Posts Tagged ‘Iran’
Friday, May 7th, 2010
7/5/10
It takes a brave man to stand up to Iran’s state media and tell them to stop broadcasting his songs. But Mohammad Reza Shajarian – Iran’s beloved and acclaimed Persian classical musician – did just that following last year’s disputed presidential elections. After President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was re-elected amid allegations of voting fraud, he referred to protesters as ”dust and dirt”. Shajarian then described himself as the voice of dust and dirt, and declared he would not allow state-controlled radio and television to play his music. Eventually, they stopped. Ahmadinejad was back in the spotlight this week with his defiant address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York. His denials about the illicit nature of Iran’s nuclear ambitions prompted a walkout by a number of delegates, including the US representative. Iran matters hugely to the future peace and stability of the world, yet here in Australia we know very little about this Muslim nation, which is why it’s worth listening to this 69-year-old Iranian musician, who is touring Australia for the first time. He offers a timely and revealing insight into the thinking of Iran’s population
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Tags: Arms, Iran, UN, USA
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Monday, May 3rd, 2010
3/5/10; (2 Items)
European attacks on the right of Muslim women to wear veils were discriminatory, declared the US daily. “The anti-burka cause is sweeping Europe. In addition to Belgium and France, Italy and The Netherlands are considering bans. Yet the targets of these measures are virtually nonexistent.” Only a couple of hundred women in Belgium wear a full veil, while in France there are as few as 1900 burka-wearers in a Muslim population of five million. “The idea that this poses a criminal or cultural threat is ludicrous. Those who say they are defending women’s rights have it exactly backward: they are violating fundamental rights to free expression and religious freedom. They are also exacerbating the very problem they say they are worried about. Muslims, including the devoutly religious, are in Europe to stay. Banning their customs, their clothing or their places of worship will not make them more European. It will only make Europe less free.”
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Tags: Europe, Iran, Religion
Posted in Asia, Australia, Gender & Marriage, Human Rights, Religion, Womens Rights | No Comments »
Monday, February 22nd, 2010
Paul Maley; 22/2/10
MansourLeghaei, the Iranian cleric twice declared a security threat by ASIO, has been given 28 days to leave the country after an immigration appeals tribunal rejected his final application to remain in Australia. For more than a decade, Dr Leghaei has been contesting in the courts two adverse security assessments issued by ASIO, which it is understood believes the cleric is an Iranian operative. Dr Leghaei’s battle to remain in Australia has won high-profile backing, with Attorney-General Robert McClelland writing two character references for the Sydney-based sheik, one of which challenged ASIO’s findings. But on Friday, the Migration Review Tribunal upheld a decision by the Immigration Department denying the sheik a residency visa. As a result, the department has cancelled Dr Leghaei’s bridging visa, giving him 28 days to leave.
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Tags: Australia, Iran, Terrorism
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Monday, January 4th, 2010
Adam Sage; 4/1/10
As the protesters lay blindfolded in an Iranian paramilitary van, blows rained down on them. One, however, was singled out for particular punishment. Afshin Ghaffarian’s identity papers described him as an actor, a profession that was not to the liking of the Basij militia commander in charge of the operation. “If you’re an artist we’ll beat you artistically,” he said. What the commander did not know, and it would have sealed the 23-year-old’s fate if he had found out, was that acting was a cover. Ghaffarian is a dancer, and dancing is an activity banned by Iran’s Islamic rulers, punishable by long prison terms. “If he had known that he would have beaten me even harder,” Ghaffarian says. He recounted the incident that could have cost him his freedom, and perhaps his life, in an interview in Paris. His story illustrates the oppression under Iran’s regime, but also the courage and ingenuity of those opposing it. As a student in Tehran he would spend hours on his computer looking for videos of the West’s greatest contemporary dancers, such as the American Merce Cunningham, who died last year. “I had to do it because this was my inspiration, my ignition. I just wanted to explore new ways of expression and this was my only source of information,” he says.
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Tags: Human Rights, Iran
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Friday, December 11th, 2009
11/13/09
Human rights violations in Iran are as bad as at any point in the last 20 years, Amnesty International, the human rights group, has said. Amnesty’s report, released on Thursday, examines allegations of torture, rape, death threats, forced confessions, intimidation, cover-ups and unlawful killings in the period after the country’s disputed presidential election in June. The rights group called on Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, to allow United Nations human rights experts to visit the country to help carry out an investigation. Official inquiries to date “seemed to have been more concerned with covering up abuses than getting at the truth”, the report said. Iran has dismissed previous criticism of its human rights record.
