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October 8, 2006 7:34 PM
The Mullahs' Massacre on the Road to Qom
News filtered out of Iran this Sunday of demonstrations protesting the arrest of supporters of Ayatollah Mohammad Kazemeini Boroujerdi, an Iranian cleric fighting against the “Political Religion” that has dominated his country since Khomeini. Rumors also spread that these demonstrations have become violent with fatalities reported. This is when Pajamas Media turns to the American who is more associated with the Iranian freedom movement than any we can think of … Michael Ledeen… for an inside report: by Michael Ledeen (updated at bottom) The news has finally caught up with the ongoing saga of the Ayatollah Hossein Kazemeini Boroujerdi, who has been challenging the legitimacy of the Iranian mullahcracy for many years. Both he and his father–who died 4 years ago, and whose grave has been desecrated–refused to embrace the Khomeinist doctrine that only a Shi’ite sage was fit to govern the Islamic Republic. The Boroujerdis retained the traditional Shi’ite view–the one famously held by Ayatollah Sistani in Iraq–that clerics should stay out of government and tend to their flock. Anyone who acts against the most fundamental doctrine of the Iranian clerical fascist state is going to have a lot of trouble, and Ayatollah Boroujerdi has had plenty of it. He has been in and out of prison, and repeatedly in front of the Special Court for the Clergy, since 1994. According to Amnesty International, “he has reportedly developed heart and kidney problems as a result of torture.” His latest round of defiance seems to have started in late June, when he preached to a large crowd in a Tehran sports stadium. A month later, on July 30th, the secret police came to his house, apparently to arrest him. But they found that he was protected by scores of supporters, so they arrested some of them instead. According to Amnesty, one of them had a heart attack and was moved to a nearby hospital. And another said that he was arrested at his home and dragged off to three weeks of solitary confinement and daily threats. They tried again on August 3rd, and were again driven off by his defenders. A month later, Boroujerdi was visited by a government agent, and a tape recording of that conversation has been smuggled out of Iran. It was made available to me by Banafsheh Zand Bonazzi, a leading Iranian-American activist who lives in New York City. The security agent told the Ayatollah that he, too, was a religious man, having attended a seminary after the revolution. He says that his visit is a kind of courtesy call, offering Boroujerdi the chance to surrender in a civilized way and then face trial. There is no escape possible, he says, for one way or another Boroujerdi will face charges of insulting the government and the clerisy, and perhaps even having been an accomplice to murder. Boroujerdi will have none of this. He says that he has already prepared himself for martyrdom (and indeed when he was arrested on Sunday, he was wearing a funeral shroud). He tells the agent that he has already suffered a heart attack, and that he will now contact the foreign press. This enrages the agent, who warns Boroujerdi that no place will be safe for him, even the mosque. He brags that Boroujerdi’s father was murdered, and says that he doesn’t give a damn about the foreign press, which he calls meaningless. Boroujerdi did indeed contact the media, but you may have noticed there wasn’t much coverage until the past few days. Amnesty’s press release was dated October 3rd, and there was little coverage of it. He also wrote to such world leaders as Kofi Annan and Javier Solana, to their apparent indifference. The secret police came again for Boroujerdi on the morning of September 28th, again found he was defended, and again dragged off many of his supporters. In its press release five days later, Amnesty demonstrated its celebrated droll sense of humor, writing that “there are fears that the Ayatollah may be at risk of imminent arrest.” But at least they wrote. Boroujerdi was dragged off to his destiny on Sunday, in a dramatic confrontation that involved thousands of demonstrators, some in Tehran, and some on the road to Qom, where many of the country’s most prestigious religious schools and scholars are located. The official news media reported that more than two hundred supporters were arrested at the house in Tehran, but this is the least of it. Two Iranian friends in Europe, and one in the United States, have received reports that speak of more than seven hundred people murdered on the road to Qom. If that, or anything approaching it, is true, it testifies to two important facts. The first is the truly vicious and totalitarian nature of this regime, which will stop at nothing to silence any sign of criticism from the Iranian people. Somebody should tell Richard Armitage about this, since he has yet to announce any second thoughts about his infamous claim that Iran is “a kind of democracy.” The second fact is widely, in fact compulsively, denied by a plethora of self-proclaimed experts on Iran. And that is the bravery of Iranians who wish to be free to practice their religion and politics as they see fit, rather than