Jul 7, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
From Cox and Forkum:
This cartoon was directly inspired by a quote in this AFP article from today: Iran Bans Commemorations of '99 Unrest. (Iran Va Jahan)Iranian authorities signaled yesterday they had banned any commemorations marking this week's fifth anniversary of violent student protests amid an effort to prevent a fresh outburst of anti-regime dissent. In comments carried in the Iranian press, the security affairs chief for Tehran, Ali Taala, said the Interior Ministry had decided to bar any gatherings and rejected a request for a student event outside Tehran University.
Student representatives have also reportedly been summoned to meet Tehran police chief Gen. Morteza Talaie and Mohsen Gomi, a university representative of Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
"In recent years there have been excellent relations between police and students and today, hand in hand, we should try to forget the bad memories of the 18th of Tir," or July 9, 1999, Talaie was quoted as telling them.
In addition, the Tehran University campus will also be shut down for the anniversary. A pro-reform group, the Association of Islamic Students, told the news agency ISNA that it had been informed the measure was taken to "disinfect the campus because of cockroach infestation."
Although Deputy Interior Minister Ali Asghar Ahmadi later insisted to ISNA that "no decision" had been taken by his ministry on the event, he did assert it was "not necessary" to mark the deadly riots.
On July 9, 1999, pro-democracy students clashed with police in Tehran and other cities in unrest sparked by a heavy-handed police and vigilante raid on a smaller dormitory protest over newspaper closures. Officially, one student was killed and hundreds of others injured in the violence, which prompted a major regime crackdown on dissent in universities -- a major driving force behind the pro-democracy movement. On each anniversary of the unrest, the government has sought to prevent any gatherings from taking place.
In 2003, protesters merely took to the streets of Tehran in their cars, honking their horns, with the sidewalks and universities patrolled by huge numbers of police. Prior to the anniversary last year, some 4,000 people were arrested in the wake of other protests.
'Free Iran' News is compiling a list of anti-regime demonstrations in the U.S. and Europe.
Also: Iranians Demonstrate Their Love of Freedom, Again
UPDATE: Roger L. Simon on the Iranian freedom movement.
UPDATE July 8: Google search results for Iran today included the following:
Iran Quiet During Anniversary of Student Protests (VOA News)
Student protesters [from past protests] held in Iran (AP)
Groups Call For Release Of Iranian Protestors (RFE/RL)
And FreeRepublic.com has pics from the demonstrations in L.A. as well as other related news and articles here.
ANOTHER UPDATE: More articles, some older:
Protest Outside Iranian Embassy [in Ottawa]
Analysis: Renewed Unity Among Iranian Students (RFE/RL, July 7)
Iran Police Deploy for Traffic; Students See Threat (Reuters, July 6)
UPDATE July 9: Martin Lindeskog reports on a demonstration in Sweden.
UPDATE: Pejmanesque.com has a number of Iran-related posts worth reading for today (July 9), including this BBC retrospective and an article on Iranian prison abuse (expect a "worldwide wave of revulsion" on that last one ... any minute now).
UPDATE: Bush expresses support for freedom movement by young Iranians. (VOA News -- we rewrote their bad headline). This article, dated today, quotes President Bush as saying:"There are people inside of Iran who are watching what's happening -- young, vibrant, professional people who want to be free. And they're wondering whether or not they'll have the opportunity." [...] "The rule of free peoples will come to the Middle East," says President Bush. And Americans "will do all in our power to help them find the blessings of liberty."
Let's hope we're doing "all in our power."
Not only does it appear that all major protests were squashed in Iran, but regime jackboots are bragging about it: Tehran Police Hail Peaceful Protest Anniversary. (RFE/RL)General Morteza Talaie, the commander of the Iranian capital's police force, said that 8 July was what he called a "totally normal" day, despite what he said had been an extensive campaign in the "counterrevolutionary media" highlighting the anniversary.
"Totally normal" day ... in a theocratic dictatorship. Here's what one Iranian student group (SMCCDI) reported about the "peaceful" day: Sporadic and brutal clashes in most Iranian cities.The brutal intervention of the regime's official and plainclothes agents has lead, tonight, to the arrests and injuries of tens of protesters in most main Iranian cities. In Tehran alone, the clashes are wide spread and are happening in Amir Abad, Tajrish, Zarabkhane, Kargar, Guisha, Kargar, Sadeghie, Narmak, Noor, vali e Asr and Enghelab area.
