person:mahmoud ahmadinejad

The roundabout revolutions

https://www.iconeye.com/images/2015/07/eyal_weizman_gwangju.jpg

The history of these banal, utilitarian instruments of traffic management has become entangled with that of political uprising, #Eyal_Weizman argues in his latest book

This project started with a photograph. It was one of the most arresting images depicting the May 1980 #Gwangju uprising, recognised now as the first step in the eventual overthrow of the military dictatorship in South Korea. The photograph (above) depicts a large crowd of people occupying a roundabout in the city center. Atop a disused fountain in the middle of the roundabout a few protestors have unfurled a South Korean flag. The roundabout organised the protest in concentric circles, a geometric order that exposed the crowd to itself, helping a political collective in becoming.

It had an uncanny resonance with events that had just unfolded: in the previous year a series of popular uprisings spread through Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, #Oman, Yemen, Libya, and Syria. These events shared with Gwangju not only the historical circumstances – they too were popular protests against military dictatorships – but, remarkably, an urban-architectural setting: many of them similarly erupted on roundabouts in downtown areas. The history of these roundabouts is entangled with the revolutions that rose from them.

The photograph of the roundabout—now the symbol of the “liberated republic” – was taken by #Na_Kyung-taek from the roof of the occupied Provincial Hall, looking toward Geumnam-ro, only a few hours before the fall of the “#Gwangju_Republic”. In the early morning hours of the following day, the Gwangju uprising was overwhelmed by military force employing tanks and other armed vehicles. The last stand took place at the roundabout.

The scene immediately resonates with the well-known photographs of people gathering in #Tahrir_Square in early 2011. Taken from different high-rise buildings around the square, a distinct feature in these images is the traffic circle visible by the way it organises bodies and objects in space. These images became the symbol of the revolution that led to the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak in February 2011 – an event described by urban historian Nezar AlSayyad as “Cairo’s roundabout revolution”. But the Gwangju photograph also connects to images of other roundabouts that erupted in dissent in fast succession throughout the Middle East. Before Tahrir, as Jonathan Liu noted in his essay Roundabouts and Revolutions, it was the main roundabout in the capital of Tunisia – subsequently renamed Place du 14 Janvier 2011 after the date on which President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali was forced to flee the country. Thousands of protesters gathered at the roundabout in Tunis and filled the city’s main boulevard.

A main roundabout in Bahrain’s capital Manama erupted in protests shortly after the overthrow of Mubarak in Egypt. Its central traffic island became the site of popular protests against the government and the first decisive act of military repression: the protests were violently broken up and the roundabout itself destroyed and replaced with a traffic intersection. In solidarity with the Tahrir protests, the roundabouts in the small al-Manara Square in Ramallah and the immense Azadi Square in Tehran also filled with protesters. These events, too, were violently suppressed.

The roundabouts in Tehran and Ramallah had also been the scenes of previous revolts. In 2009 the Azadi roundabout in Iran’s capital was the site of the main protests of the Green Movement contesting President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s reelection. Hamid Dabashi, a literature professor at Columbia University and one of the most outspoken public intellectuals on these revolutions, claims that the Green Movement was inspirational for the subsequent revolutionary wave in the Arab world. In Palestine, revolt was a permanent consequence of life under occupation, and the al-Manara roundabout was a frequent site of clashes between Palestinian youth and the Israeli military. The sequence of roundabout revolutions evolved as acts of imitation, each building on its predecessor, each helping propel the next.

https://www.iconeye.com/images/2015/07/folly_3.jpg

Roundabouts were of course not only exhilarating sites of protest and experiments in popular democracy, but moreover they were places where people gathered and risked their life. The Gwangju uprising is, thus, the first of the roundabout revolutions. Liu wrote: “In all these cases, the symbolism is almost jokingly obvious: what better place to stage a revolution, after all, then one built for turning around?” What better way to show solidarity across national borders than to stage protests in analogous places?

Why roundabouts? After all, they are banal, utilitarian instruments of traffic management, certainly not prone to induce revolutionary feeling. Other kinds of sites – squares, boulevards, favelas, refugee camps – have served throughout history as the setting for political protest and revolt. Each alignment of a roundabout and a revolution has a specific context and diverse causes, but the curious repetition of this phenomenon might give rise to several speculations. Urban roundabouts are the intersection points of large axes, which also puts them at the start or end of processions.

Occupying a roundabout demonstrates the power of tactical acupuncture: it blocks off all routes going in and out. Congestion moves outward like a wave, flowing down avenues and streets through large parts of the city. By pressuring a single pivotal point within a networked infrastructure, an entire city can be put under siege (a contemporary contradistinction to the medieval technique of surrounding the entire perimeter of a city wall). Unlike public squares, which are designed as sites for people to gather (therefore not interrupting the flow of vehicular traffic) and are usually monitored and policed, roundabout islands are designed to keep people away. The continuous flow of traffic around them creates a wall of speeding vehicles that prohibits access. While providing open spaces (in some cities the only available open spaces) these islands are meant to be seen but not used.

Another possible explanation is their symbolic power: they often contain monuments that represent the existing regime. The roundabouts of recent revolutions had emblematic names – Place du 7 Novembre 1987, the date the previous regime took power in Tunisia; “Liberty” (Azadi), referring to the 1979 Iranian Revolution; or “Liberation” (Tahrir), referring to the 1952 revolutions in Egypt. Roundabout islands often had statues, both figurative and abstract, representing the symbolic order of regimes. Leaders might have wished to believe that circular movement around their monuments was akin to a form of worship or consent. While roundabouts exercise a centripetal force, pulling protestors into the city center, the police seek to generate movement in the opposite direction, out and away from the center, and to break a collective into controllable individuals that can be handled and dispersed.

The most common of all centrifugal forces of urban disorganisation during protests is tear gas, a formless cloud that drifts through space to disperse crowds. From Gwangju to Cairo, Manama to Ramallah, hundreds of tear-gas canisters were used largely exceeding permitted levels in an attempt to evict protesters from public spaces. The bodily sensation of the gas forms part of the affective dimension of the roundabout revolution. When tear gas is inhaled, the pain is abrupt, sharp, and isolating. The eyes shut involuntary, generating a sense of disorientation and disempowerment.

Protestors have found ways to mitigate the toxic effects of this weapon. Online advice is shared between activists from Palestine through Cairo to Ferguson. The best protection is offered by proper gas masks. Improvised masks made of mineral water bottles cut in half and equipped with a filter of wet towels also work, according to online manuals. Some activists wear swim goggles and place wet bandanas or kaffiyehs over their mouths. To mitigate some of the adverse effects, these improvised filters can be soaked in water, lemon juice, vinegar, toothpaste, or wrapped around an onion. When nothing else is at hand, breathe the air from inside your shirt and run upwind onto higher ground. When you have a chance, blow your nose, rinse your mouth, cough, and spit.

https://www.iconeye.com/images/2015/07/eyal_weizman_tahrir_sq.jpg

Du coup : #gilets_jaunes ?

@albertocampiphoto & @philippe_de_jonckheere

This project started with a photograph. It was one of the most arresting images depicting the May 1980 #Gwangju uprising, recognised now as the first step in the eventual overthrow of the military dictatorship in South Korea. The photograph (above) depicts a large crowd of people occupying a roundabout in the city center. Atop a disused fountain in the middle of the roundabout a few protestors have unfurled a South Korean flag. The roundabout organised the protest in concentric circles, a geometric order that exposed the crowd to itself, helping a political collective in becoming.

–-> le pouvoir d’une #photographie...

signalé par @isskein

ping @reka

Behind the #Iran Protests
▻http://jacobinmag.com/2018/01/iran-protests-hasan-rouhani-green-movement

An on-the-ground report from the protests in Iran, where citizens are torn between anger at their leaders and fears of becoming the next Syria.

Article passionnant

It’s hard to overstate the factionalism of Iranian politics. Long a feature of the Islamic Republic, differing factions within the Islamic Republic have often publicly fought and debated one another on policies and directions for the country. During Rouhani’s terms as president, the hard-line elements in the regime have attempted to create obstacles for him and his administration at every turn. Especially since their embarrassing loss in the May presidential elections, hard-liners have attacked Rouhani at every opportunity. For his part, Rouhani has attempted to curtail the economic power of hard-line institutions and has sought to push the Revolutionary Guards out of politics, with little success.

In the middle of this fight, former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has made a surprise comeback. In November 2017, Ahmadinejad started issuing provocative statements against corruption and began to ask why, if the country’s money belonged to the people, the government was targeting funding for the people’s welfare. Using social media as his main tool of communication, Ahmadinejad issued threats against Iran’s judiciary, challenged Iran’s supreme leader by not backing down when asked to, and revived the populist message of his presidency, attacking the rich and corrupt. On Wednesday, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps announced that “a former leader of the country” had provoked people to protest. Some in Iran are now reporting that Ahmadinejad is being investigated.

#Iran : naissance d’une « troisième force »
▻https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/international/030118/iran-naissance-d-une-troisieme-force

L’agitation se poursuit en Iran, gagne de nouvelles villes et prend une coloration très anti-religieuse. Contrairement à 2009, « c’est vraiment le peuple qui est dans la rue », notent les observateurs. Le clivage réformateurs-radicaux est dépassé. On compte une vingtaine de morts et des milliers d’arrestations.

#International #manifestations

Révolte en Iran : un fil d’actus fourni (que je ne saurais ni compléter ni critiquer), avec des #vidéos et articles
▻https://twitter.com/contre_capital/status/946656455565955072

La « ville sainte » de #Qom est également touchée maintenant par la contestation et les slogans anticléricaux contre l’ayatollah #Khamenei. (...)
La révolte s’étend à toutes les villes aujourd’hui, même petites : #Gorgan, #Kerman, #Saveh, #Khorramabad, #Malayer, #Abhar, ... A #Tabriz où hier la foule a chassé un membre du clergé la police est partout. A #Shiraz le bâtiment du séminaire de théologie a été incendié.

#révolte #manifestations #théocratie #Iran

Serving the Leviathan | Jacobin
▻https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/01/iran-rafsanjani-ahmadinejad-khamenei-reform

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/Hashemi_Rafsanjani_at_Beit_Rahbari.jpg

Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the chairman of Iran’s Expediency Discernment Council, died of a heart attack on January 8, 2017. Various factions immediately tried to claim this “pillar of the revolution” in the name of their competing political objectives. The wily politician would have surely recognized this technique of marshaling the spirits of the dead to score points for short-term political gain.

