more bad publicity for Iran

There’s this story of an Iranian dissident who was jailed, beaten, and sexually assaulted by her captors—and who fled Iran and, unafraid, tells her story.

“But I know of no religious morality that can justify what they did to me, or other women. For these people, religion is only a tool for dictatorship and abuse. It is a regime of prejudice against women, against other regimes, against other ethnic groups, against anybody who thinks differently from them.”

And the Farceur-in-Chief of Iran has outdone himself, this time in an interview with the German magazine Spiegel:

Ahmadinejad: Let me ask you one thing: How much longer can this go on? How much longer do you think the German people have to accept being taken hostage by the Zionists? When will that end - in 20, 50, 1,000 years?

SPIEGEL: We can only speak for ourselves. DER SPIEGEL is nobody’s hostage; SPIEGEL does not deal only with Germany’s past and the Germans’ crimes. We’re not Israel’s uncritical ally in the Palestian conflict. But we want to make one thing very clear: We are critical, we are independent, but we won’t simply stand by without protest when the existential right of the state of Israel, where many Holocaust survivors live, is being questioned.

Ahmadinejad: Precisely that is our point. Why should you feel obliged to the Zionists? If there really had been a Holocaust, Israel ought to be located in Europe, not in Palestine.

And the New York Times raised the alarm bells (”Iran Chief Eclipses Power of Clerics”) the other day by publishing a frank assessment of the power play Ahmadinejad seems to have undertaken in Iran, and the backdrop against which this is happening:

Mr. Ahmadinejad is trying to outpace the challenges buffeting Iran, ones that could undermine his presidency and conservative control. The economy is in shambles, unemployment is soaring, and the new president has failed to deliver on his promise of economic relief for the poor. Ethnic tensions are rising around the country, with protests and terrorist strikes in the north and the south, and students have been staging protests at universities around the country.

Mr. Ahmadinejad’s critics—and there are many—say that the public will turn on him if he does not improve their lives, and soon. It may ultimately prove impossible to surmount these problems while building a new political elite, many people here said.

I wonder when I’m going to start hearing that these things, too, like the “utterly discredited” Yellow Badge for Iranian Jews story***, are neocon fabrications meant to stir American sentiment against Iran as a prelude to our “nuking” that country—that’s the tenor of the comments I’ve read all over the blogosphere.
The Iranians themselves, meanwhile, are busy accusing the U.S. and the Zionists of stirring sectarian tensions in their midst.

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***In my estimation, this story, despite the many claims that it was bogus, is still mysterious. No one has retracted the story that the Iranian parliament has considered or is considering a dress code for Iranians—which is the fundamental totalitarian evil at issue, as I mentioned here. That, of course was the gist of Taheri’s story: the dress code for Iranian Muslims. The fact that non-Muslim Iranians would have to wear distinctive and different clothing was, as I understood it, an extrapolation.
Now, Taheri has been denounced and smeared, along with anyone who associates with him. The speed with which intelligent people were so ready to make a final judgment about this story—and about Taheri and about his associates, and about anyone who defends him—is disturbing and upsetting.
from Daily Kos:

“The sole source for the pile of crap was Amir Taheri, an Iranian-born journalist with ties to warmongering neo-cons”

from AlterNet:

The story was pushed by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, whose penchant for backing-up right-wing fabrications has made it — in my mind — no longer a credible source.

The guy who wrote the Post article, Amir Taheri, is a writer for, among other pubs, the National Review and Murdoch’s New York Post. The National Post retracted the article hours after it was posted to their site, and blamed Taheri for the bad info.

Taheri’s pimped repped by Benador Associates, a public relations firm that has all the leading neocon nutcases.