, Iranian Tobacco Company, National Iranian Oil Products Distribution Company and 10 percent of its shares in a number of oil refineries."
To be sure, Ahmadinejad has spent some government money on the poor to build a political base on a clientelist basis, Latin American style. Conveniently ignored by Ahmadinejad's leftist champions is the fact that the Iranian president tried and failed to pass legislation last December to cut subsidies to the poor. Pre-election bonuses to state employees and handouts of potatoes to the poor are simply a cover for his pro-business, pro-privatization policies that are ignored by Ahmadinejad's leftist supporters.
Then there's the question of the regime's denial of the right of workers to form independent unions, about which the pro-Ahmadinejad left is silent. In researching their 2006 book, Iran on the Brink, Swedish journalists Andreas Malm and Shora Esmailian interviewed worker activists involved in the 2004-2005 strike wave in the country. Workers braved beatings, bullets and arrest to organize--and sometimes won. The struggle of Iranian bus drivers to form a union--their leader, Mansour Osanloo, is imprisoned--has been widely publicized.
But for the Ahmadinejad-loving leftists, such struggles are either slandered as CIA operations or passed over in silence. Perhaps that isn't surprising for the likes of Phil Wilayto. He's associated with the Workers World political tradition, which has supported tanks and Stalinist repression against worker and popular uprisings going back to Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and China in 1989. But with few Stalinist regimes left for that crowd to support, it seems that Ahmadinejad's Islamist authoritarian state will do just fine.
A collaborator with imperialism
Iran has been in the crosshairs of U.S. imperialism since the revolution that overthrew the U.S.-backed dictatorship of the Shah in 1979. It was at the behest of the U.S. that Iraq 's Saddam Hussein launched the Iran-Iraq war, an eight-year slaughter that killed a million people on both sides. Sanctions have caused considerable economic damage--and such measures have only increased since the U.S. sought to prevent Iran 's nuclear industry from enriching uranium.
There is also evidence of U.S. interventions in Iranian Kurdistan and tolerance for a Pakistani-based Sunni extremist group that has carried out bombings of civilians in Iran . Moreover, a cadre of neocons in the George W. Bush administration pushed for a military strike against Iran , either directly by U.S. armed forces or by Israel . And the U.S. and Iran did fight a kind of proxy war in 2006, when Israel invaded Lebanon in its failed attempt to crush the Iran-aligned Hezbollah organization.
All this may seem clear enough--the U.S. is out to achieve regime change in Iran , so therefore the regime must be anti-imperialist. But this logic is fallacious--and it doesn't describe reality. Iranian governments of all sorts have tried to achieve a kind of accommodation with the U.S. , dating from the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s when the Iranian government used its influence to obtain the release of Western hostages in Lebanon . In exchange, the Iranians were able to purchase U.S. weapons via Israel to fight Iraq --and the money used to buy the hardware was sent to the right-wing Contra guerrillas fighting to overthrow the Nicaraguan Revolution.
Trita Parsi, author of a book on post-revolution Iran 's dealings with the U.S. and Israel , wrote, "Throughout the 1980s, when Iran 's strategic interest compelled it to cooperate with Israel in order to repel the invading Iraqi army, the [Ayatollah Ruhollah] Khomeini government sought to cover up its Israeli dealings by taking Iran 's rhetorical excesses against Israel to even higher levels."
Moreover, Iran effectively supported the 1991 Gulf War. A decade later, Iran provided invaluable support in securing Western Afghanistan for the occupying forces following the U.S. invasion; the Taliban had been seen in Tehran as a major threat. And even after being denounced by Bush as part of the axis of evil alongside North Korea and Iraq , Iran again collaborated with a U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq in order to help achieve the removal of Saddam.
Ahmadinejad's supporters at home and abroad claim that it was Ahmadinejad's reformist predecessors who surrendered too much to the West, whereas Ahmadinejad pushes back. In fact, Iran continues to collaborate with the U.S. in both Afghanistan and Iraq . As an Iraqi official told journalist Patrick Cockburn last year, "There really is an Iranian-American condominium ruling Iraq these days." One can explain Iran 's foreign policy as realism in the name of regime survival--but anti-imperialist, it's not.
A progressive society?
The Iranian Revolution did bring some social advances over the Shah's dictatorship. As noted by historian Ervand Abrahamian, a left-wing critic of the clerical regime, the ayatollahs have maintained power through a kind welfare state. This involved seizing and subsidizing factories abandoned by pro-Shah capitalists, reducing illiteracy from 53 percent to 15 percent, expanding education, increasing life expectancy, improving rural infrastructure, implementing land reform, expanding affordable housing and boosting consumption of the masses with subsidies.
But these gains for the mass of people came not because of the clerics' rule, but in spite of it. The Iranian Revolution saw one of the greatest working-class mobilizations of the 20th century, but it was hijacked by Ayatollah Khomeini and the middle-class merchants in the market, or bazaar. Khomeini's rule was established through a counterrevolution that involved taking over workers' councils and repressing the revolutionary left through jailing and executions.
