Iran & The Middle East

The international experts who were appointed to investigated cases of human rights violations, torture, and purges of Shia employees from government ministries and hospitals have issued a 500-page report. The 500-page report by Mr Bassiouni’s commission outlines all of abuses during and after the protests. But most importantly, the report did not find any evidence of Iranian government’s involvement in provoking the protests. The Bahraini government has been screaming about Iran’s role in the civil disturbances, the report raises the question of why the Bahraini government officials have resorted to blaming Iran for the domestic protests that have rocked the country ? The Iranophobia politics of the Gulf countries is meant to distract their own population from their internal problems, and the Iranian government’s poor image marked by its intransigence on the Nuclear issue provides them with a no-cost strategy

Financial Times November 28, 2011 3:00 pm By Monovar Khalaj The first thing Shiva, a 39-year-old Iranian housewife, does every morning is check her mobile telephone. Rather than looking for messages from family or scanning news headlines, Shiva is looking for the latest satirical text messages on the Islamic Republic’s social, political and economic woes. She then forwards the short messages to relatives and friends, accessing a social network of mobile users which has expanded beyond internet networks such as Facebook and Twitter. “These satirical texts are passed on like the verses of a holy book,”Shiva says. “I quickly resend whatever I receive so that my family and friends can also have a laugh at our difficulties.” One of the latest revolves around an alleged banking scandal involving a missing $2.8bn, which has created a national uproar. At the same time, many Iranians believe that their government is wasting precious national assets by providing financial support to Le...

Nine months after a historical revolution in Egypt, millions of Egyptians went to the streets to vote for the Egyptian parliamentary elections. More than 4,000 candidates from 40 parties competed for the elections. Independent candidates were running for one-third of parliament's 498 seats, and two-thirds of seats were reserved for winning party lists. To make easier for the voters, "each candidate and party has a symbol to help people identify them on the ballot papers: a key, a butterfly, an apple, a mango, a knife, a fork, a screwdriver, a megaphone, an electric blender, a camera, a motorcycle, a car, a ship, a train, a firetruck, a light bulb, a chandelier, a lighthouse, a lantern, a sunflower, a gold bar, a basketball hoop, a football, a cactus, a guitar, a violin, a ruby." Wendell Steavenson's blog in the New Yorker is a great source of information. Although multiple rounds of voting will continue for weeks, everyone knows who is the winner: The Muslim B...

While the Obama administration and Congress are arguing over how to increase pressures on Iran, the factional battles within the ruling conservatives are pushing the country toward a major showdown between the clerics and anti-clerical technocratic forces who are determined to push out the clerics from the operational and institutional apparatus of the Islamic Republic. Unlike previous parliamentary elections, March 2012 parliamentary elections in Iran will have far reaching impact on the operations of the Islamic Republic, as well as its constitutional structures. Despite the fact that many experts predicted that the victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005 as an important transition that will finally consolidate the “organized chaos” structure of the Islamic Republic’s political system into a more homogenous system controlled by the conservatives, Ahmadinejad has been anything but a “unifier.” His relationship with his once conservative supporters, including the Supreme Leader who...

  Emile Nakhleh and Augustus R. Norton have written a very informative piece about the parliamentary elections in Egypt.    In   Islamists and democracy can mix ,  they remind us of Muslim Brotherhood's pragmatic postures in previous parliaments,  and how Western powers should not fear their participation in these elections.   Tom Friedman has a very good article on Syria,  and how important it is to have a democratic transition in that country.  It will be a disaster for Syria and  its neighbors if Syria explodes in a civil war. As he put,  so far we have had implosions in Libya, Tunsia, Egypt, and Yemen,  but in the case of Syria,  we may witness an explosion. In the Arab World, It’s the Past vs. the Future.