as their tyrants insist. Thousands of people stood up to the regime’s killers, in defense of a solitary mullah whose crime was to preach traditional Shi’ite values. That’s a major event, especially because Islam is not very popular these days in Iran. Just a couple of months ago an Iranian ayatollah told me that it was not unusual to find the central mosque in major cities like Shiraz and Tabriz virtually empty for Friday prayers. He said that a grand total of five people had shown up in Tabriz one Friday. I doubt most of those poor souls were protecting Boroujerdi out of religious conviction. I think most of them were using his protest to challenge the regime for political reasons, because they wish to be free. There are tens of millions of these people, awaiting their moment and searching for their leaders. If thousands risked their lives for an unpopular cause simply because it was a way to stick their thumbs in the mullahs’ eyes, imagine how many would take similar risks if they received the political support we have been promising, but failing to deliver, for so many years now. UPDATE: I am now being told that the death figure is way too high, as I rather expected, and the most recent details also confirm my suspicion that a lot of the demonstrators—of whom there were indeed many thousands, both in Tehran and on the road to Qom—were not just defending a popular Ayatollah. Most of the people on the highway were protesting the skyrocketing inflation that has taken place under Ahmadi-Nezhad. The regular security forces (revolutionary guards) were unable to clear the road, since people from various town joined the original protest. There was a very violent confrontation when RG special units were called in. Hundreds were arrested, many are hospitalized, including five RGs, who are in critical condition. I’ll have more accurate death figures in another day or two, but I wanted to make this correction quickly. Michael Ledeen - the historian and Freedom Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute - writes frequently for Pajamas Media’s Politics Central. ——— Comments (3)Prof. Dr. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis :Dick Salemink, Netherlands :Eagerly we await the day when angry mobs will besiege the abodes of Kofi Annan and Solana, chanting "you don't represent us". But seriously, the cause of the freedom of the Iranian people seems hopeless without some kind of military intervention. Larry :In '66 or '67 I shared my closest brush with death in 22 years, 5200 hours of flying, including 200+ combat missions, with an Iranian exchange student pilot named Muhammed Boroujerdi! I guess he'd be in his 60's now. Can't find a bio on the dude in the news to determine if it's the same guy, but wow, what a memory! Comments have been archived for this page. |
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33 Points for US Victory or Defeat in Iraq
(first published in: http://www.buzzle.com/articles/points-us-victory-defeat-i raq.html)
What is at stake in Iraq today is the continuity of 6000 years of Human Civilization, which is being challenged by the most elaborate barbaric and Satanic threat the Mankind has ever faced: the impending appearance of a bogus-messianic leader of 1.2 billion ignorant and misled Muslims must be averted at once.
636 days have passed!
Before precisely 636 days, I warned – in an article first published in Buzzle (http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/1-10-2005-63962.asp) and then quoted and/or republished in various portals and fora – that the US were left with no choice in Iraq, but to accept millennia long realities, reject colonial standpoints (subtly supported by the phenomenally opposed French and British Iraq policies) and implement in Mesopotamia the very American, anti-colonial, principles of the Founding Fathers. In that article, I did warn – at a moment no one commentator had – about the real outcome of the ongoing, seemingly local, conflict: the messianic arrival of a bogus Mahdi to lead 1.2 Muslims to world supremacy.
America will not have another chance after 624 days!
Many things have changed meanwhile; Somalia is being lost and for those with an insightful the Horn of Africa is not just another place on this planet.
Iran attempts to mount a nuclear threat against Israel, and will use the first bomb it creates on the spur of the moment.
Disoriented and disunited Europe, misguided by the demented colonial powers, France and England, is about to commit intellectual and corporeal suicide.
Turkey – the key country par excellence – is left to deviate to the bogus-Islamic paranoia, and its brave military authorities are discouraged from doing what it takes to rid the pivotal country of the Erdogan pestilence.
Meanwhile, presidential and royal dictators between the Atlantic and the Pacific are gullibly believed as friends of America, the West in its entirety, or the Civilized World; they are therefore naively left to pursue their murderous work of preparing hundreds of millions to go for a war wherever the fake Mahdi of their Satanic sheikhs will indicate as best place for them to die (as they have been left without any interest for life – so miserable and filthy is their surrounding world of slums).