Most women's rights were eliminated as the supposed norms of Islamist behavior became enforced by the state. And the regime was willing to extend social benefits during the 1980s--measures carried out by Mir Hussein Mousavi, then the prime minister. These policies were undertaken in large part due to the pressure of the war with Iraq , which required the new regime to mobilize broad support.
Some defenders of Ahmadinejad are willing to acknowledge the anti-working-class, capitalist character of the Iranian regime. Thus Mazda Majidi, writing on the Web site of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), states that, "The Islamic Republic, from the very beginning, was strongly opposed to forces representing the working class," and describes the repression against the left.
Majidi goes on to correctly restate the socialist position against defending any government from imperialist intervention, despite its capitalist character: "Imperialism is the enemy of working people everywhere, including within the imperialist countries. This forms the basis of the PSL's approach toward the Islamic Republic of Iran and other bourgeois national states and forces." (PSL is a splinter of the Workers World Party and shares its theoretical framework).
But even after admitting that Mousavi was an "acceptable" candidate for president for the Iranian ruling class, Majidi leaps to the conclusion that the mass protest of 3 million people could only benefit U.S. imperialism: "What would have happened had the street demonstrations overthrown the Islamic Republic regime? Would we now have a more independent, a more anti-imperialist, a left-leaning government with more benefits for the working class? There is a reason that 'left' forces supporting the opposition do not ask this question. There is not the slightest bit of evidence to think this 'revolutionary' movement would result in a leftward shift in the Iranian state and every reason to think the contrary.
"If the opposition had toppled the Islamic Republic, this would have been another example of a U.S.-sponsored color revolution--this time, green. It would likely have resulted in the overthrow of a nationalist regime in favor of a client state implementing neoliberal policies."
Let's get this straight. Any successful mass opposition to what Majidi admits is a reactionary regime would automatically lead to the victory U.S. imperialism. According to this logic, it's in the demonstrators' interests to passively submit to the basij militia's clubs and snipers' bullets rather than struggle and risk a comeback for private capital?
The problem with this argument is that it is Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who are driving the neoliberal agenda. In fact, it was Mousavi's camp that was arguing for a different approach: using the state oil and gas revenues for investment to rebuild the economy in key sectors, following the example of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela , Evo Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador . In a document posted on his campaign Web site, Mousavi declared that to achieve these development aims, it will be necessary to "re-nationalize" Iran 's oil.
Abdollah Ramezanzadeh, one of Mousavi's key spokespeople, made a similar point during the post-election protests before he was elected. "They [Ahmadinejad's government] are selling the gas to India at lower and worse prices than even the Turkmanchai Treaty," he said in a reference to the 1828 treaty that gave Russia control over much of old Persia. "...They [Ahmadinejad and his backers] are throwing everything to the wind. So of course they have to arrest us. If a government that is conceding everything that is ours to foreigners--if it can't show it can arrest a few students, and arrest a few activists--then how it call itself a government [in the front of foreigners]?"
Bench
If there is anyone who feels Ahmadinejad’s environment, s/he has to be Obama! Well, at least that is MHO after reading what Paul Krugman had to say about Republican Death Trip yesterday:
“President Obama is now facing … an enraged right that denies the legitimacy of his presidency, that eagerly seizes on every wild rumor manufactured by the right-wing media complex… But the truth is that the attacks on the president have no relationship to anything he is actually doing or proposing.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/14/opinion/14krugman.html
“The truth is that … the paranoia of a significant minority of Americans and the cynical willingness of leading Republicans to cater to that paranoia — are as strong as ever. In fact, the situation may be even worse than it was in the 1990s because the collapse of the Bush administration has left the G.O.P. with no real leaders other than Rush Limbaugh.”
I do not know what the “truth” is, but I am bombarded by the inexcusable lies, distortions, innuendo, etc. against IRI in general and Ahmadinejad in particular. So what is the only logical conclusion? I can offer this: Ahmadinejad and/or IRI are (is) doing something right that is totally against certain special interests.
BTW the problem with Iranian opposition is too many leaders! Remember the old maxim: too many chiefs not enough iundians.
Peace,
Mohamad Purqurian
On
Behalf Of Massy
Homayouni
Sent: Friday, August 14, 2009 2:36 AM
Subject: [LaaL Msg# 4920] Re: Daniel Pipes is FOR Ahmadinejad !!!
Every day new Hitlers are born and invented by those who are in the business of manufacturing Hitlers to pursue their own agenda. Voting one out of office does not mean you don't get to vote another into office!
Bush was called a Hitler by some and now Obama is being called Hitler by another group.
Nasser was a Hitler, Saddam was a Hitler, Ahmadinejad is a Hitler, Obama is Hitler etc..
Demonizing Iran will not stop. It would not matter whether it is Ahmadinejad, Mousavi, or Mahatma Gandhi unless an Iranian leader is willing to bow down and give in to all the demands in order to appease the Zionists, the neocons, and the global hegemons, Iran and its presidents will continue to be demonized.
Resistance by any leader or any group (i.e. Hamas, Hezbullah, etc..) is simply not acceptable!!
Massy
On Behalf Of Moji Agha
Sent: Thursday, August 13, 2009 3:43 PM