Iran Freedom Rally

a bit of a difference there.

Iran's government was elected by the majority of Iranians, and those Iranian protesters are just a bunch of sore loosers who don't like the outcome of the elections. It would be like a bunch of tea party people protesting the Obama win; meaningless and without merit.

The election was stolen, and completely fraudulent. Polls indicate Ahmadinejad would have come in third if the election had been honest

Do you think Gaddafi's hired mercenaries are the real representatives of the people like Ahmadinejad's Basiji?

Anne Bayefsky:

Iranians are rioting today against a vicious government that stones women for alleged adultery, murders homosexuals for the crime of existing, amputates limbs by judicial decree, brutalizes anyone wanting free speech, and is currently holding two Americans hostage for hiking. Is there a Security Council resolution in the works on the dying and the dead in Iran? Bahrain? Libya? Tunisia? Egypt? Algeria? Not the slightest possibility.

The mass uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries are not democratic merely because the people are calling for democracy and freedom. They are revolutionary because they are a movement against U.S. client dictatorships that betray the interests of the masses in favor of imperialist capital and their domestic clients. They are movements not just for formal democracy but for independence and exercising a nation’s sovereignty and control over its political system and its resources. These truly democratic movements are not to be confused with movements that hide behind the term democracy to promote pro-imperialist policies and against the interests of the working people and the poor.

To group together countries like Iran and Syria with Egypt and Tunisia is overlooking the obvious fact that the former are governed by states that stand for their country’s independence, the latter by states representing imperialist interests. This difference is not coincidental, of secondary significance or a variation in form.

http://www.pslweb.org/liberationnews/news/iran-green-movement-vs-egypt-revolution.html

Exit polls mirrored the election results, but IF there are polls that show he would have come in third, then lets see them. Otherwise, don't talk to us about "honest" anything.

http://www.juancole.com/2009/06/stealing-iranian-election.html

Stealing the Iranian Election
Top Pieces of Evidence that the Iranian Presidential Election Was Stolen

1. It is claimed that Ahmadinejad won the city of Tabriz with 57%. His main opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, is an Azeri from Azerbaijan province, of which Tabriz is the capital. Mousavi, according to such polls as exist in Iran and widespread anecdotal evidence, did better in cities and is popular in Azerbaijan. Certainly, his rallies there were very well attended. So for an Azeri urban center to go so heavily for Ahmadinejad just makes no sense. In past elections, Azeris voted disproportionately for even minor presidential candidates who hailed from that province.

2. Ahmadinejad is claimed to have taken Tehran by over 50%. Again, he is not popular in the cities, even, as he claims, in the poor neighborhoods, in part because his policies have produced high inflation and high unemployment. That he should have won Tehran is so unlikely as to raise real questions about these numbers. [Ahmadinejad is widely thought only to have won Tehran in 2005 because the pro-reform groups were discouraged and stayed home rather than voting.)

3. It is claimed that cleric Mehdi Karoubi, the other reformist candidate, received 320,000 votes, and that he did poorly in Iran’s western provinces, even losing in Luristan. He is a Lur and is popular in the west, including in Kurdistan. Karoubi received 17 percent of the vote in the first round of presidential elections in 2005. While it is possible that his support has substantially declined since then, it is hard to believe that he would get less than one percent of the vote. Moreover, he should have at least done well in the west, which he did not.

4. Mohsen Rezaie, who polled very badly and seems not to have been at all popular, is alleged to have received 670,000 votes, twice as much as Karoubi.

5. Ahmadinejad’s numbers were fairly standard across Iran’s provinces. In past elections there have been substantial ethnic and provincial variations.

6. The Electoral Commission is supposed to wait three days before certifying the results of the election, at which point they are to inform Khamenei of the results, and he signs off on the process. The three-day delay is intended to allow charges of irregularities to be adjudicated. In this case, Khamenei immediately approved the alleged results.

I am aware of the difficulties of catching history on the run. Some explanation may emerge for Ahmadinejad’s upset that does not involve fraud. For instance, it is possible that he has gotten the credit for spreading around a lot of oil money in the form of favors to his constituencies, but somehow managed to escape the blame for the resultant high inflation.

But just as a first reaction, this post-election situation looks to me like a crime scene. And here is how I would reconstruct the crime.

As the real numbers started coming into the Interior Ministry late on Friday, it became clear that Mousavi was winning. Mousavi’s spokesman abroad, filmmaker Mohsen Makhbalbaf, alleges that the ministry even contacted Mousavi’s camp and said it would begin preparing the population for this victory.

The ministry must have informed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who has had a feud with Mousavi for over 30 years, who found this outcome unsupportable. And, apparently, he and other top leaders had been so confident of an Ahmadinejad win that they had made no contingency plans for what to do if he looked as though he would lose.

They therefore sent blanket instructions to the Electoral Commission to falsify the vote counts.

This clumsy cover-up then produced the incredible result of an Ahmadinejad landlside in Tabriz and Isfahan and Tehran.

The reason for which Rezaie and Karoubi had to be assigned such implausibly low totals was to make sure Ahmadinejad got over 51% of the vote and thus avoid a run-off between him and Mousavi next Friday, which would have given the Mousavi camp a chance to attempt to rally the public and forestall further tampering with the election.

This scenario accounts for all known anomalies and is consistent with what we know of the major players.

More in my column, just out, in Salon.com: “Ahmadinejad reelected under cloud of fraud,” where I argue that the outcome of the presidential elections does not and should not affect Obama’s policies toward that country– they are the right policies and should be followed through on regardless.

The public demonstrations against the result don’t appear to be that big. In the past decade, reformers have always backed down in Iran when challenged by hardliners, in part because no one wants to relive the horrible Great Terror of the 1980s after the revolution, when faction-fighting produced blood in the streets. Mousavi is still from that generation.

My own guess is that you have to get a leadership born after the revolution, who does not remember it and its sanguinary aftermath, before you get people willing to push back hard against the rightwingers.

So, there are protests against an allegedly stolen election. The Basij paramilitary thugs and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards will break some heads. Unless there has been a sea change in Iran, the theocrats may well get away with this soft coup for the moment. But the regime’s legitimacy will take a critical hit, and its ultimate demise may have been hastened, over the next decade or two.

What I’ve said is full of speculation and informed guesses. I’d be glad to be proved wrong on several of these points. Maybe I will be.

I wasn't expecting you to provide any actual evidence. And you didn't.

And the way the media has pushed the idea that the Iranian's election was stolen, if there was any actual evidence, it would have been presented to us by now. Instead, we get speculation and outright fiction.

And the exit poles still mirrored the election results. That fact seems to get lost among all the speculation and lies that get media play in the west/

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503543_162-5095195-503543.html

Total number of votes: 43,026,078
Mir Hossein Mousavi: 19,075,623
Mehdi Karoubi 13,387,104
Mhmoud Ahmadinejad: 5,698,417
Muhsen Rezai: 3,754,218

Well. if that proves anything, if proves that you see proof were none exists. The article makes it clear that no one knows where that letter came from. But for you to come in here and say it proves anything just exposes your own prejudices. It also shows us that you see evidence where none exists. How can anyone take you seriously? I bet you see evidence of Iran's election being stolen in the sunrise, in flowers on the side of the road, in the smiles on children's faces. Yes, you have exposed yourself as being prejudiced, delusional and willing to mislead others to manipulate them. And that is very offensive against your victims.

Like I said, If there was any actual evidence AT ALL, we would have seen it by now.

Regardless of whether the vote totals were fixed, the important fact NOT being discussed here is that the elections are rigged before they begin. Only parties approved by the right-wing theocratic government are allowed to participate in the elections at all! If they are are not sufficiently religious, they are not allowed to field candidates. That is a far easier method of rigging than manipulating vote count.

Anyone backing this government, even in full view of its problems with the U.S., is a fool.