Iran's Protest Movement

[Zarquon]

An update
Cleric’s Funeral Becomes Protest of Iran Leaders


The funeral of a prominent dissident cleric in the Qom turned into a huge and furious antigovernment rally on Monday, raising the possibility that the cleric’s death could serve as a catalyst for an opposition movement that has been locked in a stalemate with the authorities.
As mourners carried the body of the cleric, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/hussein_ali_montazeri/index.html?inline=nyt-per), tens of thousands of his supporters surged through the streets of Qum, chanting denunciations of the leadership in Tehran that would have been unthinkable only months ago: “Our shame, our shame, our idiot leader!” and “Dictator, this is your last message: The people of Iran (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/iran/index.html?inline=nyt-geo) are rising!"
..........The funeral of Ayatollah Montazeri, who died in his sleep on Sunday (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/21/world/middleeast/21cleric.html) at the age of 87, appears to have put Iran’s rulers in a difficult position.
.........the continuing protests underscore a deadlock between the opposition and the government, which wants to avoid the cycle of martyrdom and mourning for dead protesters that helped create Iran’s revolution, analysts say.
Source (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/22/world/middleeast/22cleric.html?_r=1&ref=world)

[Michael]

This is playing out exactly as I expected. And yes, the Iranians do tend to organize their politics around 'funerary memorial' dates and this scares the crap out of the ruling regime because this is exactly how the 1979 Revolution played out.

Indeed, it almost looks like they are repeating the steps.

[The Drunk Guy]

This is playing out exactly as I expected. And yes, the Iranians do tend to organize their politics around 'funerary memorial' dates and this scares the crap out of the ruling regime because this is exactly how the 1979 Revolution played out.

Indeed, it almost looks like they are repeating the steps.
To be honest, I'm jealous if their initiative. They've impressed me a lot and I can't wait to see them regain control of their nation. :bigclap:

[Michael]

Interesting analysis out there on the Iranian election. The key point is that there has turned out to be ZERO evidence that Iran's election was fraudulent.

The assertion that Iran's election was fraudulent was apparently just made up by US media because they apparently wanted that to be so. In US media, the truth is what you want it to be, not what the facts indicate. We saw this same script play out with Iraq.

Who's Really Misreading Tehran?

Wishful thinking and bad analysis has inflated Iran's Green Movement into something it certainly is not: a viable alternative to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Foreign Policy's seven-part series, "Misreading Tehran," is, for the most part, a disappointing example of the phenomenon it purports to explain -- inaccurate interpretations of Iranian politics surrounding the Islamic Republic's June 12, 2009, presidential election. Such misinterpretation has had a deeply corrosive effect on the debate about America's Iran policy.

The series starts with an egregious misstatement of reality in the introduction setting up the articles that follow: "When Iranians took to the streets the day after they cast their ballots for president, the Western media was presented with a sweeping, dramatic story.... It was a story that seemed to write itself. But it was also a story that the West -- and the American media in particular -- was destined to get wrong in ways both large and small."

It is certainly true that much of the American media -- including some of the writers featured in the "Misreading Tehran" series -- got the story of Iranian politics over the last year spectacularly wrong. But that was hardly destiny. That so many got it so wrong is not the result of a "proverbial perfect storm of obstacles in producing calm, reasonable reporting about the events in Iran," as the prologue suggests. The real culprit was -- and, unfortunately, still is -- willfully bad journalism and analysis, motivated in at least some cases by writers' personal political agendas.

Source (http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/06/14/whos_really_misreading_tehran?print=yes&hidecomments=yes&page=full)

I suppose no one should be surprised here.

It is also important to note that even with this debunking of the myth, the myth of the fraudulent Iranian election is quite likely to live on indefinitely as 'conventional wisdom' (or 'common knowledge') inside US politics and US media circles.

That's what is so annoying about the media game. They report lies and propaganda with loud bullhorns so that even when the real facts get reported, they are drowned out by the noise that was created by the original lies and propaganda.

This happens with such remarkable regularity that one has to wonder if this is the operational plan of US media outlets.