Other clashes have happened, so far, in Esfahan, Shiraz and Mashad were those having defied once again the Islamic State are shouting slogans for a democratic regime change in Iran.
Many have been injured or arrested and transferred by full buses to the regime's detention centers,
The presence of the regime's foreign mercenaries and their brutality is easily noticeable. The regime seems to try to isolate the demonstrators in each area and to avoid a bigger ralliement by more demonstrators who are trying to use the darkness of the night.
Many homes have shut off their lights and people are shouting slogans on their flat roofs.
UPDATE:Iranian Dissident Says Events of July, 1999 "Marked the Death of Reform" (VOA, July 8)
In Iran, repressed journalists regroup (Washington Post, July 4)In the country that the advocacy group Reporters Without Borders calls "the Middle East's largest prison for journalists,'' those dailies still available on newsstands brim with courtroom accounts of less fortunate publications, their editors summoned to the dock by the religious government that has closed more than 100 papers in the past four years.
And finally, here is a recent editorial discussing an issue crucial to the ultimate success of the Iranian freedom movement: Secularism & Iran (Persian Journal, July 6). I know nothing of the author, Ardavan Bahrami, but he makes some insightful observations and asks some very important questions:Secularism and democracy are like two sides of a brain. In order to have a fully functional body, both sides of the brain with their specific responsibilities are needed in order to achieve the desired being. Therefore, those who comically advocate baseless concepts such as the Islamic Democracy can never deliver the true freedom our people are fighting for when divine rules and restrictions would oversee every aspects of their daily life.
The question that eventually we have to face is are we going to adhere to principles that would declare Iran a country with no official religion; hence, no advantages given to an Iranian Muslim over those Iranians from other religions? I am talking of a society that goes further than pre-1979 where an Iranian Jew, Baha'i, Christian or a Zoroastrian can become our country's prime minister or in case of a republic, its president.
Prince Reza Pahlavi if not the only Iranian political leader believing in such principles, is definitely the only one who has been brave enough to publicly state his vision for a country with no official religion. He has defended the freedom of all political beliefs/parties, guaranteeing individual rights such as; regional languages and dialects, sexual orientations, religious beliefs as well as all social freedoms that many other progressive and democratic nations in the world enjoy or may take for granted.
However, he or any other Iranian politically active cannot and will not succeed if we as individual Iranian do not participate or take steps for our future. At times in meeting other compatriots I feel we are still blurred in our understanding of secularism or that of a true democracy. Do we really understand what it is all about? If we do, how far are we prepared to go in a free, democratic and secular Iran of the future to defend its principles? Will we make concessions every now and then and therefore, undermining the principles of secularism for religious beliefs of one or two religious public figures or groups?
Jul 6, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
Robert Tracinski presents a thought-provoking analysis with some excellent observations on the Democratic party.
On John Edwards, the happy populist, he writes:
Edwards eventually withdrew from the Democratic race--but the success he achieved, launching himself from relative obscurity to a prominent position on the national stage, indicates the nature of the choice Democratic voters made in this year's primary. The Democrats want a candidate who represents the morality of envy, hatred of achievement, worship of sacrifice—but they want a representative who will present that morality with an attractive, wholesome, appealing face. ["Fine Young Cannibals: How the Democratic Party Put a Nice Face on the Morality of Sacrifice", TIA, March 15, 2004]
On Howard Dean, the angry populist:
...Dean's message was the unabashed, unrestrained voice of what some conservative columnists have dubbed the "Angry Left." This phrase, promoted over the past year by conservative commentators like James Taranto, is a non-essential description: it designates the far left by its emotions, not by its ideas. But the term has caught on because it names a prominent characteristic of today's left. The leftist establishment, under the influence of the New Left, has dispensed with the pretense that it is a movement based on intellectualism—that it seeks "scientific socialism" based on a study of the inevitable trends of history (the terms in which the Marxist Old Left presented itself). This intellectualist left has largely been replaced by an emotionalist left. Sometimes this takes the form of maudlin emotional appeals to the plight of the poor and the sick-but the dominant emotions of today's left are anger and hatred. Dean was the voice of this leftist emotionalism. [TIA]
On the uniter of the two, John Kerry, and the reason for his consistent waffling:
There is a consistent theme that binds together Kerry's public statements and voting record. Waffling is not the essence of Kerry's career; instead, his dissembling is merely a smokescreen to keep voters from detecting the cause to which he has shown a lifelong ideological commitment: anti-Americanism....
