Since my last foray into Iranian punditry a mere 24 hours ago, large demonstrations in support of Presidential challenger Mir Hossein Moussavi have been held in Tehran and other Iranian cities. The western mass media has been covering the protests feverishly.
Iran’s re-elected President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has been politely dismissive of claims that his victory is in doubt. AP reports that the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has directed a “high-level clerical panel, the Guardian Council, to look into charges by pro-reform candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, who has said he is the rightful winner of Friday’s presidential election” – see Iran supreme leader orders probe of election fraud
That same corporate slogan again - did Soros think it up?
Although most of the mainstream media coverage in the west casts aspersions about the legitimacy of the election result, Newsweek has an interesting article which takes a contrary view, more consistent with the analysis I suggested in Bad Losers, my opinion piece of yesterday.
The Changing Face of Iran by Christopher Dickey is by no means symapathetic to Ahmadinejad, but Dickey notes the strength of his support among the Iranian people as a whole:
It appears that the working classes and the rural poor—the people who do not much look or act or talk like us—voted overwhelmingly for the scruffy, scrappy president who looks and acts and talks more or less like them. And while Mousavi and his supporters are protesting and even scuffling with police, they are just as likely to be overwhelmed in the streets as they were at the polls.
Time Magazine, on the other hand, hasn’t been able to restrain it’s enthusiasm to spin the election story against Iran’s re-elected President. It’s online edition is running a headline that screams: Five Reasons to Suspect Iran’s Election Results. I located it through a Google search because I’m interested in testing the sustance of arguments that the election was rigged.
A pro-Mousavi demonstrator in Tehran: who does her message aim to influence?
Unfortunately, it left me none the wiser. The headline was not supported by any list of ‘reasons for doubt’. It was a headline without any body text. The mishmash of articles featured below the headline didn’t cover the topic either. This is trivia, perhaps – but gives an indication of the western mass media’s gung-ho approach to sustaining the momentum of Iranian protestors.
The protest crowd in Tehran on Monday was certainly much bigger than previous demonstrations. Late in the day, there was a fatal shooting. AFP reports
“the incident occurred in front of a local base of the Basij volunteer militia, which was set on fire… Pictures of the incident showed armed men, wearing helmets and in civilian clothes, pointing guns at the crowds from the rooftop of the base. The photographer said the protester was killed by shots fired by the armed men.“
Obama, interviewed in the White House, disavowed any desire to interfer in Iranian internal affairs, but said he was ‘deeply troubled’ by the turn of events. The USA, Britain and Australia have yet to formally accept the election outcome.
It’s all quite a contrast with The Lebanon a week before, when the losing Hizbollah-backed coalition calmly accepted defest – even though it came much closer on the official count than Moussavi in Iran.
A sceptic might ask who are the real democrats? Should the outcome of democractic elections be conditional on support from the Zionist-dominated mass media? I think not.
We’ve seen the results of that already in Gaza.
Time Magazine's Headline without an article
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UPDATE: Two articles in the Axis of Logic website supplement the basic approach to this issue that I’ve taken here. See:
