On Friday morning, Israel launched missile strikes on military bases near the Iranian city of Isfahan.

A desperate Netanyahu, seeing Western support for his total war on Gaza collapsing, began this tit-for-tat cycle by launching an assassination of Iranian Revolutionary Guards officers at the Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syria on April 1^st 2024.   The Israeli government knew what they were doing.  Netanyahu was baiting Tehran into a reaction, which he got.

Iran responded with a missile and drone barrage on April 13. Almost all these projectiles, however, were shot down by the United States, since Iran had openly telegraphed its intentions.

The context for this exchange of strikes is the Israeli assault on Gaza. Netanyahu’s government has killed more than 34,000 people.  The numbers are not clear, since the ones under the rubbles of Gaza cannot even be calculated.

14,000 children.

Today, Gaza is worse than Dresden after the war.  

Hamas, of course also committed atrocities against the Israeli population on October 7. Over 600 innocent, noncombatant Israelis were killed, alongside more than 400 Israeli military personnel.  Many of the civilians were peace-loving people, who disagreed with their own government’s punitive policies toward the Palestinians. The response of the far-right wing Netanyahu government, however, has been vastly disproportionate.

Another issue between the two countries has been Iran’s civilian nuclear enrichment program to create fuel for its reactor. Netanyahu fears that it can easily be militarized, and had created a spectacle at the UN showing off Iran’s alleged nuclear capabilities.   

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) refuted him, insisting that Iran has no military nuclear program.

Netanyahu’s charges obscured the imbalance of power between the two countries. Considering that Israel has 300 nukes, Iran, which has none, can be wiped off the map in a matter of minutes.

The IAEA’s assurances notwithstanding, the Israeli government under various Israeli administrations has assassinated nuclear scientists inside Iran. 

Israel, with the help of the expatriate Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) organization, which was until recently on the US State Department terrorism list, also stole nuclear data from Iran.

Then, Trump came along, and he withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal, to which Iran had scrupulously adhered, mothballing 80% of its civilian nuclear enrichment program for promised sanctions relief that was never granted.

The decision to rip up the deal was made in Tel Aviv, not in Washington. 

Now, Mr. Netanyahu  has a last chance to get his allies to rally behind him when both his support at home and internationally has dissipated. Since the war in Gaza has not gone well and has isolated his regime, his government, a very right-wing government, is looking for alternatives.

CNN Video: “Israel has attacked Iran, US official tells CNN”

The Islamic Republic has been been building deterrence by supporting the various groups in the Middle East, whether Houthis, Hezbollah or Hamas.

Several IRGC commanders were assassinated, including Ghassem Soleimani. 

The shadow war has continued.  Hezbollah launched missiles at the territory of Israel.   Houthis fired on cargo ships in support of Gaza. 

In his most recent speech at the UN, the Israeli ambassador compared the regime in Tehran to the Nazi regime.   How can an educated person even compare the two?  The Nazi regime eliminated millions of Jews and others. 

Iran has the largest Jewish community after Israel.  Khamenei is no Eichmann, despite what Netanyahu keeps alleging.

We, as Iranians and Iranian Americans wish for a better Iran without the rule of the clerics.   But not at the expense of the disintegration of Iran.  There is no question that has been Netanyahu’s wish. 

Many years ago, at a conference at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, I remember the notorious Michael Ledeen had invited non-various actors from different ethnic minorities of Iran. Those speaking on their behalf did not even represent the Iranian minorities.  At the end of the conference, where Paul Wolfowitz was also there, (the one who advised Bush to go to Iraq) all the speakers said we want a united Iran.

It was a total failure. 

To this day, Iran has been a united nation and Iran is a nation state. 

Iranians want a regime change but not by the help of any foreign entities, but rather with their own volition.

No war is going to solve anything.   We are all united against a war on Israel or the Israeli nation and on Iran and the Iranian nation.

We need clearer, sounder voices to come to the fore.

 In the words of the great Sufi poet of Iran, Rumi,

“Out beyond the idea
of right-doing and wrong-doing,
there is a field, I’ll meet you there.”

We are for peace.   But those in power in Israel and in Iran do not want peace. 

They are itching for war.

At the beginning of the Iranian revolution, the new regime in Tehran tried in vain to dissuade Iranians from celebrating this ancient feast, exhorting them to concentrate more on Islamic feasts.

It was no use. People fiercely resisted such policies and ended up celebrating Nowruz even more enthusiastically.

A day after this year’s Nowruz, on March 20th, a beloved artist/singer passed away from cancer in Maryland. He was seventy-eight years old. His name was Faramarz Aslani. We, the generation from before the Iranian revolution, grew up with his music, a mix of Spanish guitar and Persian melancholic lyrics.

Aslani, like so many singers who did not fit the new regime’s definition of culture, left Iran for England and eventually emigrated to the U.S. He continued to sing. His voice was deep, warm, and passionate, sometimes sad.

At the beginning of the Revolution, like so many artists and intellectuals, he was for change, not knowing what the future had in store. He sang a song depicting the struggle against the former regime in favor of the people’s movement. But soon, like so many he became disillusioned. His songs were forbidden and called taghouti, a Quranic term describing anything tyrannical and commonly used for the shah’s regime.

Yet, the youth in Iran still enjoyed his music and would listen clandestinely.

Over the years, things changed. I vividly remember that on one of my last trips to Iran, a large gathering of men and women and youngsters was held on the grounds of the Borj Milad in Tehran.

Faramarz Alsani’s music filled the air.

Aslani held concerts with other famous singers in cities with a high concentration of Iranian expatriates such as Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. He was revered not just as a musician but as a fine human being who truly cared about his country and his people.

“Faramarz Aslani Feat. Dariush: Age Ye Rooz | داریوش و فرامرز اصلانی: اگه یه روز | Official Video”

He started a tour in the U.S. in 1992 at the Shrine Auditorium in L.A. received by an enthusiastic crowd, he said, “These songs are from all the sweet and bitter memories of my life.”

A year later, he finished an album called Hafez, A Memorandum, which consisted of eight poems by Hafez, Iran’s most famous mystical poet.