And every Friday hundreds of thousands of Satanic puppets, idiotically believed to be sheikhs and disreputably though to be relevant to Islam, emit their mental and intellectual pollution that takes the verbal form of Khutbas (prayer sermons) of unprecedented Hatred and vociferous odium; they discharge such volumes of anti-human malignancy that is incomparably denser and heavier than all the negative feelings expressed throughout the entire History of the Mankind.
So low has therefore the Mankind fallen?
What Demon chases the Human Race with such Perseverance and such Passion?
The only power left able to oppose this disastrous disintegration is America.
America has to break Sudan down, liberate Darfur and all the enslaved parts of the vast African country.
America must bring forth Freedom, Democracy and Independence for the sake of the peaceful Berbers of Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco.
America must lacerate Abyssinia, the East African cemetery of peoples that is erroneously called ‘Ethiopia’; the Khammitic Oromos must rise to national supremacy and to major regional leadership in the Horn of Africa area, before fanaticized Abyssinian Muslims, exacerbated by the criminal Amhara monophysitic empathy, are led to join forces with the Mogadiscio Mahdist thugs.
America must dethrone the Syrian murderous dictator, and
America must nuke three sites in Iran, tear down the Ayatullah oligarchy, and ultimately split this vast circumference to eight countries, namely
1) Baluchistan (to be united with the Pakistani controlled part of that land),
2) Azerbaijan (to be united with the already independent part of the Azeri fatherland),
3) Kurdistan (to be united with the Iraqi Kurdistan and annexed to Turkey),
4) Lorestan,
5) Bakhtiaristan (in a possible confederation with the previous),
6) Turkestan (there are no less than 7 million Turkic speaking people in Iran – Azeris excluded),
7) Khuzestan (where all the Aramaean Christian populations of Iran will be re-collected), and
8) Persia (the Farsi speaking nucleus of the Ayatullah ruled country), where the son of the former Shah must solemnly be re-established in his throne to guarantee the rights of religious minorities, the Zoroastrians and the Armenians.
However, before all that, America must put a dead end to the ongoing and ostensibly deteriorating Civil War in Iraq. It is very clear that America has just some months to finish up this story.
It is not "a war that has claimed the lives of more than 2,700 US soldiers and which even optimists say is "drifting sideways" is causing severe collateral political damage" as the leading article of the Times has put it today (in: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2088-2393698,00.h tml). It is the beginning or the end of all.
What comes next are measures that America must take immediately in Iraq. These 33 points are not a guarantee for Success; they are also a promise for failure – if one point is not implemented the rest will not help much.
33 Points for Life or Death in the Mesopotamia and the World
1. Immediate acknowledgement of earlier mistakes and misconceptions of colonial origin as the reason for the ongoing civil war.
2. Dissolution of all elected bodies and removal of all elected administrators under the pretext of their proven failure to avert the ongoing civil war.
3. Immediate closure of all foreign embassies and representations.
4. All foreign companies and NGOs present in the area are placed under provisory American authority. No French are allowed to enter the country under any circumstances whatsoever.
5. Iraq as name and as country is declared as permanently abolished and non existent.
6. Aram Nahrain – Mesopotamia is introduced as definite name of the area that was under British mandate. The Aramaic identity of the country is solemnly declared, and all Arameans (either they call themselves Aramaeans, Syriacs, Chaldaeans, Assyrians, Mandaeans) who fell victims of policies of oppression since the end of the 19th century are solemnly invited to return, be given property, adequate recompense, and full right to run the administration of the country.
7. Aram Nahrain – Mesopotamia is by definition a non Arabic country, and therefore occupies no seat in the under demolition Arab League.
8. Aram Nahrain – Mesopotamia is identified as the country of the following ethnic and religious groups:
a. Christian Aramaeans (of all Christian denominations)
b. Mandaean Aramaeans
c. Muslim Turkmens
d. Muslim Kurds (of all Islamic denominations)
e. Yazidi Kurds
f. Mesopotamian Jews, and
g. all other minor religious and ethnic entities (Ahl-e Haq, Armenians, etc)
9. A constitutional act is introduced to specify that 60% of the country’s income goes to groups a and b, 15% to group c, 5% to groups f and g, and 20% to groups d and e.
10. Syriac-Aramaic, Turkmen, Turkish and Kurdish (Bahdinani and Sorani) will be immediately promoted to the level of official languages of Aram Nahrain. Among all, Syriac-Aramaic will be the main, preponderant language, compulsory for all in the Primary and Secondary Education.
