The enemy is everywhere

Perhaps it was a victory after all, albeit a meager one, and yet, better than nothing…
Twenty-one of his twenty-four ministers (which, for the first time since 1979, included a woman, Marzieh Vahid-Dastjerdi, at the health ministry) were approved by the Iranian Parliament, the Majlis, last week.
Yet, what of Iranian president Ahmadinejad’s political influence? It is doubtful that it was enhanced in the process.
The Supreme Leader himself, Ayatollah Khamenei, had to step in to ensure the restive assembly would not repudiate even more presidential appointees.
The day before the vote, he informed parliamentarians that the leader of the revolution would like all proposed ministers to get votes of confidence.
The Supreme Leader clearly feared that anything short of a robust show of support for Ahmadinejad, following his fraudulent June election victory and the massive protests that followed, would further undermine confidence in, and cripple, the regime.
The fact, however, that three (but only three) ministers were repudiated, one for the energy post, and those offered the education and social security ministries, both women, was clearly meant to demonstrate that the mechanisms designed to check the power of the executive were alive and well and that the system was still viable, both Islamic and republican.
Ahmadinejad stacked the cabinet with loyalists, and particularly at two strategic posts, the security and oil ministries.
Controlling the latter is essential, for it provides the president with the financial means to support his core supporters and their related business activities, namely the security apparatus.
Yet, to rally the support of the Majlis, and, implicitly of the Iranian nation itself, Ahmadinejad claimed that the contempt and hostility the West evinced towards the Islamic Republic demanded but one reply: enemies made efforts to damage (the) national might of the dear Iran. I believe it deserves a crushing response from lawmakers in order to disappoint them, he told the legislators. The deputy chief of the Iranian armed forces, Muhammad Bagher-Zolghadr also urged the nation to beware: the enemy is everywhere, he admonished…
The efforts of the regime to intimidate the nation into supporting the current leadership continue.
A staunch Ahmedinejad ally, Kamran Daneshjoo, the official who engineered last June’s rigged election, was selected and approved as the new minister of higher education.
His mission is clear: purge the universities of all opposition supporters, and purify the curriculum in order to eradicate all foreign and alien content.
All that is deemed secular and thus blasphemous will be repudiated.
In a recent speech delivered to an audience of teachers and students, the Supreme Leader stated: many of the humanities and liberal arts are based on philosophies whose foundations are materialism and disbelief in godly and Islamic teachings…
Teaching these subjects leads to the loss of belief in godly and Islamic knowledge, he concluded.
The regime is afraid, afraid of its own students, of the Iranian nation’s youth…Unable to comprehend and respond to the aspirations of an entire new generation, puzzled and indignant at its demands for change, the regime has responded with a rigged election, and violent crackdown.
Now, it is about to further alienate them by severing the ties of the nation’s universities with the modern world, and modern ideas…
The president’s very own presidential advisor, Ayatollah Muhammad Tagi Mesbad Yazdi, the arch enemy of the reform movement, speaking at a gathering of new cabinet ministers, asserted that the Islamic Azad University of Tehran, with campuses around the nation (and that is, incidentally, administered by members of the Rasfanjani family, the most prominent member of which, Ali Akbar Hashemi Ransfanjani, a former president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, is a supporter of Mir Hussein Mousavi) this university must once again be purified. This purification must occur at the management level and other levels. You see just how many who do not believe in religion, Islam and God have attended and graduated from this university.
The universities had suffered a similar onslaught in 1979, following the revolution…
The regime is thus about to ban any idea that it considers incompatible with Islam.
For the conservatives, Western ideas have corrupted the youth of the nation. No longer is it capable of determining who are the genuine defenders of the nation and Islam, but has allowed itself to be hoodwinked by alien concepts peddled by those who are but the agents of hostile, nihilistic foreign powers.
Daunted by its own youth and its thirst for freedom and modernity, the regime is bent on punishing all those who dared to support Karroubi and Mousavi in last June’s election.
They and all those who participated in post-election demonstrations will be suspended, if not arrested, as in Mashad last week.
Concomitantly, the regime has intensified its campaign against the leaders of the opposition reform movement.
Tuesday, the security forces raided the office of Mehdi Karroubi, a confidant of the regime’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and a former parliament speaker. They arrested the director of his website, Mohammad Davari, and seized scores of documents. Karroubi has accused the regime of abusing and raping detainees in its prisons, and claims to have ample evidence to buttress his assertions. The accusations have visibly stung the authorities (whose legitimacy always rested on its Islamic, ethical roots), and they have vigorously denied them.
His daily newspaper had already been banned by the authorities several weeks ago.
Also on Tuesday, the offices of the Association for the Defense of Prisoners’ Rights were closed, and that evening, a top Mousavi aide, Alireza Hosseini-Behesti (son of Ayatollah Mohammed Beheshti, one of the founders of the Islamic Republic) , was arrested. He chaired a committee investigating the abuse of prisoners taken into custody during the post-election turmoil.
A day earlier, another Mousavi aid was taken into custody. He had angered the government by stating that 72 and not 30 (the official figure) demonstrators were killed by the security forces in the post-election unrest.
Is the regime confiscating (and thus destroying) all the evidence of its misdeeds that it can find, and striving to intimidate any other potential muckrakers?
The opposition leaders, however, remained determined.
Mehdi Karroubi vowed to pursue his political activities come what may: I won't go underground, he told The Los Angeles Times. I act publicly and openly. Even if I am arrested and jailed and released, I will go back to open activities…I feel I am obliged to defend the rights of people. I want it to be remembered in the future by coming generations that somebody someday from the clerical establishment stood up for his stances and principles to defend the people.
Though he is openly defying the Iranian president, and the Supreme Leader, the very incarnation of the 1979 Revolution, he has no intention of attempting to overthrow the regime: political changes can come in two forms. The change we are calling for is change within the system and constitution, the observation of citizenship rights.
Mir-Hussein Mousavi shares this approach, the quest to fulfill the regime’s true potential, the conciliation of the nation’s Islamic heritage with modern democratic rights. If he is also campaigning against the conservative forces dominating all the branches of government, it is because they have betrayed the spirit of the 1979 Revolution, which first and foremost, overthrew a tyrannical regime, and then reconciled the nation with its Islamic roots: we want to maintain the Islamic republic and its system, we want social calm, we are against any violence and radicalism - but we also believe that these can only be made possible through respecting people's will and implementing the constitution, he wrote on his website last Saturday…Islam is frequently referred to but seldom followed. He thus accused the current leaders of the country of being hypocrites. These advocates of non-violent resistance within the existing framework believe the republic can only become truly Islamic if it respects the rights of the Iranian people.
Other opponents of the regime have responded more virulently to the crackdown.
On Sunday, former president Khatami declared: we are against those who, in the name of opposing Western liberalism, are trying to force people down their own preferred path with fascist methods and totalitarian ideas. I warn all the system's supporters to rebuild public trust before all chances are completely lost.
He clearly has lost faith in the country’s leaders, and their ability and willingness to respect the tenets of the Islamic Republic. The survival of the current system is therefore at stake in the current confrontation.
Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, a perennial rival and opponent of the Supreme Leader who was sentenced to five years of house arrest in 1997 for having publicly called into question the latter’s qualifications to occupy such an august function, has not hesitated to attack the very foundations of the regime.
His harsh and acerbic criticism of the Islamic Republic’s shortcomings had already provoked a severing of relations with the Republic’s founder Khomeini, whom he was suppose to succeed. Instead, the establishment preferred the innocuous and bland Khamenei...