In 2010, he released another album titled, The Third line (Khatte Sevvom).

Yet, his song, Age Ye Rooz, (if you go on a trip one day), became the signature song of nostalgia for many Iranians, evoking the past, a different era.

Like so many before him, Faramarz Aslani died in exile, far away from his homeland, where he had grown up and had learned to love and compose music.

He became a journalist in London, but it was always his music and his songs that remained.

He is gone now leaving behind a legacy. The many tributes on social media are filled with his music, remembering a legend that died a day after Nowruz.

Adieu Mr. Aslani….

When the subject of Iran and America comes to mind, two eventful episodes are often invoked by Iranians and Americans. The first is the CIA-led coup d’état of 1953, which toppled Mohammad Mossadegh’s democratically elected government; and the second is the taking of American hostages at the U.S. embassy in Tehran after the 1979 revolution.

On more than one occasion, U.S. presidents and diplomats have apologized to Iran for America’s interference in the country, yet the Islamic Republic has never taken responsibility for keeping American diplomats and personnel for 444 days in captivity.

Both these two events have left a lasting scar on the history of relations between the two countries.

But things are not that simple. Relations weren’t always contentious.

There was a time when America and Iran had in fact a good relationship and we are not referring to the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi.

The history of the relations between the two nations goes back to the early nineteenth century, as it is presented in a new book called Heroes to Hostages: America and Iran, 1800-1988 published by Cambridge University Press, 2023, and authored by Dr. Firouzeh Kashani Sabet, the Walter Annenberg Professor of history at U. Penn and the newly elected President of the Society of Iranian Studies.

This informative, well written and well researched work takes us back to the 1830’s, to the first encounter between the two nations. It was an amicable relationship, mostly involving the work of American Presbyterian missionaries in Iran. It was to benefit both people.

Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, Heroes to Hostages America and Iran, 1800–1988. Click Here.

There was no oil, there were no coups, no White Revolution, no arms sales, no military advisors, no Kennedy or Nixon doctrines and no hostage taking. Unlike Iranians’ history of suspicion towards the British, they did not share the same view towards America or Americans’ role in Iran until 1953.

Instead, there were missionaries, Perkins, Graham Wilson, Howard Baskerville, Morgan Shuster, and the Peace Corps.

In 1833, the first missionary, the Reverend Justin Perkins, set foot in Iran and spent some 8 years in the country preaching to about 140,000 Nestorian Christianss. He noted, “No American was ever a resident of that ancient and celebrated country before me” (page 17). Among other things he did, was using a printing press in Urumiyeh, in northern Iran to make the Scriptures available to all. In an act of compassion, from Ohio, contributions were sent to Iran to alleviate the suffering of famine victims in Iran. The missionaries were also involved in other work, including the establishment of schools and medical centers in Hamadan, Tabriz and Tehran.

Although in most cases, the missionaries were left alone by the local government, as many of the officials’ sons were also being educated there, there were instances when governors forbade the participation of Muslims as was the case of classes held by a Reverend A. R. Blankett.

In an unfortunate incident, a missionary by the name of Benjamin Woods Labaree was killed by Kurdish bandits. His murderer was later found and sentenced to life in prison.

Of course, the name Howard Conklin Baskerville is no stranger to Iranians. He was a missionary who decided to join the nationalists after the Constitutional Revolution of 1906. As a young man, he fought alongside them and died at the age of twenty- four on April 19, 1909.

He is buried in Tabriz where his tomb is visited by many Iranians and tourists. Before he died, he had declared, “I am Persia’s.” (page 74)

Another well-known American was William Morgan Shuster, a banker from New York, who in 1911, was engaged by the Iranian government to put the country’s fiscal house in order. Even though he was at times frustrated with the authorities, he applauds the Iranians for their sacrifices in trying “to change despotism into democracy.”

In his well-known book, The Strangling of Persia, he wrote: “It was obvious that the people of Persia deserve much better than what they are getting, that they wanted us to succeed, but it was the British and the Russians who were determined not to let us succeed.”

An American Society was formed in 1925 to promote commerce and exchange in art and literature between the two nations. Among the historians who visited Iran was Arthur Upham Pope (he is buried with his wife along the Zayandeh Rud in Isfahan) who gave a talk about Persian art with Reza Shah being in attendance. At the same time, in 1926, a statesman, Seyed HasanTaghizadeh had been Iran’s representative in Philadelphia exposition and spent time in America.

In early 1936, a Thomas R. Gibson came to Iran to direct the Iranian scouting program. Reza Shah who had crowned himself as the first king of the Pahlavi dynasty, having rapid modernization in mind, embarked on the forced unveiling of Iranian women. An American minister to Iran, William Hornibrook had deducted that Reza Shah’s top-down secular reforms, had alienated many Iranians, especially the clergy. (page 121)

In her comment to me, Dr. Kashani Sabet says: “I think the social work was important, yes. When missionaries provided medical support to the poor, especially poor women it was valuable. The peace corps also stepped in during the 1968 earthquake. These types of interventions and support ] were helpful. Unfortunately, the broader context of Western and US imperialism and later the Cold War were framing this involvement and relationship, which politicized it and made it easy to erase any good that might have come from it.”

The name Samuel Jordan who became the director of the famous Alborz college, established previously in 1873, comes to mind. (Alborz was later re- named the American College). Many others Americans become instrumental in creating good will, including the dozens of Peace Corps volunteers, some of whom fell in love with the country and its culture and later upon returning, become major academics of Iran. Among them was Ambassador John Limbert who became a hostage for 444 days.

Other Americans or American actions in Iran leave a sour taste:

Personalities like general Norman Schwarzkopf Sr., the man who assisted with the organization of the Iranian gendarmerie (father of the famous son and commander of the coalition forces in Operation Desert Storm) and then Kermit Roosevelt, Donald Wilbur (both involved in the coup) and Richard Helms ( the ex-CIA chief and later U.S.ambassador to Iran).

The book examines the CIA/MI6 coup like so many other books have covered. Suffice to say, that Dr Kashani Sabet examines this event like all academics as a turning point in the negative way which affected the relationship between the two nation .