...In Kerry's view, the American belief in the righteous use of force against evil--the sense of life represented by John Wayne--is the expression of a society twisted by hatred and the glorification of brutality, a society that had to be humbled by forcing an American surrender in Vietnam.
...John Kerry is the candidate who stands for American self-immolation on the altar of international collectivism.
What makes Kerry think he can get away with it? And what makes the Democrats who voted for him in this year's primaries think he is the most "electable" candidate? Kerry has known, ever since he returned from Vietnam, that he has one indispensable advantage he can exploit to keep the public from recognizing the meaning of his policies: his military service.
...Kerry is the candidate of American self-immolation, disguised as a war hero.
For the full article click here.
From Cox and Forkum:
Jul 5, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
The NYSun perpetuates Bertrand Russell's calumny against Aristotle, the original champion of empirical science, as having "a bewildering contempt for observation" in writing that men have more teeth than women ["Wake Me When It's Over," Adam Kirsch, June 23, 2004].
What Aristotle wrote was, "Males have more teeth than females in the case of men, sheep, goats, and swine; in the case of other animals observations have not yet been made..."
Now sheep, goats, pigs and humans (among others) all have varying numbers of teeth at different times of life. Furthermore, primitive societies are afflicted by tooth wear, dental disease and tooth loss, with women affected more than men, owing partly to the effects of pregnancy and lactation (especially if calcium is deficient).
When Aristotle counted Mrs. Aristotle's teeth, then, it is unlikely that he found the same number as in his own mouth.
As scholar William Ogle wrote in 1882,
"A very large proportion... of [Aristotle's] supposed mistakes have no other ground than the careless mode in which his writings have been studied.... [This is] the same man who had noted the heart beating in the embryonic chick... on the third day of incubation; who had distinguished the allantoidean development of birds and reptiles from the non-allantoidean development of fishes; who had unravelled with fair accuracy the arrangement of the bronchial tubes and their relation to the pulmonary blood-vessels; and who had not only given zoological and anatomical details concerning the cephalopods... but had described nine species of them 'with so much precision and happy a selection of their distinctive characters as to enable modern naturalists to identify pretty nearly all.'"
Were it not for Aristotle, we would still be living in the Dark Ages.
The magnitude of his achievement deserves our respect and homage.Jul 1, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
From the SF Chronicle:
Headlining an appearance with other Democratic women senators on behalf of Sen. Barbara Boxer, who is up for re-election this year, Hillary Clinton told several hundred supporters -- some of whom had ponied up as much as $10,000 to attend -- to expect to lose some of the tax cuts passed by President Bush if Democrats win the White House and control of Congress. "Many of you are well enough off that ... the tax cuts may have helped you," Sen. Clinton said. "We're saying that for America to get back on track, we're probably going to cut that short and not give it to you. We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good." [San Francisco rolls out the red carpet for the Clintons]
Makes you wonder what she thinks the "common good" consists of? Clearly the "common good" does not include the interests of those who work to pay taxes. [Hat Tip: N. White]
From Cox and Forkum:
Jul 1, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
Steyn on Moore:
Midway through the picture, a "peace" activist provides a perfect distillation of its argument. He recalls a conversation with an acquaintance, who observed, "bin Laden's a real asshole for killing all those people". "Yeah," says the "pacifist", "but he'll never be as big an asshole as Bush." That's who Michael Moore makes films for: those sophisticates who know that, no matter how many people bin Laden kills, in the assholian stakes he'll always come a distant second to Bush.
I can understand the point of being Michael Moore: there's a lot of money in it. What's harder to figure out is the point of being a devoted follower of Michael Moore. Apparently, the sophisticated, cynical intellectual class is so naïve it'll fall for any old hooey peddled by a preening opportunist burlesque act.
Jun 30, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
From Cox and Forkum:
