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(QUOTE) “I have one vote. I gave it to Mousavi. I have one life. I will give it for freedom.”
May her death not be in vain…
“Her name was Neda….
I find it rather fitting that ‘Neda’ (the girls name) means ‘voice’ or ‘call’ in Farsi. (UNQUOTE)
It’s a bit too slick and too professional with the same statements spreading across the Internet. Be careful this is not a Kuwait incubator moment!
More to follow …
CNN: “You Didn’t Die In Vain”
(CNN) — “RIP NEDA, The World cries seeing your last breath, you didn’t die in vain. We remember you.”
Like most of the information coming out of Tehran, it is impossible to verify her name, Neda, or the circumstances of her apparent death, captured close-up on a bystander’s camera.
TEHRAN, Iran (CNN) — “The possibility of organized and comprehensive disruption and irregularities in this election is almost close to zero given the composition of the people who are holding the election,” Mottaki said.
He blamed Britain for interfering in the elections, saying it had been planning against the vote for more than a year.
“We witnessed an influx of people from the UK ahead of the election,” he said, without offering specifics.
Mottaki accused Britain of supporting followers of the Baha’i faith, a religion that originated in 19th-century Persia but which Iran does not recognize.
[In another interview with BBC he used the decision of the U.K. and Blair to invade Iraq without U.N. approval as an argument for the West not to interfere with Iran’s democracy – Oui].
Iran’s Parliament (Majlis) Speaker Ali Larijani suggests that some of the members in the Guardian Council have sided with a certain candidate in the June 12 presidential election.
Speaking live on the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) Channel 2 on Saturday, the speaker said that “a majority of people are of the opinion that the actual election results are different than what was officially announced.”
“The opinion of this majority should be respected and a line should be drawn between them and rioters and miscreants,” he was quoted as saying by KhabarOnline — a website affiliated with him.
[See also article on CNN].
[On this BBC page more info about 2008 elections … interesting to read beyond today’s news hype]
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(BBC News) – Opposition concerns about the running of the election emerged early in the process. Monitors from their campaign teams, who by law are allowed to oversee every polling station, were issued with invalid ID cards or refused entry.
And there was a 10-fold increase in the number of mobile polling stations – ballot boxes transported from place to place by agents of the interior ministry, which is run by a close ally of Mr Ahmadinejad.
“One third of the ballot boxes were mobile,” says Mehdi Khalaji, senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
“They were out of the control of the local authorities and the representatives of the candidates, and nobody knows what they have done to them”.
Polling day saw a record turnout and Iranians queued for hours to cast their ballot in an election which all agreed was critical to the future direction of their country.
“Early on polling day, the SMS network was shut down, that made me worried about what was going to happen,” says Tehran journalist Ali Pahlavan.
With little access to the state-controlled broadcast media, Mr Mousavi’s largely young, technically savvy supporters use text messages to campaign.
“Then the interior ministry [where results from polling stations around the country are collated] started kicking out its own employees so that just a skeleton personnel and the top officials were left,” says Mr Pahlavan.
Mobile polling stations. According to the Ministry of Interior, there will be more than 14,000 mobile ballot boxes for people unable to vote at the nearly 47,000 fixed polling stations (for instance, the infirm, the elderly, and the military); the number of mobile boxes is more than ten times the number used in the previous election. Adequate supervision of the mobile boxes is extremely difficult, creating a situation where no one watches who casts the ballots or is present during the tally.
Counting process. The two-stage counting process presents perhaps the most troubling aspect of the elections. At each polling station, after the end of voting hours, the votes are counted and recorded on Form 22 in the presence of representatives from the candidates, the Interior Ministry, and the Guardian Council. These forms are secret however; the results are not announced to the press or released to the candidates. Instead, in the second stage of the counting process, the forms are sent to the Interior Ministry, where the votes are tallied and published on Form 28, which reports the votes by province or county. But because there is no supervision of the preparation, there is no way to compare Form 28 to Form 22. In other words, it is possible for agents from the Guardian Council or the Interior Ministry to change the vote totals before announcing them. This stage provokes suspicion among candidates as well as independent observers about the accuracy and fairness of the counting.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."ergo, the integrity of the process is not really the issue…they didn’t even take the time that would normally be required to hand count that many ballots…in an attempt to lend some minimal sense of legitimacy to the coup. form 28 was apparently already prepared and waiting. catch 22 in action.
at least diebold, etal, are somewhat more subtle.