The coup d’etat toppling a beloved Prime Minister and his government left a lasting mark on the Iranian psyche.

On November 15, 1953, Vice President Nixon representing Eisenhower, whose administration was complicit in the 1953 Coup, comes to Iran to pay tribute to the Shah. On December 9 of that same year, massive protests take place at Tehran University were three students are killed.

The law of capitulation was one that both Dr. Mossadegh and the clergy objected to which gave amnesty to Americans who committed crimes in Iran. In 1964, the Iranian parliament ratified a law giving immunity to members of the military missions and their dependents. This unfair law was one of the first which was dismantled by the revolutionary government in 1979.

In the 1960’s and 70’s, the Shah, whose reign was always shadowed by a coup, purchases vast number of arms, including F 16’s, and AWACKS.

He becomes the gendarme of the region.

Western influence including a sexual revolution takes place.

Discos and miniskirts take root in a very religious society. The Shah and his entourage are pro-American. Iranian cinema except on seldom cases showed semi-nude women. SAVAK whose creation is aided by the CIA starts as an intelligence apparatus but later becomes a tool of torture of dissidents including leftists and religious elements.

Ali Shariati, the famous Iranian sociologist writes, why should we not know about someone like Angela Davis but instead we must be aware of Miss Twiggy! (Page 327)

In between the years, a lot of investments are made by U.S. companies and other western companies. Some helped develop the country but mainly it was intended to make Iran into a client state.

But how much any of these developments and modernization help the Shah and his regime sustain its rule? Perhaps they did superficially but on a deeper level they did not.

The 1978-1979 events in fact shattered the illusion of the “Island of peace and stability.”

The 1979 revolution was blamed on Jimmy Carter since most Iranians do blame foreigners for their fate. Was it right? Not by any factual account. Not always.

Gary Sick, the national security advisor to President Carter, said in an interview that there was no reason the President wanted to rid of the Shah. He was our ally, and he protected our interests. Carter was busy with the Camp David accord and thus the news coming from Iran was not alerting to him as both his Ambassador (Sullivan) and the Shah himself had assured the U.S. administration that all things were in control.

Well, they were not. The Shah was too sick and he had hidden his fatal illness to everyone. The CIA had no knowledge of it.

The Shah could not make the right decisions in the most turbulent period. He asked General Huyser for advice. His Iranian advisors were also incompetent. Alam, his court jester, had died.

And then the hostage take-over takes place which completely put Iran and America at odds.

The rest is history as we say.

The cover of this book is a 1943 photo of Mrs. Louis Dreyfus, the wife of the U.S. minister to Iran giving food to Iranian children.

There are other interesting illustrations, among them, the Fiske seminary students (women) in 1900, Angela Davis in Zaneh Rouz, (woman of today), various comic drawings in the famous Towfigh satirical monthly illustrating the Roger Plan and a photo of demonstrations holding banners of “Yankee Go Home”. ( page 203)

The image of three girl scouts with their short hair in 1936 is noticeable, a far cry from the images of forced veiled women after 1980.

This book, unlike other books on this very subject, is not only elegantly written, but draws the reader to a more intense and detailed history of the U.S./ Iran relations, many aspects of which remain little known to us.

December 1901

Newark, Delaware (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Back in September of this year, When Ebrahimi Raisi, the president of Iran, or rather the former executioner, when asked about the Abrahamic accords said coolly, “Well let’s see what happens.” 

The Abrahamic Accords are now on hold.  

Whether we should take Raisi’s observation as just a simple statement or whether this pronouncement had a meaning behind it, we don’t know.

The current conflict is certainly testing Tehran’s patience, given the ayatollahs’ strong rhetorical commitment to the Palestinians.

The backlash against innocent children, men and women in Gaza has been beyond imagination.  The world is witness to the non-stop shelling of bombs containing phosphorus which burns the body to its core.  In retaliation for the horrific killing of fourteen hundred Israelis — most of them noncombatants and many of them peace activists — some eight thousand Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli Air Force.  Whole families have been eradicated.  Fifty- nine staff, medical doctors and other humanitarians have been killed.  

It is a genocidal war.  More than 1.1 million Palestinians are about to become displaced south of the Gaza Valley, marking the largest mass exodus of Palestinians since 1948.

Iran was not always a factor in Palestinian and Israeli affairs. During the Pahlavi reign,he relationship between Iran and Israel was largely behind the scenes.

Mohammad Reza Shah never endorsed the state of Israel but kept a friendly distance.

He had good relations with both Arabs and Israelis and maintained a balance, never really endorsing any side.  

When Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini took the helm of the revolution, Yasser Arafat came to visit.  It was jubilation all over. However, that euphoria dissipated among the secular-minded leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization, as it became clear that the Ayatollah preferred the Muslim fundamentalist strain of the Palestinian movement, a strain that evolved into Hamas.

Immediately after the revolution, among the military groups formed inside Iran was Sepah Qods whose names derive from Qods which means Jerusalem. “We will march to Jerusalem” was their slogan. 

In the vacuum that then existed, the Islamic Republic helped create Hezbollah and then supported Hamas.  Money and training poured into these organizations.

In fact, General Qasem Soleimani, the late head of the Qods Brigade of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps who was assassinated on the orders of Trump (let’s say by way of Tel Aviv), visited Lebanon many times and had a chummy relationship with Hezbollah.   His daughter is married to the son of the number two commander of Hezbollah.  

Then, the axis of resistance was formed to confront Israel and the U.S., especially after the wars in Iraq, in Syria and Yemen. 

Iran is the head of this axis.   

Hindustan Times: “Iran’s Direct Attack On Biden Amid Israel-Hamas War; ‘U.S. Complicit In Gaza Onslaught…’ | Watch”

The Israeli government has, throughout the last four decades and especially under Netanyahu declared a silent war on Iran.  Iran’s civilian nuclear enrichment program has been one reason, since Israel sees it as a precursor to a warhead, despite the CIA’s repeated finding that Tehran has no nuclear weapons program. Israeli intelligence has been involved in taking sensitive documents from inside Iran and one of Iran’s nuclear scientists was assassinated. 

Still, the bark of Israel and Iran toward each other has often been worse than their bite.

For instance, during the Iran-Iraq war, Israel sold arms to Iran, even while decrying the government in Tehran. And Iran secretly sold petroleum to Israel in return.

As for Hezbollah, even though it is an Iran proxy with its own vendetta against Israel, which occupied its lands from 1982 through 2000, it is unlikely that it will enter this latest conflict. Hezbollah is both a party and a militia, and it has to worry about its standing in the Lebanese government. The other Lebanese parties have warned Nasrallah against dragging Lebanon into another catastrophic war with Israel.

There is only one sure way to keep the Islamic Republic and its proxies out of Israeli and Palestinian politics, and that is to halt the pretexts for this meddling

The destruction of Gaza and the punishment of its people must stop. Peace is only possible if Israel which asks everyone to stand by its “moral” values also respects international law instead of trampling on it. Israel must cease its wanton destruction of Gaza and its punitive strikes at noncombatants and civilian infrastructure. Tel Aviv must adhere to international law instead of trampling on it. Further, it must allow new elections in the West Bank and Gaza (if there is anything left of it) so that a new generation of younger leaders can emerge. This political process will only begin when Israel ends its colonial occupation of an old and proud nation after seventy- five years.

A genuine peace settlement would leave Iran with little leverage. The current conflict, given Tehran’s rejectionist stance, is increasing the Islamic Republic’s popularity on the street throughout the Muslim world.

As usual it was all denial and delusion on the part of the highest official of the Islamic Republic.

When Raisi’s men showed up at the United Nations for the 78th assembly of nations, even the foreign minister of Iran went through the back door. What was he afraid of? What were they afraid of? Officials usually don’t enter through the backdoor unless they are hated and fearful of the reaction of their own people.

In September 1960, in the same hall, Fidel Castro gave his fiery 4-hour speech and then showed up in Harlem, staying in a hotel owned by an African American woman. All other hotels had rejected him and his companions. He mingled with people.

Raisi and his gang stayed at the Royal Hilton.

Raisi got up and showed a copy of the Koran, as if his government’s misdeeds don’t daily cover it in shame.

A reporter confronted one of the men in the entourage of Raisi. He was not just strong-armed by the thug who wanted to grab his cell phone, but if the petty enforcer had not been stopped by the U.S. security people, he would have assaulted the reporter.

They didn’t seem to realize that this was New York City, not the streets of Tehran.

It was demeaning to watch this whole episode on television, to watch your country run by thugs.

Who is Ebrahim Raisi? He served as a warden at Evin Prison as a young revolutionary guard (pasdar), in his early 20’s. He became part of what was called the Death Commission. With three others, he was involved in the execution by hanging of some 4000 political prisoners who, having served their sentences, were about to be freed. It was all done in secret. Their loved ones received their belongings in a bag.

They were all buried in the infamous Khavaran cemetery. It is now a burial place with red poppies covering the unmarked graves of countless men and women. In some parts of the gravesite, there are photos of the martyrs, with flowers left by their families. Some of the mothers have died since-it was some 35 years ago- never being able to say their last goodbyes.

When asked by Farid Zakaria about Mahsa Amini and the women’s movement against hejab, the president of Iran, who was selected by the clerical supreme leader, not by the Iranian people, said, well this is the law of the land.

Who created this law and who enforced it? Was it ratified by most representatives of the Majlis or was it a fatwa by Khomeini? In 1979, thousands of women from all walks of life poured into the streets of Tehran defying the enforced hejab. They were beaten and encountered violence.

Raisi and his gang do not represent the Iranian people. They do not belong in the Hall of Nations where the famous verse of the 12th century poet of Iran, Saadi is inscribed.

“The sons of Adam are limbs of each other,

Having been created of one essence.

When the calamity of time affects one limb

The other limbs cannot remain at rest.

If you have no sympathy for the troubles of

others,

You are unworthy to be called human.”

The Islamic regime is a government that takes up arms and kills its citizens under the rubric of Islam. Islam is supposed to be a religion of mercy.

Oh, and let’s not talk about Israel and Zionism. Who is Raisi to worry about Palestinians when his government and his henchmen have murdered many of our young people in front of our eyes in the last year alone.

Children, young girls, and boys -some as young as six years old-were shot to death.

Others were shot in the eye, losing their eyesight.

We do care about our Palestinian brothers and sisters but who is the Islamic Republic to cry foul?

And please, I beg the Israeli Ambassador to keep his sign about Mahsa and take care of his own business in his own country. Don’t grab any more lands, — and give the Palestinians some rights.

Raisi’s demagoguery was blatant. Empty words by a soulless person. He does not represent the people of Iran with its more than 3000 years of culture and history.

Iran’s future should be one of hopes and dreams for all its people, especially the young generation.

Iran wants to embrace the world and become part of the nations of the world. Its people do not want to be isolated anymore or shunned.

The masquerade by Raisi only delegitimized his government further in the eyes of the world.

You have a whole plan to visit places, parks, and monuments.

You want to have a good time with your friends and relatives.

The night before you are together with your friends and family. You laugh, you have fun like all young people do.

Then the day begins. You leave the house.

The morality police show up. You are taken into a van and then into custody because a strand of your hair is shown.

You are severely beaten on the head. The video shows how you stumble on the floor. It takes more than an hour for an ambulance to arrive. In the meantime, your interrogator, a man with no credentials, calls you names, calls you a whore. You are no good, your hair was visible, he says. The women present in the room do nothing. They watch.

This is the story of Mahsa or Zina, her Kurdish name– whose strands of hair were visible. She was dressed in black but perhaps had red lipstick on. Nothing more. She was accompanied by her brother. She was beautiful.

In less than 24 hours, she died having fallen into a coma. The doctors couldn’t save her but two photographers who are now in jail took her picture while she was at the hospital with tubes in her mouth.

The whole world watched.

She didn’t survive the blow to her head. The Islamic Republic called this an accident. It was no accident. She was murdered before our eyes.

