Well, this is just pathetic. Few things have angered me as much as watching this outrageous clip from Press TV.
It is the worst and most blatant propaganda I’ve seen for years. Exactly the kind of rubbish I’d expect from a station that is little more than a mouthpiece for Ahmadinijad’s murderous regime.
Ofcom has rules on due impartiality and that film is clearly anything but balanced. Arash Hejazi is, for example, given no opportunity to defend the various charges levelled against him. You can make a complaint to Ofcom here (apparently even if you’re not a UK resident).
Not much more I can say really, I’m just so angry at the way we’re allowing a hostile regime to broadcast its propaganda so freely in Britain.
The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood are having a hard time of late, much to the delight of their many political opponents inside Egypt. On Tuesday, 22nd December 2009, MB announced the results of the first elections held in 15 years to its leading Guidance Bureau. Unfortunately for the Brothers, the results of the election were strongly contested by leading elements within their own organisations. Even worse, these dissident Brothers have chosen to do their dirty washing in public.
The vote by the 100 member Shura Council of the Muslim Brotherhood pitted two powerful internal factions against one another for control of the organisation. One faction, made up of significantly younger leaders of MB, are keen to play down the hard-line, clerical fascist core policies of MB, instead wishing to promote the Brotherhood as a “moderate” political force wedded to notions of democracy and social reform. The other faction, made up of older, “conservative” MB leaders take a less media-friendly line, demanding that the Brotherhood remain overtly committed to its clerical fascist principles and to the assertion of Islamist theocracy.
The end is nigh for the Iranian regime. The pro-democracy Green Movement has shown itself to be equal to the Islamist regime’s use of extreme force, mass arrests, show trials, torture and rape in prisons with its ever-growing, relentless and peaceful campaign of civil disobedience.
Meanwhile the Baseej are defecting in numbers as shown in this video:
And in this picture:
Baseej Defector
The Green Movement is approaching a critical mass which presents a greater counter force than the government can possibly bear. Nor did the regime help itself by making a martyr of the nephew of the leading opposition leader. Juan Cole sees this adding insult to injury and more trouble ahead for the administration:
Earlier this week, The Iranian authorities arrested Majid Tavakoli, a student leader, who spoke at an anti-government rally in Tehran University, marking the Student Day in Iran. To humiliate him, the authorities published a picture of him wearing women’s headscarf, an old practice by the government to prove to the public that the opposition leaders are “less than men”, lacking courage and bravery.
This time around though, The anti-government movement responded quickly by posting pictures of hundreds of men wearing headscarf.
The protesters have found a new way to show their solidarity with Mr. Tavakoli — by changing their profile pictures to show them wearing similar clothes. Take a look at the video that they have released, it is remarkable:
Sudanese opposition groups, both Northern and Southern, vowed over the weekend to stage a mass demonstration at the Parliament on Monday, despite a last minute ban issued by the Sudanese regime.
Eyewitnesses reported thousands of heavily armed policemen took up positions in the capital from early Monday morning hours in an apparent bid to curb the protests.
The bulk of the parties which signed up to take part in the rally include those signatories to the Juba declaration last September in a conference hosted by the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM).
The parties are protesting the delay in passing crucial laws including the national security and referendum bill. A memorandum is set to be delivered to the national assembly.
Below are some photographs of the aftermath of that demonstration in which many peaceful demonstrators were beaten down by police using iron reinforcement rods. Amongst many arrested were the Secretary General of the SPLM, Pagun Amum, and his deputy in the North, Yasir Armun.
it has been brought to my attention by my esteemed colleagues here at the spittoon that one of the aims of the “one law for all” campaign, who are organising a rally on saturday 21 november, to “expose the discriminatory nature of religious law” and “put a stop to shari’a once and for all” because “opposing shari’a law is a crucial step in defending universal and equal rights”.
i will reiterate the reasons that i cannot support this:
1. what about jewish batei din and anglican ecclesiastical law?
some might consider this selfish, but shari’a courts must be allowed if the state is not to be guilty of severe double standards in respect of both jewish halakhah and christian canon law. although, obviously, some of the speakers (like the british humanist association and the national secular society) would argue that they would ban the lot and, indeed, maryam namazie herself says:
Back in December 2007, the Economist published ‘Guilty at Birth’, an article dealing with Jamaat-e-Islam’s stake in the elections (January 2008) in view of its legacy and culpability in war crimes that took place in the 1971 Bangladesh genocide. Soon after, the editor of the Economist received a letter before action from the representatives of the Jamaat’s leader Motiur Rahman Nizami, demanding the withdrawal of the article backed up by a threat to sue the magazine.
Soon after receiving the letter from Nizami, the Economist retracted the article from its online archives. So if you have a pass into the subscription-only Economist website, you are able to see that the article no longer exists at this address, as it previously did, and is instead replaced with this cryptic message:
“This article has been removed”
Luckily however, the journalist Saleem Samad, who runs the ‘Bangladesh Watchdog’ blog published the article in its entirety prior to it being pulled, which you can read here.
i don’t know about the rest of you, but i was an avid reader of the sandmonkey blog written in cairo and was extremely upset when he got hounded out of the country by the security forces – but hurrah! it seems that it didn’t take much time for him to get back on the camel (as it were) and continue to rile people all over the middle east with his witty, incisive and often mordant observations.
good luck to him, i say – he deserves our support. unfortunately, i believe the whereabouts of the courageous and farsighted iranian blogger hossein derakhshan still remain unknown. i wonder if we’ll ever see the guy again?