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Tags: Human Rights, Iran
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Friday, November 27th, 2009
Rowan Callick; 27/11/09
Twemty-five Solomon Islands students will fly to Cuba next week to train as doctors, accompanied by two health officials, thanks to about $107,000 paid by the Iran government for their travel costs. The money was transmitted earlier this month by the Iranian embassy in Canberra via the ANZ Bank branch in Honiara, the Solomons capital. But ANZ, which acts as the Solomon Islands government’s bank, sent it back, said a bank spokesman, “as part of ANZ’s economic and trade sanctions policy”, which prevents remittances or transactions involving Iran, Sudan, Syria, North Korea, Burma or Cuba.The standoff was resolved by the Iranian embassy giving the Solomons high commission in Canberra the aid directly, enabling the latter to use it to pay in Australia for the students’ travel.
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Tags: Cuba, health, Iran, Solomon Islands
Posted in Health & Children, Human Rights, Solomon Islands | No Comments »
Friday, November 6th, 2009
6/11/09
United Nations inspectors found “nothing to be worried about” in a first look at a previously secret uranium enrichment site in Iran last month, the International Atomic Energy chief said in remarks released Thursday. Mohammed ElBaradei also told the New York Times that he was examining possible compromises to unblock a draft nuclear cooperation deal between Iran and three major powers that has floundered over Iranian objections. The nuclear site, which Iran revealed in September three years after diplomats said Western spies first detected it, added to Western fears of covert Iranian efforts to develop atom bombs. Iran says it is enriching uranium only for electricity. ElBaradei was quoted in a New York Times interview as saying his inspectors’ initial findings at the fortified site beneath a desert mountain near the Shi’ite holy city of Qom were “nothing to be worried about.”
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Tags: Iran, Israel, Nuclear, UN, USA
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Wednesday, October 21st, 2009
21/10/09
Iran will never abandon its “legal and obvious” right to nuclear technology and will not curb uranium enrichment, Manouchehr Mottaki, the country’s foreign minister, has said. His statement was issued on Tuesday amid talks in Vienna that major powers hopes will lead to restraints on Iran’s atomic programme. Iran won a reprieve from harsher UN sanctions by agreeing in principle at a high-level meeting in Geneva on October 1 to send low-enriched uranium (LEU) to France and Russia for further enrichment into fuel for a reactor that makes cancer-care isotopes.
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Tags: Iran, Israel, UN, USA, War
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Friday, October 16th, 2009
16/11/09
U.S. spy agencies are considering whether to rewrite a controversial 2007 intelligence report that asserted Tehran halted its efforts to build nuclear weapons in 2003, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. The possible reassessment comes as pressure is mounting from Congress and among U.S. allies for the Obama administration to redo the 2007 assessment, after last month’s revelation of a second uranium enrichment plant in Iran. German, French and British intelligence agencies have all disputed the conclusions of the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, or NIE, in recent months, the Journal said, citing European officials briefed on the exchanges. The report reversed earlier findings that Iran was pursuing a nuclear-weapons program. It found with “high confidence” that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003, and with “moderate confidence” that it hadn’t been restarted as of mid-2007.
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Tags: Arms, Iran, Israel, USA
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Sunday, October 11th, 2009
11/10/09
An Iranian man was hanged today by the parents of his victim whom he murdered when he was a minor, the official IRNA news agency said. Behnoud Shojaie had been convicted of stabbing to death 17-year-old Ehsan Nasrollahi during a fight in August 2005 when he himself was aged 17, IRNA reported. Shojaie was hanged by the victim’s parents in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison, the agency said. Former Iran judiciary chief Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi had agreed in June last year to suspend Shojaie’s death sentence to give the victim’s family a chance to pardon him under Islamic sharia law.