A young woman with hopes and dreams for a bright future was taken away. She was studying to become a doctor.

Perhaps if she had landed in Northern Tehran where women’s hijab is no big deal she would have survived.

Her murder caused a fury. Not just a fury but a revolutionary movement on the part of women and men who are asking for the basic rights of any human being. To be free, to wear what they want and to mingle like all young men and women desire. To laugh and be happy.

Her life was taken away…. For no good reason.

In 1979, the famous Italian journalist, Oriana Fallaci , interviewed Ayatollah Khomeini. She had the hijab on and asked the Ayatollah why women in Iran are supposed to wear the hijab over their clothing. In response he said, well it is none of your business. If you don’t like it don’t wear it. She immediately took off her hijab.

He left the room angry.

Women in Iran have had to endure the compulsory hijab for four decades.

But no more. It is done. It is over-with.

Nowhere does the Koran say that women must cover their hair.

In Sura 24, The Light, al-Nur, verse 30, women are admonished to “draw their head coverings over their breasts and, and not show their charms,” except to their husbands and the male members of their family.

Mahsa left her mark. She is now a symbol of the struggle of women all over the world against oppression.

She is the daughter of Iran as her father has called her. She symbolizes the emancipation of women of Iran from a system that has incarcerated them for over four decades.

She is free……… and so will be the women of Iran. Sooner rather than later.

The movement has just begun.

– Fariba Amini

Distortion in History

By Mohammad Amini*

Fifty years after his passing, misinformation about Mohammad Mossadegh is still prevalent. There is an assertion that Mossadegh repeatedly rejected pragmatic solutions put forth by the United States and the United Kingdom to resolve the crisis, causing Iran’s economy to collapse and paving the way for the coup. This is one of the widely accepted misconceptions. The first error is to refer to Mossadegh’s 80-hour talks with George C. McGhee, the US Assistant Secretary of State.

 In October 1951, Mossadegh traveled to New York to speak up for Iran’s rights before the UN Security Council. Then he went to Washington, where, on the advice of Dean Acheson, President Truman’s Secretary of State, he agreed to American mediation between Iran and the Anglo-Persian Oil Company and then he sat down to talk to McGhee. The truth is that following Lord Herbert Stanley Morrison’s speech in the House of Commons, and then Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s letter to President Truman complaining about why he had invited Britain’s “oil thief” to the White House, it was clear that the British government had no intention of reconciling with Mossadegh.

Of course, Mossadegh was unaware of these issues and sat down to negotiate with the Americans in good faith. Unfair historians have claimed that Mossadegh, at the conclusion of his negotiations with McGhee, “rejected all reasonable American offers to return victorious to his country”. On the contrary, by the time the talks were over, according to Dean Acheson, it appeared that Mossadegh had agreed to all his proposals.

“Mossadegh also appeared willing to have it operated by a “neutral” company-for instance, a Dutch company. Sometimes he would seem agreeable to the presence of a few Englishmen, sometimes not. Working from these premises the three [McGhee and his two assistants at the State Department] devised an ingenious scheme by which Anglo-Iranian would get Iranian oil for export on a basis that represented the same fifty-fifty profit division between government and company in effect elsewhere in the Persian Gulf […] Thinking that we had the makings of a deal, I set out for a series of foreign ministers’, NATO, and General Assembly meetings in Europe […] Rowan [economic minister at the British Embassy in Washington, D.C.] decreed that Mossadegh, leading the attack on British foreign investments, had to fail, to be crushed and punished. This adamant British attitude ruled out further discussion or search for face-saving formulas of retreat for Mossadegh.”[1]

Acheson added that “Nitze and McGhee ended the negotiations on the ground that Mossadegh had never been definite enough on price to give the British a proposal capable of development”.[2] However, Acheson was well aware that Mossadegh had discovered that these were mere ruses and that the failure of negotiations was due to the Anglo-Persian Company’s defiance and Churchill’s support, rather than the fluctuating price of oil: “they told me that Mossadegh never believed them. He knew that the British wanted a fight to the finish, and he took the declaration of a fight to the finish with dignity.”[3] During an interview for the Truman Library’s oral history project, in response to a question about whether the British were obstinate, George McGhee stated:

“Very. Anglo-Iranian [Company] was run by William Frasier, a Scotch accountant who didn’t understand the modern world. His failure to understand the political forces in Iran helped create a very difficult problem for them. The company and the U.K. faced the possibility of a grave loss at a time when they badly needed the income from Iranian oil; so they played their hand pretty close. They missed a great opportunity. We warned them that we were offering fifty-fifty. They could perhaps have had a settlement at fifty-fifty, but they wouldn’t offer it […] In the midst of the impasse, I suggested that Harriman go out together with a Britisher (the U.K. named Lord Stokes) to attempt to bridge the gap between the Iranian Government and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, but they were unable to do so.”

The truth is that twenty days after Mossadegh was elected Prime Minister, the British government and the Anglo-Persian Oil Company submitted a lawsuit to the International Court of Justice in The Hague to stop the nationalization of Iran’s oil industry, which was approved by the majority of the Iranian National Assembly. So, it was clear that four months after filing this lawsuit and during Mossadegh’s visit to the United States, the British government and the Anglo-Persian Oil Company had no desire to reconcile with Iran.

Here, it’s important to clear up some misunderstandings about the British complaint to the International Court of Justice.

On May 26, 1951, the British government filed a complaint against Iran to the International Court of Justice.

On June 22, 1951, The Hague Tribunal set September 3 for the submission of the British Memoir and December 3 for the Iranian Counter-Memoir. Britain went even further, asking the Tribunal, on the same day, to stop “the dispossession” of the Anglo-Persian Company in Iran. The Tribunal decided to address this matter on June 30. Some historians have claimed that three Iranian parliament members rushed to The Hague in response to the same issue. This claim is made either out of ignorance of historical facts or to discredit Mossadegh. The Iranian government never responded to the British complaint, and there is no evidence of Iran’s response in The Hague Tribunal’s archives (in the section that relates to Iran’s case, pages 700-765). In July 1952, Ali Shayegan, Hasan Sadr, and Ali Asghar Parsa went to The Hague in response to an injunction order, not a British complaint. Ali Shaygan, a member of parliament, provided a report detailing the trip’s motivations after his return. On February 4, 1952, one week before the court deadline was set to expire, Hossein Navab, Iran’s ambassador to the Netherlands, presented Iran’s statement to The Hague Tribunal, denying the court’s jurisdiction over the British complaint. The court granted Iran’s petition, which was based on the oil concession agreement of 1933 between Iran and the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. Mossadegh’s trip to The Hague was not to appear at court but rather to declare that the tribunal lacked the authority to hear and decide the complaint.