11. With respect to non-Kurdish, non-Turkmen, Muslim populations, their identity of Aramaeans will be solemnly declared. The Shia Muslims will be immediately offered the possibility to learn Syriac Aramaic and to use it in the daily life and their contacts / participation in the administration.
12. With the exception of groups c, d and e, fluency in Syriac-Aramaic will be the condition sine qua non for working in the government and the private sector. Special schools and institutes will therefore be organized as matter of utmost urgency (involving intensive courses, and language sufficiency within 9 months)
13. First to delineate will be the territories for the Kurds, and the Turkmens. Border lines will be demarcated for the different constituencies, and populations will be transferred where they should in order to be completely separated. (In this regard, see: A Map for Aram Nahrain / Mesopotamia: the Key to Peace in Iraq / http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/1-16-2005-64338.asp)
14. Parts of Aram Nahrain – Mesopotamia will left for populations under special treatment and formation.
15. The Kurdish Region will be delineated at the East of Tigris river, from the Turkish border down to the Little Zab estuary to Tigris, then the demarcation line will follow that affluent river’s flow up to the middle of the distance between Kirkuk and Qalat Dizah, and from that point it will go straight down to Khanekin until reaching the Iranian border.
16. The Turkmen Region will be demarcated between the Kurdish line in the North (Little Zab flow) and the East, the Dicle (Tigris) flow in the West, and the demarcation line will follow Tigris and Diyala until the points from where the two rivers start a parallel flow towards the south.
17. As already mentioned in point 14, an area for populations under special treatment and formation will be delineated in the triangle between Khanekin, Baghdad and Kut. All the Arabic speaking populations will be transferred there to live in settlements and be sheltered in tents. As understood, the entire area of the ‘classical’ Sunni triangle, Ramadi – Tikrit – Baghdad (including Falluja) will have to be evacuated by its the Sunni population, and given to Aramaeans.
18. It will solemnly announced to the transferable Sunnis that they stand accused and face serious charges for
a. having wholeheartedly supported Saddam Hussein’ s totalitarian and antihuman rule for decades, and
b. having sabotaged America’s efforts to pacify post-Saddam Aram Nahrain – Mesopotamia. They are therefore charged with high treason, condemned to forced works for 3 years, and complete deprivation of civil rights; their properties to the most minute objects are confiscated irreversibly. In the settlements were they will be transported, the Sunni family cells will be broken and no contacts will be allowed.
19. Their only chance to obtain civil status (at the end of the 3-year period) and be integrated in the under construction New Era of Aramaic Mesopotamia will hinge on their ability to forget their past, learn Aramaic, ad develop a new understanding of their religion, Islam; for this purpose, a great part of care will be displayed by the provisory administration, involving courses given by liberal Muslims, translation of the Coran into Syriac Aramaic, etc. Only then, they will have right to property and free work, and they will have the possibility to form a new entity to count in the socio-economic and political realities of Aram Nahrain – Mesopotamia: the Sunni Muslim Aramaeans.
20. In the aforementioned area for Sunni populations under special treatment and formation, there will be no space for prisons. Lack of cooperation, disobedience, and any act of obstruction will mean immediate execution.
21. The Aramaic Region will be delineated at the West of Tigris, from the Turkish border down to the northern suburbs of Baghdad, and then the demarcation line will leave the greater Baghdad area in the east, and will continue down the Tigris river until almost the middle of the distance between Baghdad and Al Kut. From that point it will turn towards the West, will encompass Hillah and Hindiyah, will leave Karbala in the south, and will continue until the Saudi Arabian border at the south of Nukhayb.
22. Hatra will be rebuilt as Aramaic Capital of the entire Mesopotamia, and at the same time Nehardea will be rebuilt as Capital of the worldwide Jewish studies and culture.
23. Groups a, b, f, and g will be transferred (if need be) and accommodated here.
24. The Shia Region will be delineated at the South of the Aramaic Region, and at the South of Al Kut. However, it will not count as a regular and fully accredited province of Aram Nahrain – Mesopotamia. It will be declared as area for Shia populations under special treatment and formation.