The biggest oppression ... is despotic treatment of the people in the name of Islam, Montazeri wrote on his website last month. I hope the responsible authorities give up the deviant path they are pursuing and restore the trampled rights of the people…I hope authorities ... have the courage to announce that this ruling system is neither a republic nor Islamic and that nobody has the right to express opinion or criticism.
It remains to be seen whether he truly believes that a system calling itself the Islamic Republic is even feasible.
Is it? That is indeed a legitimate and relevant question…
Hence, as the universities are about to reopen for the Fall term, on September 23rd, the regime, as we have seen, is clearly uneasy, and intent on doing its utmost to intimidate all those seeking to revive the post-election agitation, and prevent large gatherings from occurring.
An annual religious event, which was to have taken place between September 9th and 11th at the Imam Khomeini shrine was cancelled, for the first time in twenty years.
Khatami had been slated to appear, and his presence would undoubtedly have drawn significant crowds .
Yet, opportunities to mobilize the regime’s opponents abound, first and foremost by hijacking official events, such as Qud’s Day, on September 18th .
An official demonstration, it is designed to mobilize all Iranians against Israel and its policies.
Karroubi has asked all his supporters to attend: on Quds Day you will once again see the power of the people and realize which side the people support.
Though the regime refuses to yield and make any concessions, it has not yet chosen to cross the Rubicon…
And yet, the regime cannot simultaneously arrest and prosecute prominent members of the opposition and its supporters, and allow the leaders of the reform movement to go about their business, without appearing weak and incoherent.
Ahmadinejad and the Supreme Leader have not yet dared take the fateful step of arresting them…
Such a drastic move may be inevitable, as no other measures have succeeded in cowing MM Khatami, Karroubi and Mousavi.
It remains to be seen whether the Iranian people would tolerate such a brazen act…

(the photograph on top: from left to right, Mir-Hussein Mousavi, Mehdi Karroubi and Mohammad Khatami)