Temperate “principalists” (usulgarayan), technocratic conservatives (eʿtedaliyyun), and reformists (eslahtalaban) — that is, much of the Iranian political class — saw something in the elderly statesman’s legacy worth appropriating. In this way, his death mirrors his life: during his sixty-plus years of political activity, he became many things to many people, while his ultimate objectives often remained opaque, if not virtually impossible to discern.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and others often painted this postrevolutionary pragmatist as a corrupt and arrogant patrician who had cast aside revolutionary austerity in favor of decadent opulence. The accusation resonated far beyond Ahmadinejad’s supporters, aligning with popular slogans that denounced the two-time president as “Akbar Shah” (meaning King Akbar, Great Shah) and compelling ordinary citizens to scrawl dozd (thief) on many of his campaign posters during the 2005 presidential campaign. He was also known to many as “the shark” (kuseh) on account of his inability to grow a fully fledged beard, though others felt it described his political modus operandi to a tee.

By 2009, however, he seemed to have aligned himself with the Green Movement, drawing closer to the reformists he once opposed. His intermittent criticisms of the Ahmadinejad government endeared him to many, who began to see him as one of the few establishment voices willing to openly defy the administration and by extension, his old ally, the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. He became inextricably linked with the trope of “moderation,” a powerful idea in a country on the precipice, especially after the UN imposed sanctions of 2006.

Many others remained skeptical, however, unable to forget his reputation as an arch-Machiavellian. They recycled urban legends about his family’s wealth, reinforcing his image as a power-obsessed wheeler-and-dealer.
Resisting the Shah

Born in 1934, Akbar Hashemi Bahremani grew up on his family’s small farm in the village of Bahreman in the Nuq district of Rafsanjan, Kerman province. At the behest of his father, he studied in a traditional maktab, but was still expected to help tend to the animals and orchards in a region renowned for its prized pistachio. His paternal uncle was a cleric who often took to the village pulpit, and at the age of fourteen, he left for Qom to study at the Shiʿi seminary, the chief center of Islamic learning in Iran.

Through the Maraʿshi brothers (Akhavan-e Maraʿshi), Kazem and Mehdi, fellow Rafsanjanis, with whom he lived for a number of years, Akbar quickly came to know Seyyed Ruhollah Khomeini, then a relatively junior mojtahed and esteemed teacher of philosophy and mysticism. In Rafsanjani’s memoir, The Period of Struggle, he recalls how he was immediately captivated by the “majesty” of Khomeini’s visage and demeanor. Thus began an extremely close and fruitful relationship that would last the remainder of Khomeini’s lifetime. Indeed, Rafsanjani’s final resting place is alongside his political and spiritual patron.

In Qom, Rafsanjani rapidly got involved in political life and activism and found himself attracted to the militant Devotees of Islam (Fadaʾiyan-e Islam), led by Seyyed Mojtaba Mirlowhi, better known as Navvab-e Safavi or “Prince of the Safavids,” whose meetings he would attend at every opportunity. The group tried to convince the Qom seminary to agitate for a strict and unforgiving nomocratic order, but with little success. Under the guidance of Grand Ayatollah Boroujerdi, the overwhelming majority of the Qom seminary rejected the message of the Fadaʾiyan, at one point running them out of town.

Rafsanjani was studying in Qom during the years of anticolonial fervor after Prime Minister Mosaddeq nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (BP). He encountered Mosaddeq’s one-time clerical ally, Ayatollah Seyyed Abolqasem Kashani, who became one of the Fadaʾiyan’s initial patrons. Kashani eventually turned on Mosaddeq, and, in August 1953, a joint CIA-MI6 orchestrated coup d’état ousted the prime minister.

After the revolution, even while expressing his support for the national movement, Rafsanjani blamed Mosaddeq’s National Front and the communist Tudeh Party for their role in weakening the seminary during this period. But he still recalled with pride how the former prime minister contributed to printing and distributing his translation of The Journey of Palestine, a translation of a popular book on Palestine written in Arabic by Akram Zwayter, a Jordanian ambassador to Tehran. Published in semi-illicit form in 1961, this book marked the beginning of a long career in which he became the most prolific statesman-cum-author of the postrevolutionary era.

In 1955, Navvab was executed by firing squad, but vestiges of the Fadaʾiyan persisted, creating a vital network of clerical and lay activists in the country’s mosques and bazaars. Rafsanjani became an important organizer inside the country, following Khomeni’s exile in 1964. In January 1965, he was arrested by the Shah’s infamous secret police, SAVAK, for his role in the assassination of the pro-American premier, Hassan ʿAli Mansur. Later recollections by members of the Islamic Coalition Society have since admitted it was Rafsanjani who supplied the weapon. From 1958 until the revolution he was arrested on several occasions. He persisted in his activism despite the abuse and torture he suffered at the hands of the SAVAK, publishing illegal periodicals and distributing Khomeini’s communiqués from Najaf. It was also in 1958 that he married ʿEffat Maraʿshi, the daughter of a fellow cleric from Rafsanjan. His companion of almost sixty years, she would come to exude a formidable matriarchal presence on the Iranian political scene throughout the 1990s and 2000s.

Rafsanjani also managed to travel to the United States and Japan during these years. Many regard the latter as especially formative for his worldview and proclivity toward the seemingly indigenous, albeit technologically advanced, version of modernization he would seek to exact during his own time in power. He also penned a volume on the nationalist icon Amir Kabir (who died in 1852), who tried to streamline the Qajar court’s expenditures, consolidating the weak Iranian state in Tehran while importing technical and military know-how. That Rafsanjani died on the anniversary of Amir Kabir’s murder has only fueled the flood of hagiographies.
Internal Divisions

On February 5, 1979, Rafsanjani made his first public appearance facing the world’s media with Khomeini during Mehdi Bazargan’s introduction as prime minister of the Provisional Revolutionary Government. He began his government apprenticeship as deputy interior minister, and soon found common ground with another junior minister, Seyyed Ali Khamenei, who held the same role in defense. More importantly, Rafsanjani also served on the revolutionary council, a secretive body dominated by clerics loyal to Khomeini that was created in lieu of a legislative branch of state.

Rafsanjani and Khamenei were on a pilgrimage to Mecca when they learned that radical students, who called themselves the Muslim Student Followers of the Imam’s Line, had overrun the United States embassy on November 4, 1979. They had by this time become leading officials of the Islamic Republic Party (IRP), and Bazargan’s resignation thrust both men into the limelight. Rafsanjani took over the interior ministry and organized the first presidential elections of 1980. In the spring of that year, he was elected to the Majlis (parliament) and became speaker, a post he turned into a personal stronghold for most of the following decade.

Rafsanjani remained steadfastly loyal to Khomeini and led the clerical front that ultimately marginalized competing revolutionary organizations in the early 1980s. But their relationship was not always easy. Together with Khamenei, Rafsanjani lobbied Khomeini to allow clerical candidates into the first presidential election; his mentor’s refusal paved the way for the victory of layman Abolhasan Bani-Sadr. Only after much of the IRP leadership was killed in the Hafte Tir bombing did Khomeini relent and allow Khamenei to run for president in the summer of 1980.

They also seem to have disagreed about the war with Iraq. According to various sources, including Khomeini’s son Ahmad, the Grand Ayatollah wanted to bring the conflict to an end after taking back the southwestern city of Khorramshahr in April 1982, but Rafsanjani, among others, prevailed on him to prepare an offensive into Iraqi territory.

As the 1980s progressed, Rafsanjani’s role within the state system far surpassed his formal title of parliamentary speaker. In international settings, he was treated like the state’s foremost figure. The West — including the Reagan administration — relied on him to end kidnappings in Lebanon, and he became known as the real power behind the scenes.

By 1985, the fervent anti-Americanism he had previously displayed gave way to the realization that a tactical accommodation with the “Great Satan” was necessary. In a risky and ultimately unsuccessful move, he agreed to hold talks with a delegation led by national security adviser Robert McFarlane, which surreptitiously visited Tehran in October 1986 with much-needed weapons for the war effort. The Iran-Contra revelations severely embarrassed both Reagan and Rafsanjani, and the whole affair had major repercussions for the domestic scene. Nevertheless, two decades later, the Rafsanjani clan published a book including the delegation’s fake passports and the inscribed Bible Reagan gave to Rafsanjani to underscore the cooperation between these erstwhile adversaries.

Rafsanjani was at the heart of several crucial developments during the last years of Khomeini’s life. Many believe he took part in the efforts lead by Ahmad Khomeini and minister of intelligence, Mohammad Reyshahri, to persuade the revolutionary leader to withdraw his support for his designated successor, Hossein ʿAli Montazeri. He certainly had motivation: Montazeri’s relative and close associate, Seyyed Mehdi Hashemi, and his people were responsible for leaking the details of McFarlane’s visit. In early 1988, Rafsanjani had to navigate a major internal crisis when Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi resigned and noted — in a secret letter to Khamenei — that other figures, including Rafsanjani, had gravely eroded his authority.

That same year, the USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655 over the Persian Gulf, killing almost three hundred civilians. Rafsanjani gloomily indicated during a Friday prayer speech that the tragedy was not an accident and warned that the United States would now intensify its involvement in the Iran-Iraq conflict. This likely contributed to Khomeini’s acceptance of UN Security Council Resolution 598, which initiated the ceasefire between the two countries and which he famously compared to drinking a “poisoned chalice.”
Consolidation

Following the Iran-Iraq War and the death of the revolutionary patriarch in June 1989, many wondered if the revolutionary state and its institutions could survive without the uniquely charismatic Ayatollah Khomeini. Even before his death, the ruling establishment proved vulnerable as militant groups such as the People’s Mojahedin Organization and the Forqan, which opposed the political clerisy’s ascent, had assassinated several senior figures in the regime. Khamenei and Rafsanjani both survived attempts on their lives in this period, ensuring that these two friends would decisively shape the post-Khomeini political order.

Rafsanjani played a key role in elevating Khamenei as Khomeini’s successor, but the more intimate details of his lobbying have yet to be fully revealed. It occurred as the Iranian elite was reeling, both politically and emotionally. Khomeini’s death came after a period of incapacitation, but it nevertheless caught senior state figures unprepared. As a result, the Assembly of Experts, the clerical body in charge of selecting and supervising the guardian jurist (vali-ye faqih), had to decide how best to handle the succession. Rafsanjani took to the podium and declared that Khomeini had stated his preference for Khamenei, despite his lack of clerical rank and authority. The latter was not an Ayatollah, let alone a marjaʿ al-taqlid (source of emulation or Grand Ayatollah).

Khamenei’s accession unfolded in tandem with major constitutional amendments and changes in the revolutionary state’s institutional structure. The position of vali-ye faqih (often referred to nowadays as the “supreme leader”) was radically revised. No longer was his capacity to act as a source of emulation for the faithful, namely the criterion of marjaʿiyyat a prerequisite for the office. Instead, Khamenei had an “absolute mandate” to rule. At the same time, the office of prime minister was abolished, leaving a directly elected president, which Rafsanjani promptly assumed. These moves quickly consolidated power between the longstanding allies.

