IRAN WILL RESIST

Jun 24, 2009 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

---

If you listen and look at only the BBC and CNN you may be tempted to believe that Iran is in the throes of an Orange Revolution. Thank goodness, however, that Al Jazeera is around and allows far more balanced coverage of what is taking place in that country.
But even so, Al Jazeera has been able to definitively debunk this silly view which is circulating in Iran and around the world – compliments of the mass media – that the Iranian elections have been rigged in favour of the Incumbent, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
There is a great deal of misinformation that is being pedaled about the election in Iran. The vast majority of disinformation is coming from the western sources, including news agencies, who are being misled into believe that there is massive unrest and protest in that country. They are hyping up the protests in Iran, in the hope that the fuel that is lacking within that country to spread the flames of dissent may be spurred on by international support drummed up by western media reports, that the people of Iran are demanding change.
The people of Iran by their vote in the Presidential election have decided what they wanted. This is not what the West was hoping for, and they are trying their best to stir trouble and at the same time test how what is being called the new media – internet, texting and cell phone photography- can be used as a means of orchestrating social change.
Unlike in Zimbabwe, where a systematic international campaign forced Mugabe into a political accommodation with his main rival, there is, however, not going to the same result in Iran. That country has resisted the Americans and Europeans before, and is not going to surrender to any campaign to undermine its theocracy.
The West is going to fail, because the numbers opposed to the elections in Iran are not large enough to create a viable vehicle for regime change. I saw the Million Man March in the United States of America. The crowds were like a huge sea of people. I have seen nothing so far about what is happening in Iran which indicates that three million persons are in the streets protesting the elections. These figures are hugely exaggerated.
Close to forty million Iranians voted in that country’s Presidential elections. The voting was simple, in that it was only for a President that the electorate had to cast their vote. This should not lead to complications about the results.
Just before the elections, in fact, mere weeks before the election, a western commissioned poll indicated that President Ahmadinejad had a two-to-one advantage over his rival, Mir-Hossein Mousavi. It would seem impossible that three weeks after, this seemingly unassailable advantage could be wiped out to the extent that Mousavi supporters can claim that the elections were rigged and that their candidate won the election.
What we are witnessing in the streets of Iran today seems therefore nothing more than an orchestrated campaign by the west to instigate regime-change through a velvet revolution. The only problem for imperialism is that it does not have the numbers within Iran to create such a revolution. It would possibly require in excess of twenty million persons taking to the streets for the order in that country to be overturned.
As it is, all the excitement that the western media is drumming up about the elections will fizzle in a matter of days. The small protest demonstrations cannot be sustained, and are unfortunate, because despite the absence of social freedoms in Iran, that country can boast of a credible record when it comes to elections, having elected close to six Presidents since the 1979 Revolution that toppled the Shah.
The West, of course, wishes to create turbulence in Iran. It wishes to replace Ahmadinejad with someone that would be more to their liking. But Mousavi may not necessarily be the right person and they are making a dangerous miscalculation in supporting this relative obscure and unknown politician.
We can expect in the weeks ahead for the western media to continue to fan the dying flames in the streets of Tehran and in other parts of that country. We can expect a great deal of coverage being dedicated to the fizzling of the velvet revolution.
The West will, however, still get something out of this. They will hold fast to the line that the elections in that country were flawed and that the President of Iran is an authoritarian ruler who lords over an un-submitting polis. This is the most that the West will achieve.
Iran will outlive this latest assault and aggression. It will resist change being imposed from outside of its borders, just as how it has resisted the sanctions and attempts at international isolation over its refusal to bend to western pressures to halt its nuclear programme.

---

---