“The Court has arrived at the conclusion that it has no jurisdiction to deal with the case submitted to it by the Application of the Government of the United Kingdom dated May 26th, 1951. It is unnecessary for the Court to consider any of the other objections raised to its jurisdiction. Since the Court is without jurisdiction in the present case, it need not examine any arguments put forward by the Iranian Government against the admissibility of the claims of the United Kingdom Government.”[4]

Now, I’ll go back to the subject of Mossadegh’s “stubbornness” towards “the proposal” jointly made by the United States and the United Kingdom. The Churchill-Truman proposal was delivered to Mossadegh, in August 1952, a month after Britain’s defeat at The Hague Tribunal. According to McGhee, after the Washington talks failed in 1951, he had suggested that Stokes and Harriman mediate to resolve the issue and convince the Anglo-Persian Oil Company to take on the US offer. At the time, Britain hoped to win the case in court, so this proposal did not go anywhere; however, after Britain’s defeat in court, Churchill considered the US mediation.

Interestingly, the first paragraph of this proposal was to accept the World Court’s arbitration in dealing with this issue, even though the Court had voted just one month ago to have no jurisdiction in this matter. Truman and Churchill made a passing reference in their proposal to a letter Mossadegh had sent to the British government through the British Embassy in Tehran in August 1951, requesting that the oil embargo on Iran be lifted. Mossadegh’s reaction to this proposal, which was presented to the Iranian parliament, stemmed from his desire to defend Iran’s rights. He said that returning the case to the international court was unacceptable and that Iranian courts, which, after The Hague Court’s ruling, were the only ones authorized to hear the company’s claims, were ready to settle the two parties’ differences. He did, however, respond to Churchill and Truman by saying that Iran was even willing to accept the International Court’s proceedings in certain circumstances:

• To decide over the amount and compensation payments for the properties that the company had at the time of the nationalization of the oil industry in Iran, based on any laws, applied to the nationalization of industries in any countries, that the company is willing to accept. This will be the only compensation that Iran will pay, and the company will not have any other claim for compensation.
• To deal with lawsuits and resolving disputes between 1933 and 1947 according to the 1933 agreement, and between 1948 and April 30, 1951 (the date on which the oil industry nationalization law was approved), according to the 1933 agreement and the supplemental Gass-Golshaian agreement that the company signed and approved, but the Iranian government and parliament do not believe it is sufficient for the realization of Iran’s rights.
• To determine the amount of damage to the Iranian government because of the problems that the British government and the company have created for the sale of Iranian oil, as well as for the export of goods and Iran’s use of sterling funds.
• The payment of 49 million sterling calculated on the company’s 1950 balance sheet for the increase in royalties, taxes, and Iranian shares.

Mossadegh, who had accepted the US proposals more than a year before and had won The Hague Court case, had now presented some simple proposals to the British government. Of course, these proposals were not acceptable to a government that called Mossadegh “the thief of British oil.” Churchill and his administration had only one goal: to subdue Iran. Therefore, other proposals presented to Iran in late 1952 were not viable options. With Dwight Eisenhower’s victory in the US presidential election in November 1952, a campaign to depose Mossadegh was launched, and the events of March 1953, particularly the murder of General Afshartous in April 1953, were part of this campaign.

Donald Wilber, the lead US planner of the coup, in his report says: “British Intelligence representatives brought up the proposition of a joint political action to remove Prime Minister Mossadeq […] On the basis of the […] overture and other clear signs that determined opposition to Mossadeq was taking shape […], the US Government could no longer approve of the Mossadeq government […] it was authorized to consider operations which would contribute to the fall of the Mossadeq government.”[5]

In the first few weeks following Eisenhower’s inauguration, the campaign to overthrow the Iranian government started. Two weeks after the US election, Christopher Woodhouse, MI6 agent in Tehran before the British embassy was closed, and Sam Falle, the head of the MI6 station in Iran, left for Washington DC to meet with their American colleagues. In a secret meeting on December 2, Kermit Roosevelt joined them, and then this group met with the US Secretary of State and the head of the CIA. At this meeting, Roosevelt was tasked with leading the operation to overthrow Mossadegh. To survey the area and prepare the necessary information, Roosevelt sent Miles Copeland, one of the unknown CIA officers, to Iran. On April 16, 1953, the Eisenhower’s administration prepared a relevant study titled “Factors Involved in the Overthrow of Mossadegh”, thanks to Copeland, Roosevelt, and their British counterparts, and the operation to overthrow Mossadegh officially began.

Therefore, those who believe that Mossadegh made a mistake by declining US-UK proposals in the final seven to eight months of his premiership and that his policy opened the door for the 1953 coup are either uninformed or aiming to reverse history. Because of the shift in US foreign policy under President Eisenhower, the British government, which had been considering overthrowing Mossadegh ever since he became prime minister, no longer felt the need to work with Iran to find solutions. The project to depose Mossadegh was underway, and he found himself alone, having lost many of his previous allies and being unable to stand up to the world’s most powerful intelligence organizations, as well as their Iranian associates.

*Mohamamd Amin Amini was a historian, a public intellectual and a formidable speaker of immense courage.   Author of several books On Dr. Mossadegh and Ahmad Kasravi, he passed away in Irvine, California at the age of seventy-one.   He was one of the founders of the Confederation of Iranian Students in the U.S. and the eldest son of Nosratollah Amini, a member of the National Front and the personal lawyer to Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh.

This article was translated by Mehdi Mousavi, my friend and colleague.