At this moment, Rafsanjani was at the peak of his powers. Many have speculated that he placed his ally in this role because he was counting on Khamenei’s lack of religious credentials and limited influence among the clergy, to keep him relatively weak. Arguably, it was a calculation that would come back to haunt him in the last decade of his life.

His two presidential terms have become associated with the period of the nation’s reconstruction. In the first few years, his partnership with Khamenei proved most efficacious. First in the 1990 Assembly of Experts’ elections — but most decisively in the 1992 Majles elections — they used the guardian council’s arrogation of the prerogative to supervise elections and thereby disqualify candidates to rapidly marginalize the so-called Islamic left, which included groups like the Association of Combatant Clerics, the so-called Imam’s Line, and the Mojahedin Organization of the Islamic Revolution. All of whose members had been Ayatollah Khomeini’s stalwart supporters and advocated for anti-imperialism and a radical foreign policy, state control of the economy, and the egalitarian redistribution of wealth.

In response to the country’s very real internal and external economic and political challenges, Rafsanjani and Khamenei conspired to cast aside the Left. Thus, in 1992, they either saw disqualified or campaigned against a raft of sitting MPs and left-leaning regime loyalists, including Behzad Nabavi, Asadollah Bayat, Hadi Ghaffari, Ebrahim Asgharzadeh, and the infamous Ayatollah Sadeq Khalkhali. In fact, only 20 percent of incumbents earned reelection that year.

Consequently, the traditional right dominated the Fourth Majles, adding to the duo’s firm grip on the intelligence and security apparatuses, the state institutions regulating the Shiʿi clergy, the levers of economic power and patronage — including the ministry of petroleum — and a vast network of religious endowments. Despite starting from a position of weakness, Khamenei began to strengthen his hold on economic and military power. In Rafsanjani’s second term, a mild rivalry started to color their relationship.

With the Left on the sidelines, Rafsanjani pursued what amounted to a neoliberal agenda of privatization and structural adjustment. He also created a regional détente with the Gulf states, above all Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, which had bankrolled Saddam Hussein’s war effort with US support. Journalist Mohammad Quchani approvingly called Rafsanjani’s tenure the era of “depoliticization,” where “expertise” firmly supplanted “commitment.” Technocratic competency and state-directed economic liberalization without corresponding political reforms became the order of the day. Saʿid Hajjarian — a former intelligence officer who became a preeminent reformist strategist — recalled a meeting with Rafsanjani in which the president disdainfully shrugged off the very notion of political development, a euphemism for “democratization.”

But after ejecting much of the Islamic left from the ranks of government, Rafsanjani was himself forced to cede primacy over the cultural and intellectual spheres to the traditional right. His brother Mohammad had to give up his long-standing control of state radio and television, while the future president Mohammed Khatami publicly resigned from the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, replaced by arch-conservative Ali Larijani (who has since joined the ranks of centrist principalists).

The traditional right’s own predominantly mercantilist interests often conflicted with Rafsanjani’s efforts at economic liberalization. As a result, he had to pursue a more modest reform program. Resistance from below also appeared. In 1992, a tentative subsidy reform on foodstuffs and energy — which would only be implemented, ironically, under the Ahmadinejad government — coincided with inflation hovering around 50 percent, leading to tumultuous provincial bread riots.

Moreover, the privatizations that did take place were far from straightforward. Selling shares to para-statal and quasi-statal organizations sparked allegations of crony capitalism and corruption that the Fourth Majles eventually had to redress through legislation, even if the issue was never satisfactorily resolved. Moreover, one of Rafsanjani’s key allies, Gholam Hossein Karbaschi — mayor of Tehran from 1989 to 1998 — played a crucial role in the capital city’s “urban renewal.” He sold off state-owned land below market value to the connected and well-heeled and exempted large developers from zoning laws, creating a speculative real-estate boom in which certain segments of the political and economic elite were seen to massively profit.

Rafsanjani also helped create the Islamic Free University, which provided higher education to hundreds of thousands of students unable to enter the state system because of the competitive national examinations. Nevertheless, the university has been criticized for introducing market logic into education and thus exacerbating existing class divisions.

As Kaveh Ehsani writes, the Rafsanjani administration had decided that “the Islamic Republic needed to first create its own loyal, Islamic (but neoliberal) middle class.” Rafsanjani, however, ultimately failed to develop an entrepreneurial class that could fully implement his neoliberal agenda. Attempts to do so — particularly through his half-hearted wooing of expatriate businessmen who had fled on the eve of the Islamic Republic — were largely met with scorn. The Executives of Reconstruction Party, heavily populated by the president’s kin, including his outspoken daughter Faʾezeh, would belatedly attempt to consolidate this new technocratic order in 1996.

Meanwhile, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) was invited by the government as a quid pro quo for its services during the war, to help reconstruct the country’s severely depleted infrastructure. Khamenei shrewdly capitalized on this development to augment his institutional power.

This period also saw a slew of intellectuals, writers, and activists assassinated, arrested, and/or tortured. The long list even extends into the Khatami era and includes ʿAli Akbar Saʿidi Sirjani, Faraj Sarkuhi, Shapur Bakhtiar — the Shah’s last prime minister, who had tried to oust the Islamic Republic with Saddam Hussein’s support — and Sadeq Sharafkandi, secretary-general of the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran. These killings have been strongly linked to the Iranian security apparatus, but the extent of Rafsanjani’s involvement remains unclear. Regardless, his objective of consolidating the regime he had been instrumental in building extended — with or without his direct participation — into neutralizing, by any means, dissenting and subversive voices.
Between the Establishment and Reform

When Mohammad Khatami became president in the June 1997 elections, many observers — including Rafsanjani — were surprised. In fact, the departing president would eventually admit that he had voted for Ali Akbar Nateq Nuri, the establishment candidate. Nor was he temperamentally disposed to the ethos of the emerging “reformist” camp, which rallied around Khatami. Their emphasis on political, rather than economic, change and openness in the media and intellectual spheres starkly contrasted with the ambitions and priorities of his own administration.

In fact, between 1997 and 2001, the former president tilted more toward the conservatives, when the right wing became concerned the reformist coalition was taking control of the chief reins of government. In 2000, Rafsanjani ran for parliament in Tehran and sparked a major political crisis. He initially did not rank among the first thirty seats, but was reinstated after a known dissident was disqualified. The media waged a campaign against what they regarded as brazen interference, and Rafsanjani relinquished his seat at a high cost to the Khatami front.

Entrenched as leader of the expediency council — a body whose influence grew in periods of mediation between parliament and the guardian council — Rafsanjani effectively helped stymie the reformist-dominated Sixth Majles, repeatedly kicking key reforms into the long grass. As a result, the public grew disenchanted with the reformers, seeing them as incapable of implementing their program.

In 2005, Rafsanjani once again ran for president, arguing that only he could fix a deadlocked political system. His quixotic campaign used roller-skating young women to hand out posters to bemused drivers in Tehran. But Ahmadinejad’s insurgent candidacy derailed his plans and forced an unprecedented run-off. Rafsanjani scrambled and succeeded in winning the support of many moderates, dissidents, and artists, including the late ʿAbbas Kiarostami, who warned of a Chirac-Le Pen scenario.

When the veteran candidate appeared at Tehran University to this end, he responded to students chanting the name of Akbar Ganji — an imprisoned journalist and public intellectual, who had famously characterized Rafsanjani as Iran’s very own Cardinal Richelieu — by saying conditions in prisons today were far better than under the Shah’s regime. In his final televised campaign interview, he unpersuasively apologized for not holding events outside Tehran in what appeared to be a last-ditch pledge to improve the plight of the neglected provinces.

His defeat — which he half-heartedly attributed to security forces’ interference — effectively aligned him with the reformist camp he had previously been at odds with. By 2006, he recognized that Ahmadinejad threatened both the Iranian state and the fragile détente with the West that he and Khatami had laboriously engineered. For the last decade of his life, he would repeatedly call for moderation, speaking out against excesses and cautiously supporting Mir-Hossein Mousavi in the 2009 elections.

Despite warning Khamenei about possible tampering on the eve of the vote and using his Friday prayer address to call for the release of scores of reformists in July 2009, Rafsanjani managed to keep his place within the state apparatus. Rather than directly challenge Khamenei — as Mousavi and Karroubi would — he retained his position as head of the expediency council.

During the second Ahmadinejad administration, Rafsanajani stayed in the media spotlight, published his much-anticipated annual volumes of political diaries, and continued to lobby at the regime’s highest levels. Despite having few obvious cards to play, Rafsanjani drew on his myriad relationships across ministries, economic institutions, political factions, the bazaar, the clergy, and even the IRGC. He also compelled his son, Mehdi, to return home and face a jail sentence so that opponents couldn’t use the charge that his child was abroad and in the pay of foreigners against him politically.
Transformation or Rebranding?

In 2013, after remaining on the fence until the last hours of the registration window, Rafsanjani announced his bid for president without securing the customary approval from Khamenei, who rebuffed his attempts to discuss the matter. The guardian council rejected him on health grounds, paving the way for his protégé Hassan Rouhani, whom Rafsanjani had persuaded not to drop out, to carry the centrist ticket and win in the first round.

Even in his final years, after he had lost many of the institutional levers he had once wielded so dexterously, Rafsanjani managed to interject himself at crucial political moments and tilt the balance of forces in one direction or another. These interventions were not without significance or merit. His continued support for Rouhani and the nuclear accord with the P5+1 helped alleviate the atmosphere of securitization, economic distress, and growing militarization that had characterized the Ahmadinejad years. When he decried the Western sanctions that “had broken the back” of the nation, he belittled the conservative attempts to portray the accord as a sellout.

In recent years, prominent intellectuals like Akbar Ganji and Sadeq Zibakalam have debated whether Rafsanjani’s apparent “conversion” to reform represented a truly genuine transformation or another example of his essential Machiavellianism. But a more pertinent question would be what opportunities for contestation and increasing democratic accountability and pluralism were engendered as a result of his interventions and the unforeseen repercussions of elite competition and cleavage.

On the one hand, his role as mediator between the ruling establishment and the reformists in these final years played an important part in assuaging the contradictions between popular expectations and the reality of regime governance. Since the late 1990s elite competition has taken place on the terrain of electoral and constitutional politics, and Iran’s sizeable urban population and middle classes were periodically summoned to provide momentum to their own mediated demands. A process that also harbored the potential for sparking deeper political transformation, and a renegotiation of the social contract defining the relationship of government and the governed.

In the short term, reforms included resolving the nuclear impasse; returning to competent, technocratic economic management; lowering inflation and youth unemployment; releasing Green Movement leaders Mir Hossein Mousavi, Mehdi Karroubi, and Zahra Rahnavard; and loosening political and cultural restrictions.