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Tags: Capital Punishment, Iran
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Saturday, October 10th, 2009
Akiva Eldar; 10/10/09
Since I last saw him, a bit more than two years ago, streaks of gray have appeared in the hair of the 48-year-old Jordanian king. Fifteen years ago, on October 26, 1994, Abdullah II’s father and Yitzhak Rabin co-signed a peace treaty, and King Hussein spoke of the fine period the neighborhood was about to enter. Today, Jerusalem, the apple of the eye of the Hashemite dynasty (the peace agreement assigns Jordan a “role” in the eastern part of the city), is about to go up in flames; Mahmoud Abbas, the man who was supposed to extricate Jordan and Egypt from the un-splendid isolation of Arab recognition of Israel, played the Goldstone report like a rookie; Hamas is celebrating Israel’s release of 20 female Palestinian prisoners; Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is breaking records in the opinion polls; and President Barack Obama is promising more than he is delivering. For a long while, the “Jordan is Palestine” formula – of which many Israelis, notably Ariel Sharon, were fond – rattled the royal house. In recent years, only right-wing Israeli fringes continue to espouse the idea.
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Tags: Arms, Iran, Israel, USA
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Thursday, October 8th, 2009
8/11/09
In her seminal work Homefront: A Military City and the American 20th Century, the renowned Brown University anthropologist Catherine Lutz illustrated how the United States and its people have become socially, culturally, economically, politically and psychologically, a “society made by war and preparations for war.” Extremist pundits who adhere to this paradigm point to Iraq as a model of success, opining that the surge produced results, although calibrated redeployments to secure bases were probably the chief reason for reduced casualties. Few recall the million plus dead so far or spotlight their graves as a measure of success. Against this egregious contemporary record, many are now calling on President Barack Obama to rekindle the war for Afghanistan, by increasing the total number of troops in that hapless country. Others are far more sanguine, telegraphing a future confrontation with Iran as an inescapable obligation, in what can only be ascribed as a rabid frenzy for a bloodbath. Is war with Iran thus inevitable?
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Tags: Iran, Terrorism, USA
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Thursday, October 8th, 2009
Shirin Ebadi; 8/11/09; The Australian, No Internet Text
No one is more driven to secure democracy for Iran than its women, writes Shirin Ebadi in The Guardian. “Iran today is a country where women are more educated than their male compatriots … Even the present parliament, which is monopolised by hardliners, has 13 women members.” Yet the Islamic Republic has passed laws that repress women.
“A man may marry up to four wives and divorce them whenever he desires … The life of women is worth half of the man’s life in terms of blood money. During a trial, a declaration by a man is worth twice that of a woman … Should the health minister wish to attend a meeting of the World Health Organisation, she must receive her husband’s assent”
Many campaigners against the laws have been prosecuted, but this has not subdued them. “Following the June presidential elections, women of all ages took part in demonstrations against the official results. Armed forces shot dead a young woman, Neda Soltan. She has now become a symbol of the Iranian demand for democracy. Women are at the forefront of this struggle, well aware that they will obtain equality only within a truly democratic political order.”
Tags: Iran, Women
Posted in Asia, Gender & Marriage, Human Rights, Womens Rights | No Comments »
Saturday, October 3rd, 2009
John Lyons; 3/10/09
Something extraordinary is happening in Israel’s approach to Iran, its most bitter enemy: silence. Over the past year, it was almost impossible to hear an Israeli politician speak without Iran being mentioned. It has been Israel’s main message to the world – Iran is a threat to our existence from the moment it gains a nuclear weapon. Now, since the beginning of this week, try getting an Israeli politician or official to say the word “Iran” – journalists who call Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs for comments about the developments in Tehran’s nuclear program will be met with a firm “no comment”. So what’s happened?
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Tags: Arms, Iran, Israel, USA
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Tuesday, September 29th, 2009
The Sydney Morning Herald; 29/9/09; Letters
Given the UN’s determination to have a world free of nuclear weapons, when will Israel admit it has an arsenal of them and take steps to get rid of it (“Iran heightens nuclear tension with missile tests”, September 28)? How would it react to talk of a strike on its stockpile in the interest of world peace? Brian Haill; Frankston (Vic)
Tags: Iran, Israel, Nuclear
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Saturday, September 26th, 2009
Yossi Melman, 26/9/09
The United States has known for years of the existence of a secret Iranian nuclear enrichment facility, a senior U.S. official stated Friday. The official stated that the facility is well-hidden and well-defended and that Iranian officials admitted to building the facility after they discovered that its existence was known. The U.S. source said that Iran discovered that U.S. intelligence had compiled a dossier on the facility and the Islamic Republic then sent a letter to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) disclosing the existence of the facility.
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Tags: Iran, Nuclear, USA
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