[1] Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department, New York, 1969, pp. 510-511.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] “Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. Case (United Kingdom v. Iran) Preliminary Objection, Judgment of July 22nd, 1952”, International Court of Justice, Reports of Judgments, Advisory Opinions and Orders, Leyden, 1952, p. 114.

[5] Donald Wilber, Regime Change in Iran: Overthrow of Premier Mossadeq of Iran, Spokesman, 2006, pp. 19-20.

When major Hollywood actors and directors, and sports coaches, were implicated on sexual harassment charges, they were put on trial and their credentials were taken away. They faced hefty fines. Even the 45th President of the U.S., Donald Trump, has been indicted for sexual harassment and rape, for misappropriating government documents, and now, for seeking to overturn a national election and invalidate the Constitution.

In many countries in the Middle East, matters tend to be different. Even if those charged are found guilty, they and their backers can buy judges, lawyers and prosecutors.

Recently, a scandal involving corruption broke in Gilan, a province in northern Iran.

In Gilan, two men, holding high positions of power, both in charge of the local branch of the “vice and virtue” department, while holding others responsible for “indecent behavior,” are now accused of engaging in sodomy. Sodomy in the Penal Code of the Islamic Republic carries a severe penalty, lashes and, potentially, the death sentence.

“All sexual activities that occur outside a traditional, heterosexual marriage (i.e., sodomy or adultery) are illegal. Same-sex sexual activities that occur between consenting adults are criminalized and carry a maximum punishment of death—though not generally implemented.”

Almost a year ago, Mahsa Amini, the young Kurdish woman who became a global symbol of women’s struggle in Iran, was beaten to death for having a little hair shown. The man who hit her on the head and caused her death was never tried nor taken to jail. He was protected by a judicial system that is utterly corrupt.

A revolutionary situation ensued. Some called it the first feminist movement in the world. All over Iran and the world people came out in the streets to show support for Iranian women in their quest for equality and their wish to be free of mandatory hijab and other restrictions.

Now there are at least two well-known cases, one of a married cleric who went on TV and preached piousness while at night engaged in sodomy with his brother-in-law. His name is Mehdi Hagh Shenas and he has long been the direct representative of Supreme Leader Khamenei in Gilan. He is shown in one of his TV shows, in clerical robes, discussing the cause-and-effect relationship between sin and illness. “Lacking decency and moral depravity are both sinful,” he proclaimed.

Then there is the case a Mr Seghati, who also engaged in sexual relations with a man while he held the position of the director of what is called the Department of Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong, a moral injunction that goes back to the Koran.

A few years ago, Saeed Tousi, Khamenei’s favorite Koran reader was exposed as a child sex predator, taking young boys to Hajj pilgrimage in Mecca and raping several of them. A court acquitted him.

In an interview with BBC Persian, he denied reports that the office of the Supreme Leader had influenced the outcome in his case.

The young cleric who engaged in sexual relations and text messages with his in-law suffered the harshest punishment meted out for this kind of behavior by being defrocked; others were temporarily marginalized and then given other positions. All the while, hundreds of women and men are stopped, detained, and given long sentences for harboring the ordinary desires of any young person.

In the Islamic Republic of Iran, those who commit crimes and are closely related to Khamenei’s beyt (household) have never been held responsible. They are protected by the system–a corrupt system that holds the victim in contempt and releases the criminal.

In 2021, a blogger and the founder of Amad News, Ruhollah Zam, whose father had named him after Ruhollah Khomeini, exposed the corruption of the regime’s officials. He was later abducted while traveling to Iraq from France, kidnapped, and taken to Iran. He was in prison for nearly a year and later, without ever being told that he had been sentenced to death, was executed.

The married judge who sentenced him to death had also texted with a woman asking for sexual favors.

Ruhollah Zam’s crime? He had exposed a regime of corruption.

A year later, his father, who had worked closely with the regime, defiantly took off his clerical robe in protest of his son’s unjust execution.

When asked in a townhall meeting in NYC, at Columbia university in 2005, the then newly elected President of Iran Ahmadi Nejad responded to a question about the suppression of gays in Iran, by saying that “We don’t have gays in Iran!” eliciting laughter from the audience.

Hypocrisy is rife in many places. Arguably the most notable example in this country is that of Trump’s personal lawyer, Roy Cohn, who went after gays (and communists) during the McCarthy era and later came out of closet. He was the epitome of evil.

In Iran, too, “pious” men are often the most hypocritical and dishonest men who, not only engage in lewd behavior, but engage in unspeakable suppression of our women. This is the well-known problem of clergy malfeasance, from which Iran is not immune, to say the least.

They have never been tried nor held responsible.

Such are the laws of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and such laws must be eliminated.

Iran needs a total overhaul in every sector and in every aspect of its society especially in its corrupt judicial system.

Under the previous Iranian Penal Code or IPC, which was in force until 2013, the charge of mohareb, “Waging War (on Islam,” was frequently used against political dissidents and people with connections to opposition groups abroad, even if they were non-violent. The new Penal Code has provided for their punishment under the vague charges of efsad-fil-arz and baghy.

“They are looking for a neck to hang.”  Those were the chilling words of Navid Afkari, a young wrestler who in September 2020 was executed in Shiraz after having been charged with killing a member of the security forces.  His dossier, like hundreds of others, remains murky to say the least.  

But executions are nothing new to Iran. 

 In the 1930’s, during the reign of Reza Shah Pahlavi, the founder of the Pahlavi dynasty, several pro-communist sympathizers and other opponents were jailed and died in prison, under suspicious circumstances among them Taghi Arani and Teymourtash.

Sardar-e-Fateh of the Bakhtiari tribe, the father of the late PM Shapur Bakhtiar, was also executed on the orders of Reza Shah. 

Under Mohammad Reza Shah, executions continued. In October 1954, Morteza Keyvan, an Iranian poet, art critic, newspaper editor and political activist of the Tudeh Party (Iran’s pro-Soviet party), was executed in Qasr prison.

In addition, 31 members of the Tudeh officers’ organization were executed.