But in the long term, the reformist horizon strove for something like a new constitutional settlement that would place the supreme leader under close supervision — if not call for his direct election — hold the security apparatuses accountable, and reverse the guardian council’s powers over elections. Reformist activists, as well as political currents with negligible official representation, saw Rafsanjani’s funeral procession as one more opportunity to articulate these manifold demands, proving even his posthumous relevance to the political balance of power.

Rafsanjani initiated a deeply personal form of statecraft, one that could not bring about a structured perestroika, but did enable the Islamic Republic to survive crises and challenges. Rafsanjani and Khamenei’s chief objective had always preserving the regime they helped build. The question of how to achieve this — and their material and institutional stake in it — rankled their relationship in later life and still divides the country.

▻https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akbar_Hashemi_Rafsanjani

#Iran #politique #islam

François Hollande : La capitulation en rase campagne du foudre de guerre de Syrie . René Naba - RipouxBlique des CumulardsVentrusGrosQ
▻http://slisel.over-blog.com/2016/12/francois-hollande-la-capitulation-en-rase-campagne-du-foudre-de-gu

http://www.renenaba.com/site/uploads/2016/12/hollande.jpg

L’homme de l’année 2016

Fait sans précédent dans les annales de la Vème République, François Hollande a annoncé jeudi 1 er décembre 2016, qu’il renonçait à briguer un deuxième mandat présidentiel, tragique aveu d’une grande impuissance.

L’homme qui avait mené deux batailles au Mali et en Syrie, a renoncé à livrer bataille sur le plan intérieur pour défendre son bilan. Pour un foudre de guerre sur la scène internationale, qui avait eu le plus grand mal à se retenir de bombarder la Syrie en 2013, ce renoncement a retenti comme une capitulation en rase campagne. Une implosion en plein vol.

« L’Homme d’état de l’année 2016 » aura eu un triomphe météorique, à l’image de ses prédécesseurs malchanceux, les conservateurs européens, l’espagnol José Marie Aznar ou le britannique David Cameron (lauréat 2015) ; à l’image de l’adhésion populaire dont il a bénéficié à son élection, plombée à son envol par le tweet ravageur de la « première peste de France » (1), soutenant le rival de la propre mère des quatre enfants de son compagnon, symptomatique de la confusion mentale qui a régné au plus haut niveau de l’état, tant au niveau de la vie privée du premier magistrat de France que de sa politique.

Scipion l’Africain au Mali (2), général Flamby (3) en Syrie, Scooter One Rue du Cirque -quel cirque- François II aura été aux antipodes de son prédécesseur. Falot et mal fagoté, au regard d’un florentin brillant et flamboyant, grand manœuvrier devant l’éternel. Retour sur la dérive de ce quinquennat calamiteux.

De la trahison au Parti Socialiste ou le vaudeville d’une « présidence normale ».

« La gauche de gouvernement devient suspecte dès qu’elle accède aux responsabilités et son destin est de toujours être accusée de trahison », soutient François Hollande dans un entretien à la revue débat.

▻http://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2016/09/15/francois-hollande-la-gauche-de-gouvernement-est-toujours-accusee-de-trahison

Non François Hollande, au vu de votre comportement et celui de votre gouvernement tout au long de votre mandat, ce n’est pas la gauche de gouvernement qui est accusé de trahison, c’est le gouvernement lui même qui a trahi et la nomenklatura « solférienne » avec.
L’exemple vient de très haut, du premier des socialistes François Hollande lui même, qui a trahi sa compagne d’alors et mère de ses 4 enfants, avant de lui saborder sa campagne présidentielle, en 2007, puis de récidiver avec sa compagne présidentielle, la dénonciatrice des « sans dents », un scandale qui a terni durablement son mandat.

Engagé sur deux théâtres d’opérations extérieurs (Syrie-Mali) et sur le front intérieur du chômage, ce vaudeville consternant a plombé durablement sa mandature présidentielle et sinistré le parti socialiste, faisant du socialo-motoriste, le plus impopulaire président de la Vme République
Jean Pierre Jouyet, une prime à la trahison.

En 2ème position, l’ami le plus proche du président, Jean Pierre Jouyet, en aura été l’incarnation la plus achevée. Ralliant sans hésitation ni vergogne, Nicolas Sarkozy au poste de ministre des Affaires européennes, le camarade de l’ENA « promotion Voltaire » sera néanmoins repêché par François Hollande au secrétariat général de l’Élysée. Un repêchage perçu comme une prime à la trahison. Autres transfuges célèbres, Bernard Kouchner, ministre des affaires étrangères du néo gaulliste atlantiste Nicolas Sarkozy, de même qu’Eric Besson et Jean Marie Bockel, le « Tony Blair de gauche ». Une trahison à sens unique de la gauche vers la droite, sans le moindre mouvement en sens inverse.

Sur fond d’un paysage dévasté par une considérable destruction de l’emploi industriel, de l’ordre de 1,4 millions d’emplois en 25 ans, – 407 usines fermés en deux ans, 190 usines en 2015 et 217 en 2014, l’armée française désormais équipée d’armes allemandes et de rangers allemands- de l’hémorragie du vote ouvrier vers le Front National, de la préemption démagogique des mots d’ordre sécuritaire de l’extrême droite sous l’effet d’une panique nationale (déchéance de nationalité), la fonction de la gauche depuis le début du XXI me siècle a surtout consisté à servir d’appoint électoral à la droite, sans renvoi d’ascenseur. Un marche pied.

« Le PS a zappé le peuple ». L’admonestation de Pierre Mauroy lors de la présidentielle 2002, fatale à Lionel Jospin, demeure d’actualité. Plutôt que d’initier une politique de la demande et de la relance de la consommation par l’augmentation du pouvoir d’achat, l’ennemi de la haute finance s’est révélé un zélé passeur de plats du grand patronat. En 2015 et 2016, les entreprises françaises ont été les plus gros payeurs de dividendes d’Europe sur fond de casse sociale.
La social démocratie préconisée par François Hollande apparaît rétrospectivement comme l’enterrement en grande pompe du socialisme par la mort du social.
De Lionel Jospin ( 1997-2002) à François Hollande (2012-2017), la gauche s’est réduite à soutenir une droite qui se distingue de moins en mois de l’extrême droite.

Ainsi le « Front Républicain de 2002 » est apparu comme une prime à la corruption en ce que Jean Marie Le Pen n’avait aucune chance de gagner la bataille présidentielle alors que Jacques Chirac avait été le dirigeant qui avait institutionnalisé la corruption au plus niveau de l’État, le seul président français depuis Pétain a être condamné par la justice pour des faits ayant rapports avec l’argent illicite.

Il en a été de même avec le « Front Républicain pour les régionales 2016 », qui a débouché sur la propulsion du motoriste Christian Estrosi à la tête du PACA et l’élimination du PS de tous les exécutifs régionaux. La récidive a été fatale au crédit de la gauche de gouvernement qui a donné l’impression de courir derrière une droite de plus en plus contaminée par le discours Lepeniste. La démarcation s’est dissipée dans l’esprit des électeurs.
Servir d’appoint électoral à la droite radicale et continuer à ostraciser un authentique homme de gauche, Jean Luc Mélenchon, relève de l’aberration mentale et explique la dispersion des forces du progrès en France et la perplexité de nombre de personnes se réclamant de la gauche, qui y voient un jeu d’apparatchik contre productif.

De François Mitterrand à Lionel Jospin, à Harlem Désir et Jean Christophe Cambadélis, en passant par le socialo motoriste Hollande, le charisme du leadership socialiste s’est considérablement dégradé. Le PS souffre d’absence de clarté dans son positionnement. D’une locomotive. Évident manque d’appétence à son égard.

Du bon usage de « Munich et des Sudètes de Tchécoslovaquie » : « Le changement, c’est maintenant »

MUNICH : Seul pays au Monde à faire un usage intensif de ce terme pour stigmatiser ce qu’il considère être « le défaitisme » des adversaires de sa politique, « Munich » et par extension « Munichois », est en fait l’apanage du socialisme français. Son arme de destruction massive pour neutraliser toute critique à son égard.

Harlem Désir, en la matière, n’est en fait que le piètre successeur de Guy Mollet, le dernier Premier ministre socialiste de la IV République, l’homme de Suez et d’Alger, -beau palmarès-, qui avait brandi cet argument pour disqualifier les opposants à l’agression tripartite de Suez, en 1956, contre Nasser. 57 ans après, Harlem Désir nous ressert la même rengaine… Le changement, c’est maintenant. Vraiment ?

Dans la terminologie de l’époque, l’« expédition punitive » anglo-franco-israélienne, -menée, faut-il le souligner, par les deux puissances coloniales de l’époque en association avec leur pupille israélien-, devait châtier le « Bickbachi ». Terme de l’ordonnancement militaire ottoman équivalant au grade de Colonel, le Bickbachi Nasser sera ainsi désigné à la vindicte publique comme le nouvel Hitler de l’après-guerre, sous le vocable de Rayïss, que l’on faisait rimer dans le subconscient européen avec le Reich.

Le 2ème Hitler arabe sera naturellement Yasser Arafat, le chef de l’Organisation de Libération de la Palestine. Figure de croquemitaine dans l’imaginaire occidental, l’Arabe, surtout lorsqu’il est porteur d’une revendication nationaliste, est un Hitler en puissance, quand bien même les Arabes et les Africains (chrétiens et musulmans) ont été parmi les principaux pourvoyeurs de « chairs à canon » pour la libération de la France, à deux reprises en un même siècle, phénomène rarissime dans l‘Histoire. De Gamal Abdel Nasser (Égypte) à Mohammad Mossadegh, à l’Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeiny et Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (Iran) en passant par Yasser Arafat et Cheikh Ahmad Yassine (Palestine), à Moqtada Sadr (Irak) et Hassan Nasrallah (Liban), tous ont eu l’honneur d’assumer cette fonction sans que jamais personne n’ait songé à établir un lien entre l’arrogance occidentale et la radicalisation des contestataires de sa suprématie.

Munich, spécialité française, est d’autant plus vigoureusement brandie que les socialistes, plutôt répressifs en ce domaine, n’ont jamais apporté le moindre soutien aux guerres de libération du tiers-monde. Pour exemple, Léon Blum, le chef du gouvernement du « Front Populaire » ne lèvera pas le petit doigt pour le « Fronte Popular » espagnol, ses confrères Républicains, lors de la guerre d’Espagne (1936) et Guy Mollet agressera l’Égypte nassérienne, ordonnant en prolongement les ratonnades d’Alger. C’est Pierre Cot, ministre communiste de l’aviation du gouvernement Léon Blum et son directeur de Cabinet, le mythique Jean Moulin, de connivence avec André Malraux qui doteront les Républicains espagnols de l’escadrille ESPANA.

