This blurb appeared in the New York Times Aug. 8: The authorities have banned a rights group founded in 2002 by a group of lawyers and led by Shirin Ebadi, the only Iranian to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. The… Read moreIran: Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi’s rights group banned
Our correspondent Mahmood Ketabchi writes for his Hammer & Broom blog: Thousands of women and male supporters came together on June 12 in Haft Tir Square in Tehran, Iran to protest against anti-women Islamic laws and gender apartheid. A similar… Read moreIran: women’s protest brutally attacked
Pretty bad times to be part of an ethnic or religious minority in Iran, it seems. From the New York Times, June 1: Members of the Bahai religious minority in Iran said this week that the government had recently intensified… Read moreIran: Bahais under attack
This one is really funny. The ultra-conservative hyper-interventionist Islamophobes at the oddly named Human Events managed to score an interview with Reza Pahlavi, son of the late Shah of Iran and pretender to the throne. But this self-promoting monarchist restorationist,… Read moreIran: monarchist pretender not reactionary enough for neocons!
Dubious reports circulate that a bill pending in Iran would force Jews and other religious minorties to wear identifying insignia—in an obvious echo of Nazi Germany. Predictably, the Iranian regime is calling the allegations a Jewish conspiracy. From the Financial… Read moreIran: badges for Jews? No, but veils for women is bad enough, thank you
The BBC reports today that price of oil is back up to over $70 a barrel following a drop of more than $1.50 following news yesterday that Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had written Bush a personal letter. This was initially… Read moreAhmadinejad letter signals escalation
Just as the PUK shows signs of losing control of its stronghold in northern Iraq, it launches attacks across the border in Iran—with doubtless US (and likely Israeli) assistance and direction. Iran, of course, replies by bombing Kurdish civilians, which… Read morePUK raids Iran; Tehran shells Kurds
He knows how to play to a heartland audience. It’s the Jews who are gonna make me sacrifice your sons on the killing fields of Iran. Never mind that Iran’s growing sway over the Baghdad regime poses a threat to… Read moreBush: I’ll attack Iran to “protect Israel”
An ominous sense of deja vu. The US invasion of Iraq and rift with France immediately preceded new oil deals between Saddam and the French giant Total. (Seee WW4 REPORT #56) Now, just as Bush is rattling the sabre and… Read moreFrench oil giant in talks with Iran
From Human Rights Watch, March 9: Iranian police and plainclothes agents yesterday charged a peaceful assembly of women’s rights activists in Tehran and beat hundreds of women and men who had gathered to commemorate International Women’s Day, Human Rights Watch… Read moreIran: police attack Women’s Day march; crackdown on Sufis
Pejman Akbarzadeh, a member of the Tehran chapter of Artists Without Frontiers and the author of a two-volume work on Persian music, writes in response to Melody Zagami’s review in our March issue of Nasrin Alavi’s book We Are Iran:… Read more“Farsi” or “Persian”?
Boy, things are really getting out of hand. Here’s how the European double standard on free speech paradoxically legitimizes and strengthens Holocaust revisionism. Europe defends Islamophobia in the name of freedom of expression, while denying that same freedom to the… Read morePoland blasts Tehran’s Holocaust “fact-finding” trip