25. Baghdad will cease to be capital, will be temporary center of the American administration, but after the Americans leave Baghdad will not be the capital anymore. Baghdad will be divided into two sectors, Shia and Aramaic, and the transportation between the Shia sector and the Shia region will be effectuated by means of one (permanently under inspection) highway crossing the Aramaic region. Similar highway will be linking the Shia sector of Baghdad with the holy places at Samarra.
26. It will solemnly announced to the Shia populations that they stand accused and face serious charges for
a. having partly sabotaged America’s efforts to pacify post-Saddam Aram Nahrain – Mesopotamia. They will have no civil rights for a period of two years, and their region will not be promoted to the level of regular and fully accredited province of Aram Nahrain – Mesopotamia, before they fully cooperate with the provisory administration, learn Syriac – Aramaic, accept the country’s transformation, and pacify in their places. Only then, they will have the possibility to form a new entity to actively participate in the socio-economic and political realities of Aram Nahrain – Mesopotamia: the Shia Muslim Aramaeans.
However, Shia populations will not be deprived of their properties, and only those living outside the aforementioned area will be transferred.
27. It will be made clear to the Shia populations that any attempt of obstruction will imply immediate reprisals of unprecedented scale that would easily and soon decimate them.
28. In the effort of reconstruction, all the borders of the country will have to be electrically wired and the country will be isolated. Thousands of houses will be demolished, thousands of houses will be built, and thousands of houses will change owner.
29. A great change will take place in the Primary, Secondary and Tertiary Education. Americans must understand as early as possible (and this already means yesterday) that the ideological creature of France was not opposed by the British. So, it is omnipresent on the territories the French wished it diffused. It is meant to keep the local peoples in permanent underdevelopment and confusion, ignorance and fratricide strife, colonial dependence and cultural alteration. But it is also meant to make any foreign intruder, who would jeopardize the global interests of colonial France, fail. It is not military might that will guarantee for the American administration the ultimate success; it is high intellect, unbiased historiography (in the way of Martin Bernal, who demolished the Colonial Greco-Romano-centrism of France in his celebrated ‘Black Athena’), and rich conceptual thought. It is not just a coincidence that all sorts of bad intentions have been directed by the French against the Aramaeans of Iraq, Syria, Iran, Turkey, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, Kuwait, Jordan, Qatar and the Emirates. America will mobilize its ostensibly anti-colonial intellectual resources to promote studies of the Sumerian – Assyrian – Babylonian (Cuneiform) and Aramaic legacy of Mesopotamia through a non colonial standpoint, making of this the epicenter of the future culture of the modern peoples of Aram Nahrain – Mesopotamia.
30. De-arabization must go in parallel with a re-spiritualized, re-'intellectualized' and re-civilized Islam. All liberal Muslim intellectuals, who have the intention to participate in such a great work, will meet in an extraordinary Conference, set up ideological pillars, and develop a great variety of modern approaches to and interpretations of Islam that will be the only permitted to be diffused through any sort of meeting within a mosque and a medresa (religious school). Neoterisms must certainly be introduced in this regard, and the main Sermon (Khutbah) of the Friday Prayer must be retransmitted by radio and/or TV set throughout all the mosques of the country. Like this, only one top religious leader will be allowed to give a speech, and none else. This leader’s Sermon will be heard (and watched) by all the Muslims in all the mosques of Mesopotamia.
31. Turkey, as the earlier rightful administrator (Ottoman Empire), will be offered the extraordinary right to represent Aram Nahrain – Mesopotamia internationally until the period of 3 years passes and the situation be clarified. This will imply that Turkey promotes Kurdish and Syriac-Aramaic as official languages in Turkey.
32. To successfully execute this plan the US administration will have to count on no less than 600000 workers and soldiers. It is therefore essential to conceptualize that American forces will implement order and reconstruction in Aram Nahrain -Mesopotamia helped by soldiers and workers coming from India, Japan and Turkey. An alliance between America, India, Japan and Turkey will be formed, and the three countries will have American support for UN Veto right, India and Japan by virtue of economic growth and population, Turkey as the warrantor of the Islamic World’s Renaissance.
33. Aram Nahrain Mesopotamia will become immediately a NATO member state. Furthermore, American citizens will be particularly motivated to move there for work and definite resettlement. Negotiations with the various ethnic and religious groups will start soon as to the final international status of the country; it will be considered whether Aram Nahrain – Mesopotamia would join the US, becoming its 51st state.
Oct 9, 2006 07:00 AM