Alors Harlem Désir, Munich, la Chambre des Communes qui a infligé une retentissante leçon de démocratie à la France ? Munich, Barack Obama, qui a jugé plus conforme à l’éthique démocratique de prendre l’avis des représentants de la nation ?

Munich, l’Inde qui a vaincu le colonialisme par la non-violence ? Munich, l’Afrique du Sud qui triomphé de la ségrégation raciale par une réconciliation nationale et non par la stigmatisation ? Munich, le Pape François qui prie pour la paix en Syrie quand le mufti de l’Otan, le prédicateur millionnaire du Qatar, Youssef Al Qaradawi, supplie que la Syrie soit bombardée par ces anciens colonisateurs ?

Munich à la manière de Guy Mollet, comme en 1956…. Le changement, c’est maintenant ? Ou tout bonnement Harlem Désir, tête brûlée pour une politique de terre brûlée.

Les Palestiniens, les Sudètes du XXI e siècle

Dans sa démarche vis-à-vis de la Syrie, François Hollande, nous a chuchoté le quotidien Le Monde -jamais avare de confidence dès lors qu’il s’agit d’épauler le nouveau pouvoir socialiste au point de lui servir d’amplificateur médiatique et de relais diplomatique-, est hanté par le précédent de la Tchécoslovaquie et le sort des Sudètes (1938) qu’Hitler absorba sans crier gare du fait de la passivité européenne, résultante des accords de Munich.

Le conditionnement idéologique est tel, la servitude intellectuelle si forte que les ravages de la pensée socialiste paraissent incommensurables. Ainsi Laurent Fabius, qui passe, à tort, pour être l’un des esprits les plus brillants de la République, préconisait avec morgue et suffisance d’armer l’opposition syrienne pour établir une parité militaire et créer les conditions équilibrées à une négociation avec le pouvoir syrien. Il suggérait de même une action énergique en vue de favoriser le retour des réfugiés syriens dans leur pays. Préoccupation humanitaire légitime qui aurait pu honorer son auteur si elle s’était accompagnée d’une requête similaire concernant les Palestiniens, dépouillés, exilés et déplacés, eux, depuis soixante ans…Eux, les véritables Les Sudètes du XXI me siècle.

« La Syrie, le drame du XXIe siècle » ? La Syrie ou l’Irak ?

Le premier drame du XXIe siècle est non la Syrie, comme le soutient François Hollande, mais l’Irak tant par son antériorité que par son ampleur. L’Irak où s’est refusé à s’enliser Jacques Chirac et non la Syrie ou se sont laissés embourbés Nicolas Sarkozy et François Hollande, deux philo-sionistes atlantistes patentés. « Des néoconservateurs américains avec un passeport français », selon l’expression du transfuge socialiste Eric Besson.

Sauf à concéder à l’auteur de ce constat l’excuse de troubles précoces de mémoire, une telle approximation est inexcusable. Que dire de l’Irak, désormais dénommé « Le pays des veuves » ? Invasion américaine, Daech.., Mossoul, Falloujah, près de deux millions de victimes. Et des dizaines d’autres quotidiennement depuis treize ans.

La prostitution en guise de survie alimentaire. Quatre millions d‘exilés, sans la moindre assistance humanitaire. De l’Uranium appauvri, arme de destruction massive prohibée par le droit international, abondamment utilisé contre biens et personnes par « le plus vieil allié de la France » et son nouveau partenaire dans l’équipée syrienne. Un fait avéré, qui ne fera l’objet de la moindre enquête dans l’ancien journal de référence Le Monde, davantage soucieux de faire office de caisse de résonance au Quai d’Orsay avec ses enquêtes préprogrammés et ses blogs relais.

Le tropisme philo-sioniste ou le prurit belligène du socialisme français.

De l’expédition de Suez contre Nasser, en 1956, ordonnée par Guy Mollet, aux ratonnades d’Alger par Robert Lacoste (1955-1958), au caillassage de Lionel Jospin à Bir Zeit pour avoir traité de « terroriste » le Hezbollah libanais, l’unique formation politico-militaire du monde arabe à avoir infligé un double revers militaire à Israël (2000-2006), à l’esplanade David Ben Gourion dédiée par Khoyya Bertrand Delanoë, le Maire de Paris, au fondateur de l’armée israélienne au lendemain de l’attaque navale israélienne contre un convoi humanitaire turc en direction de Gaza…. Le registre est connu et bien tenu.

La filiation est lointaine et ne se dément pas, remontant au grand manitou du socialisme français, Léon Blum, qui invoquera son « trop d’amour » pour son pays « pour désavouer l’expansion de la pensée et de la civilisation française », admettant « le droit et même le devoir des races supérieures d’attirer à elles celles qui ne sont pas parvenues au même degré de culture ». Cette profession de foi surprenante est parue dans le journal « Le Populaire » en date du 17 juillet 1926, sans que ce vénérable humaniste, premier chef du gouvernement socialiste de la France moderne, artisan des premières conquêtes sociales sous le gouvernement du Front Populaire (1936), ne se doute que, lui-même, à son tour, subira, quinze ans plus tard, les lois de l’infériorité raciale de la part de ses compatriotes non coreligionnaires.

La relève : Manuel Valls et Laurent Fabius (4)

L’éviction de la vie politique française de Dominique Strauss Khan, un des parangons d’Israël, de même que la dérive xénophobe du gouvernement israélien matérialisée par la présence au sein du cabinet de l’ultra droitier Avigdor Libermann, ministre des Affaires étrangères puis de la défense, n’ont pas pour autant réduit la vigueur du tropisme pro-israélien au sein de la hiérarchie socialiste, en ce que la relève est désormais pleinement assurée par Manuel Valls, un sarkozyste de gauche, dont il a hérité de son poste à Beauvau, ainsi que Laurent Fabius.

Manuel Valls, lié de son propre aveu, « de manière éternelle à la communauté juive et à Israël », stigmatise le boycott d’Israël, mais non la phagocytose de la Palestine ou sa rétention des recettes d’exportation des produits de Cisjordanie. Il se place ainsi sur la même longueur que Richard Prasquier, le président du CRIF, dont la tonitruance inconditionnellement pro-israélienne s’accommode mal du positionnement qui se veut « normal » du nouveau président français. En résonance avec son comportement abusivement dilatoire dans l’affaire Georges Ibrahim Abdallah où la diplomatie française a subi les diktats de Hillary Clinton à l’époque secrétaire d’État.

Laurent Fabius : L’esbroufe comme mode opératoire.

L’esbroufe aura été son mode opératoire. De même que le mépris et la morgue, ses deux plus implacables ennemis. En trois ans de parade au Quai d’Orsay, Laurent Fabius aura poussé les travers français à leurs expressions les plus extrêmes. Donné toute la mesure de ses faux talents, un mélange de malveillance, de bonne conscience, d’outrecuidance, de morgue et de mauvaise foi (5).

La propulsion du premier ministre des Affaires étrangères de François Hollande à la tête d’une prestigieuse institution, clé de voûte du système juridique et politique français, loin de constituer le couronnement d’une carrière publique exemplaire, paraît devoir s’apparenter à une opération d’évacuation par le haut d’un personnage à bien des égards calamiteux, en application du vieux adage latin, plein de sagesse, « Promoveatur ut Amoveatur » dont la traduction administrative courante se décline en français par le principe anglais du « Principe de Peter ». Au delà des lauriers, au delà des louanges, la propulsion de Laurent Fabius à la présidence du Conseil Constitutionnel signe sa congélation politique ad vitam dans un placard doré, terme ultime d’un parcours désastreux.
En fait Laurent Fabius avait été déjà carbonisé en direct par ses amis américains incommodés par son rôle de « bad cop » tant dans les négociations sur le nucléaire iranien que sur un éventuel règlement politique en Syrie.

Les révélations de la presse américaine sur les frasques casinotières de l’aîné des Fabuis, Thomas, -sur des faits datant de 2013 mais fuités le 29 octobre 2015 à la veille de la première conférence multilatérale de Vienne sur la Syrie-, ont retenti comme un rappel à l’ordre américain renvoyant à ses pénates le paternel de l’enfant prodige.
En lui suggérant de se préoccuper de ses affaires domestiques plutôt que de se trémousser dans la gestion des affaires du Monde, les États-Unis lui montraient par là même le chemin de la sortie.

Les attentats de Paris-Bataclan quinze jours plus tard, le 13 novembre 2015, à la veille du deuxième round de Vienne, ont signé la fin de sa lévitation en même temps qu’ils scellaient son sort en ce que de nombreux observateurs ont perçu ce massacre collectif de Parisiens comme la sanction d’une politique erratique du socialo motoriste François Hollande en tandem avec son âme damné Fabiuçius.

Bachar Al Assad « ne mérite pas d’être sur terre »

Bachar Al-Assad « ne mérite pas d’être sur terre ». Laurent Fabius ne s’imagine sans doute pas les millions de personnes qui ont formulé pareil vœu à son égard tant sa morgue, sa suffisance et ses outrances verbales ont indisposé et choqué venant du chef de la diplomatie d’un pays réputé pour sa courtoisie et sa finesse d’esprit.

Le plus capé des socialistes, réputé pour ces somnolences dans les forums internationaux, passera ainsi dans l’histoire comme « le petit télégraphiste des Israéliens dans les négociations sur le nucléaire iranien », le piètre pensionnaire du Quai d’Orsay de la gauche française, à l’égal du transfuge sarkozyste du socialisme Bernard Kouchner.

François Hollande, non un homme de poids, mais un homme empesé

Atteint de plein fouet sur le plan domestique par les gazouillis de la « Première peste de France » , caramélisé sur le plan international par la défection de ses deux alliés atlantistes, les États-Unis et le Royaume Uni, François Hollande, en dépit d’une reprise pondérale n’est pas un homme de poids, mais un homme empesé, affligé d’une posture dépareillée par un langage suranné, secondé par le pire ministre socialiste des Affaires étrangères de la Vème République.

En contre pied de l‘aîné corrézien passé à la postérité pour sa gestuelle gaulliste de Chirac d’Irak, le point d‘orgue de sa double mandature par ailleurs calamiteuse, le cadet socialiste de Tulle, à dix ans de distance, s’est laissé happé par la tourmente d’un « anus horribilis », Scipion l’Africain du Mali, en janvier 2013, Général Flamby en Syrie, à l’automne de la même année, une performance qui sonnait prématurément son crépuscule diplomatique.
Camouflet supplémentaire, « le plus vieille allié des États Unis » n’a pas échappé à l’espionnage de son partenaire outre atlantique, qui lui a dérobé près de 70 millions de communications électroniques entre décembre 2012 et Janvier 2013, en pleine campagne du Mali et de Syrie. Véritable dindon de la farce, que n’a-t-il perçu cela avant de s’engouffrer dans la brèche syrienne alors que ce scandale marquait et l’affaiblissement et la duplicité des États Unis.