Another notable execution at the time was that of Dr. Hossein Fatemi, Mossadegh’s 37-year-old foreign minister, who proposed the oil nationalization to Dr. M. He was executed by a firing squad in Tehran’s Qasr prison on 10 November 1954, while still suffering from the injuries of an earlier assassination attempt on him by the Fedayee-e Islam. 

Shortly thereafter, Navab Safavi, the leader of the Fedayeen Islam and one of his comrades- in -arms who had been involved in assassinations of Iran’s Prime ministers and of the famous anti-Shia writer Kasravi, were also put to death.

Many of the leaders and members of leftist and Islamist organizations who took up arms against the regime in the 1970s faced firing squads.  The numbers are not clear. But at least a few dozen met a similar fate.  Some, such as Bijan Jazani and his colleagues, were not executed but gunned down on the hills of Evin prison.

Khosrow Goleshorkh and Keramat Daneshian, both aged 30, two writers and poets, were charged with the plot of kidnapping the Shah’s son. The allegation against them was found to be fabricated.   They were both executed on 18 February 1974.

During the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah, the number of executions was high, but it never reached the level of what happened after the Revolution.   It is noteworthy that many of those who repented, led a normal life, and even got jobs in the government.  

This was not the case after the rise of the Islamic Republic. 

Now, executions were the order of the day.

Some members of the intelligentsia, or sympathizers of leftist and Islamist organizations, most notably the largest ones, (the Fedayeen and the Mojahedin) after having been released from prison, were also put to death. 

The poet Saeid Soltanpour, who had been in prison during the reign of the Shah and was released after the Revolution, was arrested on his wedding night, taken to the gallows by the IRI, and executed.  He was 41.

He has now become a legend. 

Many of the Shah’s generals and his prime minister were also executed.  Some without due process of law.  A few after facing kangaroo courts, the most notable one being the Shah’s Prime Minister Abbas Hoveyda.

Farrokh Rou Parsa, minister of education and an educated woman, met the same fate, being charged with spreading corruption on earth, a common term used by the IRI prosecutors who apply the sharia law of justice rather than generally accepted modern jusrisprudence.

Habib Elghanian, a Jewish Iranian entrepreneur who had created many industries in Iran, returned from a trip, faced execution.  He was branded as a Zionist who loved the state of Israel, yet he was a true Iranian nationalist and had done nothing wrong.  

Many members of the Bahai faith were also executed at that time.

In 1988, immediately after the end of the Iran-Iraq war, some 4,000-5,000 political prisoners who had almost completed their sentence and who were waiting to be released, were executed in Evin and Gohar Dasht prisons.  The decree came directly by Khomeini.  They were also branded as Mohareb ba Khoda (enemy of God).

This incident, which has been the subject of numerous books and films, is the single incident in the history of executions in the world when political prisoners were taken from their cells after long sentences and taken to the gallows.

The late Abbas Amir Entezam, the spokesman of the provisional government who, arrested on trumped on charges, spent 27 years in prison,  wrote:  “The worst time was when I was with other prisoners and witnessed many of my cell mates being taken and executed one-by-one, without any trials or jury. In the year 1367(1989), we were 350 people in our ward (bandeh zendan); 342 were executed; their ages ranging between 20 – 70 years.  Those were the worst days of my life. I will never forget a single moment of that pain.”  (Interview with author, Tehran, 2005). 

In September 1982, Sadeq Ghotbzadeh who had sat next to Ayatollah Khomeini on that infamous Air France flight to Tehran and Iran’s foreign minister, was executed after being falsely charged with a coup plot.  

And so, the executions continued…….

According to historian Ervand Abrahamian,  

“Whereas less than 100 political prisoners had been executed between 1971 and 1979, more than 7900 were executed between 1981 and 1985. … the prison system was centralized and drastically expanded … Prison life was drastically worse under the Islamic Republic than under the Pahlavis. In the prison literature of the Pahlavi era, the recurring words had been “boredom” and “monotony.” In that of the Islamic Republic, they were “fear,” “death,” “terror,” “horror,” and most frequent of all “nightmare” (kaboos).”

In 2010, A Kurdish teacher and poet, Farzad Kamangar, was put to death.  The IRI has been especially wary of the ethnic minorities of Iran, fearing that they might want independence from the central government.   Farzad Kamangar was 32 years old. 

Since the murder of Mahsa Amini, and after protests took place in major cities of Iran, executions have been on the rise, especially in the regions of Sistan-Baluchistan, Kurdistan and Khuzestan. 

By executing anyone whether for political reasons or murder, or for homosexuality or other “crimes,” the IRI continues to create fear in the Iranian society.    You protest, we will kill you.  You raise your voice; we will kill you.   Only on occasions when there has been outcry by the governments around the world or human rights organizations have, have we witnessed a decrease. 

Still, the IRI does not heed the international community’s outrage.  Its rulers do what they want, without fearing any repercussions.    The Shah’s regime did care about world opinion.  This has not been the case with the IRI.   In the last year alone, according to various documented and undocumented reports, nearly 245 individuals  the number could be much higher) have been executed, after engaging in protest or on trumped up charges.   The recent execution of three men, Saleh Mirhashemi, Saeed Yaghoubi and Majid Kazemi who were charged with killing members of the security forces in street fights in Isfahan (it is very hard to know the exact details) has been met with international outcry to no avail. 

Just before their death, they wrote a note from prison, “Please don’t let them kill us.” 

The Islamic regime does not move an inch to reduce any of these actions.  In fact, it has gotten bolder as Iranians behave defiantly.   Yet the very boldness of its reaction may hide a state of panic. The regime in Tehran indeed finds itself in a deep crisis, with protests in Iran calling for the fall of Khamenei and the abolition of Velayat- e -faghih.  Yet in the short run, that means more executions, especially since Ebrahim Raisi, the current President of Iran,  in the early phase of the Revolution, was a member of the execution committee and served as a warden in Evin prison.

After China, Iran is the number one executioner of our time.   It is sad and it is inconceivable that a country with so much beauty, so much culture is on record as the number two killer of its citizens.

 Can we stop this killing machine?   Yes, we can, and we must.