The subtlety of cheating has lost any indicator in Iran.
The dying of a daughter, a sister, mother, or cousin has transcended subtlety. Tyranny will not last on the blood of women.
The elections at this point in time mean nothing for the pain inflicted & the revolution will be painted green, the color of hope, not envy.
Father`s day shall be remembered by me as the birthing of a power that will never end till all our daughters are free from the moment they are born.
Time means nothing now.
(rant over)
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Arrests of Rafsanjani kin show Iran clerics split
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Only 6 percent of Jewish Israelis consider the views of American President Barack Obama’s administration pro-Israel. Another 50% of those sampled consider the policies of Obama’s administration more pro-Palestinian than pro-Israeli, and 36% said the policies were neutral. The remaining 8% did not express an opinion.
Israelis’ views of Obama’s predecessor in the White House, George W. Bush, are nearly the opposite. According to last month’s poll, 88% of Israelis considered his administration pro-Israel, 7% said Bush was neutral and just 2% labeled him pro-Palestinian.
Moreover, by acting as the loudest and first democratic champion of the protesters, Israel would catapult itself to the forefront of the campaign for democracy in the Muslim world. Doing so would make it far easier for Israel’s representatives throughout the world to defend against false accusations by self-described human rights organizations that Israel is a human rights abuser.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.".
Do not underestimate the role of women and women’s rights underwriting the demonstration and protests against president Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Khamenei. Presidential candidate Mousavi was the first to campaign sise by side with his spouse Zahra Rahnavard …
Zahra Rahnavard has taken a visible role in the campaign. (cnn)This is a peculiarly modern “revolution,” where the call is not to overturn the Islamic system but for young people, and not only the young, to have a private life and speak freely to their companions, to play popular music and freely see and make movies – for girls to let their hair escape from under the veil and wear a touch of cosmetics.
It might be called a pre-political revolt. The countries this kind of revolt will eventually affect most, after Iran, will be Saudi Arabia and the other Muslim countries that are at the same time rich and repressive and suffer hypocritical male ruling elites.
The increasingly bizarre Col. Muammar Gaddafi of Libya visited Italy last week, accompanied by his bodyguard of Amazons. He asked to speak on women’s rights to an audience of a hundred prominent Italian women. The audience was assembled and the colonel said that it was absurd that in some Muslim countries women had to ask the chief of state for the right to drive a car. He said that’s something “their husbands or brothers should decide” – and seemed taken aback by the wave of laughter that followed.
Can you be an observant Muslim woman and drive a car, or wear cosmetics, or work outside the home? There are observant Christian and Jewish women, and Muslim women as well, who do this in the Western or Westernized countries. But Israel has thousands of strictly observant Orthodox Jewish women who accept a role not unlike that of Muslim women. Nuns have always played a vital role in the Catholic Church, although they at least rule their own convents and ways of life. This is a deep cultural matter, and an individual choice of life – so long as it is not arbitrarily, and forcibly, imposed.
West ‘seeks Iran disintegration’
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Yes, there is a high probability that the if the video is real (unlike the Berg beheading video, it look real) that the shooter was an agent provocateur.
There are lots of claims being made with great certainty and very little, if any, evidence as to who did this.
Compare this article with the video and you will see that claims are being made that do not match the video. Why? Bad reporting or an agenda?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8113552.stm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfrfEtW2aT4
Who benefits?
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“I told her, ‘Neda, don’t go’,” said a woman called Golshad. “She said, ‘Don’t worry. It’s just one bullet and it’s over’.”
It was not the only occasion in which she alluded to the prospect of dying.
Miss Agha Soltan’s boyfriend, Caspian Makan, a 37-year-old photojournalist who met her abroad, spoke of his girlfriend’s determination to protest in the name of “freedom” as he spoke of his grief.
“Neda had said that even if she lost her life and got a bullet in her heart, she would carry on,” said Mr Makan. “Unfortunately, that is how she died, a bullet hit her heart and her lung, and maybe 5 or 6 minutes later, she died.”
Her name is Neda Agha-Soltan and when a sniper shot herdead the uprising got its martyr(The Independent)
Too much information already. The myth is more glorious without it.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."