Ségolène Royal, meilleure présidente que François Hollande.

En cinq ans de gouvernance, seul fait indubitable, François Hollande par ses bourdes successives pourrait accréditer l’idée que Ségolène Royal, la précédente postulante socialiste à la magistrature suprême, aurait fait meilleure présidente que lui, dans tous les cas de figure, qu’il a, comble de cynisme, lui, en tant que secrétaire général du PS, elle, en sa qualité de la mère de ses quatre enfants, plaqué au paroxysme de la campagne présidentielle ; indice indiscutable d’une grandeur d’âme.

Quarante ans après Epinay, le glorieux parti de Jean Jaurès, le parti du conquérant François Mitterrand qui rêvait d’un dépassement du socialisme par l’Europe n’est plus que l’ombre de lui-même. Un syndicat de barons arc boutés sur des privilèges surannés. Sans créativité, ni réactivité. Sans novation ni innovation. Sans vitalité. Un électro-encéphalogramme plat.

La Syrie apparaîtra rétrospectivement comme l’ultime expédition post coloniale d’un pays en déclin : « Parmi les grands perdants de la mondialisation, parmi les grands perdants de l’Européanisation », selon l’expression de Marcel Gauchet (6), la France de François Hollande figure aussi parmi les grands perdants en Syrie et, indice patent de la déflagration mentale des socialistes français, les meilleurs alliés des Saoudiens et néoconservateurs américains, des néo conservateurs israéliens.

« JE RESTERAI TOUJOURS UN AMI D’ISRAËL » « Tamid esha’er haver shel Israel ! »*

Accueilli en grande pompe par Benyamin Netanyahou, dès son atterrissage à Tel-Aviv, François Hollande entendait visiblement faire honneur au « tapis rouge » que le premier ministre droitier avait annoncé dérouler pour la visite du président français. Au point de le clamer, en hébreu dans le texte : « Je resterai toujours un ami d’Israël ».

Une déclaration qu’aucun des présidents français n‘avait osé faire auparavant, pas même Nicolas Sarkozy, qui passait jusqu’à présent comme le plus philo-sioniste des dirigeants français. Chapeau l’artiste socialiste tel qu’en lui-même l’éternité le figera. CF : Le « chant d’amour » de François Hollande « pour Israël et ses dirigeants ».

Malheur aux vaincus : L’ingratitude est la loi cardinale des peuples pour leur survie. Le naufrage collectif du socialisme français portera les noms de Dominique Strauss Khan et Jérôme Cahuzac, de parfaits représentants de la déliquescence du socialisme et non de sa quintessence, de même que sur le plan diplomatique, le nom du tandem comique Laurel et Hardy, alias Lolo et Flamby, une risée planétaire.

Référence

▻http://www.gala.fr/l_actu/news_de_stars/exclu_-_julie_gayet_et_francois_hollande_leurs_stratagemes_pour_garder_leur_his

1- La première peste de France :
▻http://www.madaniya.info/2014/10/02/journalisme-metier-deontologie sport-combat/

▻http://www.grazia.fr/societe/phenomenes/articles/valerie-trierweiler-la-premiere-peste-de-france-487191

2-Scipion l’Africain (Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus) est un général et homme d’État romain, né en 235 av. J.-C. mort en 183 av. J.-C. à Linterne en Campanie. Vaincu par le carthaginois Hannibal Barca à la bataille de Cannes, près de l’actuelle Canossa, il s’emploiera à prendre sa revanche à sa nomination Consul en 205 av. J.-C. A la tête d’une armada de 50 vaisseaux de guerre et 400 navires de transport, emportant près de 35.000 soldats, il passe en Afrique. Deux ans plus tard, il réussit à vaincre le général Carthaginois Hannon et prend le titre Scipion l’africain.

3-Flamby : Pâtisserie sans œufs ni crème désigne péjorativement un être mollasson et onctueux. Sobriquet réservé à François Hollande avant son accession à la présidence de la république française.

4-Le gouvernement Ayrault satisfait les Français d’Israël
▻http://jssnews.com/2012/05/16/ayrault1

Ainsi qu’ à propos du tropisme socialiste à l’égard d’Israël : La France gagnée par le sionisme, par Eyal Sivan
►http://www.rue89.com/2013/10/07/eyal-sivan-cineaste-israelien-france-est-gagnee-sionisme-246345

5-Laurent Fabuis et la réforme du droit de veto au Conseil de sécurité de l’ONU ►http://www.madaniya.info/2016/02/10/5762

6-Marcel Gauchet in « Les quatre failles d’une présidence », Le Monde en date du 1er octobre 2013, article de Françoise Fressoz, page 6.

Illustration

François Hollande et son prix, entourés notamment (de gauche à droite) par le milliardaire Carlos Slim et l’ancien secrétaire d’Etat Henry Kissinger le 19 septembre 2016. AFP PHOTO / STEPHANE DE SAKUTIN

▻http://www.renenaba.com

Pourquoi, malgré les efforts intenses exercés par des forces internes et externes, le système iranien ne s’est-il pas effondré ?
▻http://www.middleeasteye.net/fr/opinions/pourquoi-la-r-publique-islamique-d-iran-ne-s-est-elle-pas-effondr-e-1

[...]

5. Soutien populaire

Ce qui préserve le pouvoir du régime est sa base de partisans, à savoir les chiites conservateurs. Aucun sondage transparent n’est disponible pour fournir des données précises sur ceux qui s’opposent au régime et ceux qui le soutiennent. Cependant, après les élections contestées de 2009, qui se sont conclues par la victoire de Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, alors représentant du camp conservateur, Ken Ballen, le président de Terror Free Tomorrow : The Center for Public Opinion, une organisation qui étudie les attitudes envers l’extrémisme, et Patrick Doherty, de la New America Foundation, écrivaient dans le Washington Post : « Alors qu’au cours des jours précédents les élections, les médias occidentaux dépeignaient un public iranien enthousiaste vis-à-vis du principal adversaire d’Ahmadinejad, Mir Hossein Moussavi, notre échantillonnage scientifique à travers la totalité des 30 provinces d’Iran montrait qu’Ahmadinejad était largement en tête ».

Peu importe quel camp dispose de la majorité, la réalité est que la société iranienne est fragmentée entre les forces de la tradition (les conservateurs) et celles de la modernité (les musulmans libéraux et les laïcs). La réalité est également que les deux factions sont vastes et ne peuvent être ignorées. Les conservateurs soutiennent le système pleinement et avec constance, en raison notamment de leurs croyances religieuses et du fait qu’ils jouissent d’avantages dont sont privés leurs adversaires. Ils sont considérés par le système comme des khodi, de l’intérieur, alors que les autres sont considérés comme des nakhodi, de l’extérieur. Ces forces sociales sont présentes à tous les niveaux de la société, de l’administration aux écoles et universités, en passant par les grands groupes industriels.

En cas d’un soulèvement de leurs adversaires, les conservateurs, et tout particulièrement les groupes d’auto-défense de jeunes, les contrent en utilisant la force et des manifestations de masse. Ils ont de toute évidence le soutien de l’appareil sécuritaire, les GRI et la police. Cette force est l’élément principal de la pérennité du pouvoir de la République islamique.

Dit simplement, le rôle de l’islam dans la mobilisation de la population iranienne ne devrait pas être sous-estimé, comme l’illustre cette vidéo de l’Achoura datée de 2013, un jour solennel de deuil en hommage au martyr en l’an 680 de l’Imam Hussein, le troisième Imam du chiisme, montrant des commémorations de deuil à travers tout le pays.

Iran’s Booming Consumer Culture

During his visit to Cuba in 2012, former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said, “Thankfully we are already witnessing that the capitalist system is in decay, on various stages it has come to a dead end — politically, economically and culturally.”

But the changes that have been taking place in Iran in the last few years seem to contradict this.

Despite slow mobile internet connections, high prices for imported – most of the time smuggled – technological products, and constant governmental censorship of the media, Iranians are frantically buying smartphones, tablets and flat screen TVs.

Shopping has became a near obsessive ritual for young people, and especially women, who have now turned to buying beauty products and high-end western brands to fill in the void of entertainment options and to “rebel“ against the array of restrictions they are subjected to.

Even if traditional Grand bazaars continue to be the favorite places to shop for regular Iranians, they now face competition from huge shopping malls, which were erected in the outskirts of major cities across the country. And these offer western-style hypermarkets, international brands and colourful gaming arcades to list just a few temptations.

In his recent opinion piece for Al Jazeera, Dott. Richard Javad Heydarian described Iran “as one of the most promising economies of the 21st century – and perhaps the next China”, a lion ready to awake.

Perhaps “the lion“ is getting ready – In the last few months we have witnessed improved relations between Iran and the West, while the upcoming negotiations for the lifting of the sanctions could pave the way for even more changes in the country and consequently also within the region.

— Thomas Cristofoletti

https://dd978y4vwod92.cloudfront.net/uploads/photos/images/419570/8258d4f5499b6e84e340fb86e685f34c-large.jpg https://dd978y4vwod92.cloudfront.net/uploads/photos/images/419571/007cb2ccb3917bccc6b4869f19429fdc-large.jpg https://dd978y4vwod92.cloudfront.net/uploads/photos/images/419562/ed1340c176b29c3fce11f0c175fcd737-large.jpg

▻https://www.lensculture.com/articles/thomas-cristofoletti-iran-s-booming-consumer-culture
#photographie #consumérisme #Iran #reportage_photo
via @albertocampiphoto

Iran parliament rejects Rouhani’s science minister pick
▻http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=68973

The Iranian parliament overwhelmingly rejected President Hassan Rouhani’s pick for science minister on Tuesday — the third time they have done so in little more than a year.

[…]

The post of Minister of Science, Research and Technology is sensitive because it involves oversight of Iran’s universities and students, whose political activities are heavily monitored by the regime.

[…]

On Tuesday, lawmakers aired a video of Danesh-Ashtiani in 2009, in which he was shown to call for the closure of universities in protest at the controversial re-election of president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

[…]

Lawmakers criticised Faraji Dana — who was Rouhani’s second choice — for appointing too many officials with links to the so-called “seditionist” movement that took to the streets in protest after Ahmadinejad’s re-election.

Iran is far more progressive on social issues than you might think

▻http://www.yourmiddleeast.com/culture/iran-is-far-more-progressive-on-social-issues-than-you-might-think_2

http://www.yourmiddleeast.com/media/news/images/2014/image1412578644-27054-PlaceID-0_s660x390.jpg

In 2007, when former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared during a Columbia University appearance, “In Iran we don’t have homosexuals like in your country,” many chuckled. It seemed to verify the average person’s preconceptions of the country as being primitive and socially backwards. Ahmadinejad was obviously wrong and his response spotlighted the fact that homophobia is a major issue in Iranian society. The event wasn’t meant to facilitate a productive discussion on the Islamic Republic’s many failings though, it was meant to reassure Columbia students and faculty of their own progressiveness. Ahmadinejad got a podium. The audience got a way to criticize his ideological beliefs.

Orientalist thinking like this obviously has consequences in how we discuss and view Iran. It isn’t just that we have trouble discussing the many problems that do exist in the country, such as human rights violations. We are also prevented from recognizing when Iran is doing things more or less right. Iran is actually far more progressive than many people realize on a number of issues. This is especially apparent when it comes to: organ donations, family planning, transgender surgery, drug rehabs, stem cell research, and HIV prevention.

#Iran #santé #recherche #LGBT #drogue #femmes

cc @alaingresh cc @mona

Iran, reportage intellectuel 1978-2014 | Avant-propos
▻http://www.vacarme.org/article2640.html

L’élection surprenante de Hassan Rohani dès le premier tour de la présidentielle iranienne de juin 2013 a suscité, sinon la satisfaction unanime, du moins un soulagement étrange. Les électeurs iraniens ont interprété la victoire d’un « modéré » comme la leur contre l’absolutisme du régime islamique et les États occidentaux l’ont considérée comme une chance pour la diplomatie et la reprise des négociations autour de la question nucléaire. Il faut en effet préciser que cette élection est survenue au terme du second mandat de Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, entaché en particulier par la répression violente du mouvement protestataire postélectoral de juin 2009, baptisé « Mouvement vert ». Ce mouvement, le plus important qu’ait connu l’État islamique depuis sa fondation en 1979 et qui a largement surpris l’opinion publique internationale, non seulement par son ampleur mais surtout par la modernité de son mode d’action et de sa revendication, a été en quelque sorte le précurseur des révolutions arabes de 2010-2011.

#Iran_reportage_intellectuel_1978-2014

The Brotherhood and #Iran: An Islamic alliance against strife?
▻http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/brotherhood-and-iran-islamic-alliance-against-strife

http://english.al-akhbar.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/4cols/leading_images/AMR071R_SYRIA-CRISIS-ISLAMIC_0206_11.jpg

Former Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi (C) attends a meeting with Turkish President Abdullah Gul and Iran’s former president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, after the opening of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) summit in Cairo February 6, 2013.(Photo: Reuters/Egyptian Presidency/Handout) Former Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi (C) attends a meeting with Turkish President Abdullah Gul and Iran’s former president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, after the opening of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) summit in Cairo February 6, 2013.(Photo: Reuters/Egyptian Presidency/Handout)

When the first swallows of the Arab Spring began singing in Tunisia and #Egypt, Iran described the revolutions as an Islamic awakening. "The Arab (...)

#Opinion #Articles #Hamas #Muslim_Brotherhood #Saudi_Arabia #syria #Tehran

Rohani: #Iran economic issues go beyond Western sanctions
▻http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/rohani-iran-economic-issues-go-beyond-western-sanctions

http://english.al-akhbar.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/4cols/leading_images/715650-01-08.jpg

From left to right, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif, President Hassan Rohani and Azerbaijan’s Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov attend the opening session of a two-day ministerial conference of the Economic Cooperation Organisation (ECO) in Tehran on November 26, 2013. (Photo: AFP - Atta Kenare)

President Hassan Rohani said Iran’s economic problems went beyond sanctions, blaming “unparalleled stagflation” on the profligacy and mismanagement of his predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In office from 2005 until August, Ahmadinejad presided over a period of unprecedented revenue growth due to high oil prices but, analysts say, squandered much of it on subsidies that pumped money into the economy and drove up inflation. read (...)

#Top_News

Max Blumenthal’s “Goliath” seen as threat at heart of Israel’s propaganda machinery
▻http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/benjamin-doherty/max-blumenthals-goliath-seen-threat-heart-israels-propaganda-mac

The pair met a decade earlier in the Israeli army where, the company press release states, “they both were entrusted with revising the Army’s strategic media infrastructure.”

In 2010, Thunder11 created Iran180, an astroturf operation posing deceptively as a “human rights” group. Its real goal was to demonize and incite confrontation with Iran.

Iran180’s most notorious activities have included street performances depicting sexual assaults and intended to portray former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a gay Jew. Other Iran180 productions include bizarre music videos that portray Ahmadinejad defecating and him and Bashar al Assad as misogynistic, married gay men.

Hassan Rohani à l’ONU : une nouvelle rhétorique empreinte de prudence | Nouvelles d’Iran
▻http://keyhani.blog.lemonde.fr/2013/09/25/que-signifie-le-discours-de-hassan-rohani-a-lonu

S’il faut retenir un seul enseignement du premier discours du président iranien, Hassan Rohani, devant l’Assemblée générale des Nations unies, mardi 24 septembre, c’est qu’il a avant tout cherché à ne pas s’attirer les foudres des plus conservateurs en Iran, d’où ses nombreuses critiques faites à l’Occident et particulièrement aux Etats-Unis et leur politique de « l a guerre froide ».

On sent bien toute la sympathie de « la rédaction du Monde » pour l’Iran…

Hassan Rohani a également écarté cette théorie selon laquelle l’Iran représenterait une vraie « menace ». Selon le président iranien, cette « menace imaginaire » a été « développée et maintenue pour faire oublier une longue liste de crimes pendant les trois dernières décennies », dont celles d’" avoir donné à Saddam Hussein des armes chimiques « et d’ » avoir soutenu les talibans et les membres d’Al-Qaida ".
(…)
Dans une autre attaque contre l’Occident et notamment contre les Etats-Unis, M. Rohani a condamné l’utilisation des drones contre les innocents et aussi "l’assassinat des scientifiques nucléaires iraniens ", que Téhéran impute à des iraniens, formés en Israël.

Mais où va-t-il chercher tout ça ?

On sent bien, aussi, que la rédaction du Monde regrette déjà Ahmadinejad…

Quelles différences avec son prédécesseur, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ?
Peu après sa première élection en 2005, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad s’était prononcé devant l’Assemblée générale des Nations unies. Pendant ce discours, il avait fustigé les Etats-Unis et également le fonctionnement de l’ONU. La question nucléaire iranienne avait été au centre de ses propos.
(…)
Pour son dernier discours, en septembre 2012, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad avait adopté un ton plutôt prophétique, annonçant un « printemps » pour toutes les nations, faisant manifestement allusion au retour du douzième imam chiite, l’imam Mehdi.

Obama Reference to Fatwa Makes Iran Hardliners Take Note
▻http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/09/obama-rouhani-unga-fatwa-iran.html

After the speech, an informed Reformist source reminded Al-Monitor, “The fatwa isn’t new, and Ayatollah Khamenei has highlighted it several times, as did the former president [Mahmoud Ahmadinejad].” Indeed, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued the fatwa against the pursuit and possession of nuclear weapons on Feb. 22, 2012. 

Assessing what Obama had done, the source continued, “But those at the top in Tehran believe Obama wanted to send a clear message to them — that the US is ready for the confidence-building process.” The source further explained that a decision had been made in Tehran, with the blessings of Ayatollah Khamenei, to seize every opportunity to respond to the issue of the nuclear program. He added, “Given that Iran has nothing to hide, mutual trust will certainly lead to a place where both Iran and the West can manage their differences.”

En regard, également, de la déclaration de Nasrallah sur les armes chimiques :
▻http://seenthis.net/messages/178207

Il faut savoir que, pour le Hezbollah, les armes chimiques sont prohibées dans notre religion.

Twitter / AnneRenaut : Poignée de main historique ...
▻https://twitter.com/AnneRenaut/status/382573421848035328

Poignée de main historique France-Iran #UNGA via @franceonu

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BU8qhnbCMAAGoUj.jpg

tandis que

Israeli Diplomats Mock Iran’s President Online
By ROBERT MACKEY
▻http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/24/israeli-diplomats-mock-irans-president-online/?smid=tw-thelede&seid=auto&_r=0

On a day when President Obama told delegates at the United Nations that he welcomed the opportunity posed by diplomatic overtures from Iran’s new president, Israeli diplomats in Washington sounded a very different note online, mocking the moderate cleric as scarcely different from his predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

A message posted on the official Twitter page of the Israeli Embassy on Tuesday morning drew attention to a parody LinkedIn account for President Hassan Rouhani. The mock résumé of Mr. Rouhani’s career, filled with sarcastic asides, described him as “President of Iran, Expert Salesman, PR Professional, Nuclear Proliferation Advocate.”

Un excellent Robert Fisk (pour une fois), qui dénonce l’escalade des clichés en Syrie : This bombardment of Syria clichés shows no sign of stopping
▻http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/this-bombardment-of-syria-clichs-shows-no-sign-of-stopping-8798719.ht

And then yet once more – how tired can you get of this mulch? – Kerry also felt he could compare Assad to Hitler. This is preposterous. Over a hundred thousand Syrians may well have died in this terrible war. But Hitler started a war that may have killed 70 million. Does Kerry maybe think that Hitler is still alive? The late Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin thought that when he fantasized in a letter to Ronnie Reagan when he was invading Lebanon in 1982 that he felt he was advancing on Berlin (Arafat was the man in the bunker). And not long ago the now Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told us all that the crackpot president of Iran (Mahmoud Ahmedinejad at the time) was “worse than Hitler”. So let’s have it just one more time: HITLER IS DEAD.

Zahra, la femme qui voulait être présidente d’Iran • un roman graphique de Amir & Khalil | Courrier international
▻http://www.courrierinternational.com/evenement/zahra

Dans « Zahra’s paradise » [Ed.Casterman, sept.2011], Amir, l’auteur, et Khalil, le dessinateur relatent l’histoire d’une mère qui recherche son fils, disparu lors des manifestations qui ont suivi la réélection de Mahmoud Ahmadinejad en 2009. Cette année, à l’occasion de la présidentielle iranienne, les auteurs ont imaginé une suite à l’histoire de Zahra. Celle-ci se présente comme candidate virtuelle dans une élection où les femmes n’ont pas le droit de se faire élire. A travers Zahra, les auteurs brossent un portrait de l’Iran actuel. On y voit une population très marquée par la répression qui a suivi 2009, et par une grave crise économique due aux sanctions internationales contre le programme nucléaire de Téhéran.

▻http://courriermedias.courrierinternational.com/webdocs/zahra/images/1.jpg

Les premiers épisodes de ce nouveau roman graphique sont publiés au fur et à mesure sur leur site par les auteurs.
Courrier international publie en exclusivité les premiers chapitres traduits en français.

Forte participation en Iran pour élire le successeur de Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - PRÉSIDENTIELLE IRANIENNE - FRANCE 24
▻http://www.france24.com/fr/20130614-debut-election-presidentielle-iranien-vote-bureaux-ouverture-ahma

Apparemment les citoyens iraniens, contrairement aux dirigeants occidentaux ( souvent élus avec un taux de participation bien moindre) et leurs subordonnés arabes (auto-élus le plus souvent), n’ont pas considéré les élections de leur président comme étant sans enjeu.

Quelque 50 milions d’électeurs étaient appelés aux urnes ce vendredi 14 juin pour désigner le successeur du président Mahmoud Ahmadinejad à la tête de la République islamique d’Iran, après deux mandats de quatre ans. L’affluence était telle que le ministère de l’Intérieur a dû prolonger de quatre heures la clôture du scrutin. Selon le responsable des opérations de vote pour la province de Téhéran, Safar-Ali Baratlou, la participation devrait atteindre au moins 70 % dans cette région. Différents responsables locaux ont également fait état dans les médias d’une participation d’au moins 70% à 18 heures locales dans d’autres provinces.

REVUE DE LA PRESSE IRANIENNE PAR POMED

Iran Weekly Update - May 10, 2013
▻http://us2.campaign-archive1.com/?u=8a185f96ecfeb10569f5120d0

 
 
Presidential Candidate Registration Begins:
The registration period for the upcoming presidential election began on Tuesday. According to Interior Minister Mostafa Mohammad-Najjar, 243 individuals have submitted applications, including: former nuclear negotiator Hassan Rouhani; Mohammad-Reza Aref, Vice President under Mohammad Khatami and Expediency Council member; Kamran Bagheri Lankarani, a conservative former Health Minister; Ali Fallahian, a conservative member of the Assembly of Experts and former Minister of Intelligence; and Mostafa Kavakebian, a former reform-leaning MP. The registration period will end on Saturday evening.
 
Sources: 
Mohammad-Reza Aref Registers as Presidential Candidate BBC Persian [Persian], 5/10/2013
243 Register in 3 Days Fars News Agency [Persian], 5/9/2013 
Candidate Wanted by Interpol Registers for Iran Elections Iran-Pulse [English], 5/9/2013
Iran’s Presidential Race Gets Underway Uskowi on Iran [English], 5/7/2013
Iran’s Presidential Candidates Begin Registration Process Iran-Pulse [English], 5/7/2013

Speculation Surrounding Rafsanjani and Mashaei:
Former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani made headlines Sunday after claiming that he intends to speak with Khamenei about his candidacy. Sadeq Zibakalam, a prominent political analyst, claims that Rafsanjani will eventually stand. On Friday, former President Khatami reiterated that, in his opinion, Rafsanjani is the best option. Other political experts believe there is a possibility that, in the absence of Rafsanjani’s candidacy, all three members of the 2+1 Coalition will register and run in the election, rather than choosing one unity candidate. Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel, a member of the 2+1 Coalition, seemed to confirm this option, saying, “…it is yet not clear when exactly we will announce the result [on the designated unity candidate],” but "the announcement will not take place” before the Guardian Council has completed the candidate vetting process. On Thursday, the conservative Coalition of Five became the first coalition to announce a unity candidate: former First Deputy-Speaker of the Parliament Mohammad Hassan Aboutorabi-Fard. In an interview published on Thursday, Bahman Sharifzadeh, a Mashaei supporter, asserted that Mashaei would register on the last day of the registration period. 
 
Sources:
Coalition of Three to name candidate after vetting process Press TV [English], 5/10/2013
The Best Presidential Option: Rafsanjani BBC Persian [Persian], 5/10/2013
2+1 Unity Candidate May Be Determined after Registration Fars News Agency [Persian], 5/9/2013
Sharifzadeh: “Mashaei to Register on Saturday” Entekhab [Persian], 5/9/2013
Rafsanjani Says He Won’t Run Without Khamenei’s Consent Iran-Pulse [English], 5/6/2013

New Minister of Labor Approved; Head of Medical Association Blocked:
On Sunday, Parliament approved President Ahmadinejad’s Minister of Labor nominee, MP Asadollah Abbasi. On Wednesday, reports emerged that the writ of approval for Iran’s new Medical Association head was sent to the office of President for the third time, with Ahmadinejad again refusing to sign it. Ahmadinejad’s refusal to sign the approval may stem from his dissatisfaction with the vetting process and the denial of his favored candidates during the Medical Association elections in February. 

Sources:
Majlis approves Abbasi as Labor Minister Tehran Times [English], 5/5/2013
Abbasi becomes Minister of Labor Entekhab [Persian], 5/5/2013 

Kahrizak Trial Continues:
On Tuesday, the seventh session of the Kahrizak trial was held behind closed doors. During the session, Director General of Tehran’s Prisons Sohrab Soleimani testified that the now-closed Kahrizak facility was not a legal detention center. One of the defendants, former Deputy Prosecutor Ali Akbar Heidarifar, argued that the Ministry of Justice’s failure to nullify the detainees’ imprisonment orders was tantamount to granting its approval for them. 
 
Sources:
Iran holds 7th court session to hear Kahrizak case Press TV [English], 5/8/2013
Judicial Documents Published on Website Kalameh [Persian], 5/8/2013
Judge Positively Evaluates Kahrizak Case Alef [Persian], 5/7/2013
 
Intelligence Ministry Releases Details of Government Scandal:
Earlier this week, Minister of Intelligence and presidential hopeful Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi released a report concerning a 450 million Euro scandal involving the government’s alleged construction contract in the free trade area of Kish. Reports indicate that construction proceeded without the appropriate auctioning procedures. The government has denied the allegations.
 
Sources:
Details of Government Scandal Published Kalameh [Persian], 5/8/2013
Intelligence Ministry Publishes Details of Scandal Alef [Persian], 5/7/2013
Attorney General Condemns Revealing Scandal BBC Persian [Persian], 5/6/2013 ❞

Le meilleur candidat à la présidence de l’Iran est-t-il une héroïne de BD ? · Global Voices en Français
▻http://fr.globalvoicesonline.org/2013/05/12/145902

http://globalvoicesonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/zahra2-375x137.png

La main de fer du régime iranien ne laisse aucune chance à des candidats de l’opposition de participer à la course à la présidence, mais dans le monde virtuel, le personnage d’un roman graphique qui vient de paraître s’est fait le champion d’une élection libre et honnête.

Des centaines d’Iraniens pleins d’espoirs ont fait acte de candidature [anglais] pour succéder au Président Mahmoud Ahmadinejad à l’élection qui se déroulera le 14 juin 2013. Le très conservateur Conseil des Gardiens s’apprête à établir la liste des candidats admis à se présenter effectivement.

Zahra Président

Le mouvement massif de protestation qui a éclaté après l’élection de 2009 reste présent dans beaucoup d’esprits. Le site militant United4Iran (Unis pour l’Iran) et le feuilleton en bande dessinée Zahra’s Paradise (Le Paradis de Zahra) ont lancé la campagne virtuelle Zahra Présidente 2013 pour exposer par la satire le système politique corrompu de l’Iran.

IRAN. PROJECT ON MIDDLE EAST DEMOCRACY (POMED) publie un rapport sur la politique de réforme et la prochaine élection présidentielle iranienne
▻http://pomed.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/POMED-Policy-Brief-Farhi.pdf

As the Islamic Republic of Iran approaches its eleventh presidential election, the conflicting impulses that have shaped its 34-year life are once again manifest. The constitutional mandate to hold regular elections, whose competitiveness helps legitimize the Islamic Republic and deepen the allegiance of its citizens to the Islamic system, is again confronted with the need to place limitations on the contest in order to prevent the candidacies of those branded as “outsiders.”
The upcoming contest comes on the heels of two bruising presidential elections in 2005 and 2009: the former went to a second round, while the latter resulted in large protests and a subsequent crackdown by the security establishment. Ghosts of both cast long shadows on
the coming election, though for different reasons. The traditional conservative political establishment is fretting over the possible emergence of another relatively unknown and highly polarizing candidate “not up to the task” of managing the government and economy, as was the case in the 2005 election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. From this perspective, trouble lies in the possibility of continued economic ruin and international isolation through a combination of populist policies, managerial incompetence, and stridence.
Uncertainty regarding Iran’s fluid political environment remains. There exists potential for a large number of votes cast against a “preferred” candidate, even at the last minute. The working assumption is that the electoral environment and the field of candidates will be manipulated to assure that the establishment candidate is elected without tampering on election day. But an “engineered” election was also the plan in 2009, when a presumably washed up and uncharismatic former
Prime Minister, Mir Hossein Mousavi, was approved to run against Ahmadinejad, whose populist policies at least assured him support
in rural areas and smaller cities. The 85 percent participation rate registered in 2009, which was 22 percent greater than the participation rate in 2005, was unexpected—and grounds for public skepticism and post-election protests.


Le jour où un agent américain a failli tuer Ahmadinejad par mégarde | Courrier international
▻http://www.courrierinternational.com/article/2013/03/21/le-jour-ou-un-agent-americain-a-failli-tuer-ahmadinejad-par-m

L’anecdote, racontée par The Atlantic, est tirée de Deep State : Inside the Government Secrecy Industry [L’Etat profond : voyage dans l’industrie gouvernementale du secret], un ouvrage (à paraître) des journalistes américains Marc Ambinder et D.B. Grady sur l’histoire des services secrets américains.

La scène, dont témoigne un ancien haut responsable de l’administration Bush, se déroule en septembre 2006, à l’occasion d’une Assemblée générale des Nations unies à laquelle participe le président de l’Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. « Un agent des services secrets, apparemment par erreur, a déchargé son fusil alors que le président s’apprêtait à rejoindre son cortège motorisé à la sortie de l’hôtel InterContinental (de New York). »

The Day the Secret Service Almost Shot Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
▻http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/04/deep-state/309260

Pakistan begins construction of Pakistan-Iran gas pipeline - World Socialist Web Site

▻http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/03/15/paki-m15.html

Pakistan begins construction of Pakistan-Iran gas pipeline
By Vilani Peiris and Sarath Kumara
15 March 2013

Amid US threats to impose sanctions on his country, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari joined Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a ceremony breaking ground on construction of the Pakistani portion of a planned Iran-Pakistan pipeline on Monday.

With national elections due in May, Zardari and his ruling Pakistan Peoples’ Party (PPP) will seek to gain electoral advantage by using the pipeline to posture as being independent from Washington. Iran sees the project as a way to counter the crippling economic sanctions the US has imposed on it, based on unsubstantiated allegations that Iran is developing nuclear weapons.

#énergie #transport #gaz #iran #pakistan