The recent election of Iran, fake or real?

There are many different opinions and views about the recent election in Iran, so tell us what you think about the validity of it? Even if you don't have enough info about it, just tell us your opinion and supposition. We like to know what you think.

 HAY

IRAN HAS MANY PROBLMS

 IRAN HAS MADE MANY MISTAKES

 BUT

IRAN HAS MANY BRAVE & SMART PEOPLE TO REBUILD IT AS WELL

 I MEAN :

IRAN IS BELONG TO US & WE HAVE TO BUILD IT

 NOT ALLOW EVERY ONE TO INTERFER IN

OUR LOCAL PROBLEMS WHICH

MAYBE RUN IT TO WORST SITUATIONS.

LETS TRY TO BE GATHER & BUILD IT

YOU CAN'T FIND ANY SYMPATHETIC PERSON BETTER THAN OURSELVE.

 WE ARE HERE TO SAY

 WE CAN BUILD OUR COUNTRY

IF WE TRY TO BE CONFEDERATE.

 I AGREE WITH ALL  WHO SAY :

 IRAN IS THE BEST

Sina16: yeah, I really believe in what you said.

arabhamid: yeah exactly, many countries just look forward to such chaoses and anarchies in Iran, and our ppl are helping them.

I've figured out sth about Iranian ppl since some years ago, they just like to make a revolution, but a revolution to what? They don't really care.

Yeah, protesting is a human right, but if it helps the enemy, you shouldn't do it. It's the basic rule.

I think there is a lot of evidence pointing to some kind of fraud. Clealry, millions of Iranians agree and want their voices heard. but I think this is not just about the election anymore. It ws just the spark tht set off this explosion of public protest. The people are openly defying their Supreme Leader and i think it will result in some change. How much is yet to be seen.

I hope in the end the Iranian people have more freedom and  a stronger say in their government. 

arabhamid, please calm down. I didn't claim to speak for Iranians. 

Amir asked for opinions and I gave mine. 

opinions reflect the identity of their speakers

as do false claims and hysterics

I thought this was another interesting view:

A special comment by Tamim Ansary, author of Destiny Disrutped: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes

The Khomeinist regime in Iran is in terminal trouble; but that doesn’t mean Iran is about to repudiate Islam and become a secular democracy. In order to see where Iran is going, it’s important to see where it’s been.

The so-called Islamic Revolution of Iran was never just about Islam. It was the product of  three revolutionary currents coming together. One was constitutionalism, a century-old struggle for democracy, driven mostly by Iran’s secular modernists.  One was Islamism, a push to put the shari’a in charge of political life—a movement fed by rural resentment of the Westernized urban elite and embraced by merchants of the country’s traditional economy.

And then there was nationalism: a rage fueled by Iran’s long-subjugation to European powers, a passion that permeated every level of Iranian society and made people of all backgrounds hungry to see Iranian sovereignty, strength, and pride restored.

In the tumult of 1978-79, master strategist Ayatollah Khomeini appropriated the nationalist impulse into his Shi’i Islamist movement. He was in a good position to do so because Shi’ism had been intertwined with “Iranianism” for over five centuries.  Indeed, it was a defiant Shi’ism that set Iran apart from its powerful Ottoman and Moghul neighbors and let it emerge into history as a nation-state.

By making his brand of Islamism the face of Iranian nationalism,  Khomeini combined two streams of revolutionary enthusiasm and used it to crush the third stream, the  democracy movement of the secular modernists.

In the next several decades, while the world mourned the death of Iranian democracy, Khomeini and his successors made good their promise to nationalist pride and thus secured their grip on the country. They humiliated the United States; beat back Iraq; eradicated all traces foreign cultural influence in Iran; and forged a menacing state able to project its power through Lebanon into the Arab-Israeli conflict.

But recently the Khomeinists have faltered.  The ascension of Ahmadinejad has hurt them.  The trouble with Ahmadinejad is not that most of the world sees him as a villanous thug (that by itself could have helped him domestically.) The problem is that most of the world sees him as a laughable buffoon, a donkey: he brings shame upon the nation.  And he compounded his flaws by mismanaging the economy.  Iranians worried about tomorrow’s livelihood feel their country’s power and prestige waning.  As a result, the regime’s ownership of the nationalist agenda erodes.  If it loses that chip, it must rely purely on its Islamic credentials for legitimacy and even in Iran, that’s not enough.

Many in clerical establishment have seen this coming. This is what the reform movement has been about.   Men like Khatami, Mousavi, and Rafsanjani don’t propose to dismantle the Islamic Republic and replace it with a secular democracy. They’re out to save the Islamic Republic by changing its approach to the world and thus preserve its stature in world affairs.  They see what Obama sees: that belligerent bullying ultimately weakens a nation. This doesn’t mean their commitment to Islam (or even Islamism) has weakened, any more than Obama’s willingness to talk with states like Iran means he no longer believes in democracy.

In Iran, however,  the pressure of internal contradictions has built up such intensity that there is no controlling the reformist challenge and no predicting its consequences.  The only thing we can say for sure is that the regime led by Khamenei is in a bind from which it cannot escape.

The regime is in a bind because the question on the table now is whether it is hurting the nation, and the question doesn’t come from disaffected outsiders but from core members of the ruling elite.

Every instrument the regime possesses for dealing with the crisis tends to put its own legitimacy at risk. Khamenei’s decision-making has further boxed him and his cabal into a corner.   Take the election results: had those been counted properly, they might well have produced numbers pretty close to what the regime announced—believe it or not, that’s what a Manchester Guardian poll and several others showed in the weeks before the election. In the voting itself, there may not have been much fraud.

But that no longer matters, because the votes were not counted properly. That’s indisputable.  By issuing the results of the voting sooner than the votes could possibly have been counted,  Khamenei drew the spotlight away from scattered polling booths and trucks rolling through the streets with ballot boxes, and situated the central act of fraud squarely in the headquarters of the regime.

As Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei may have many powers, but he doesn’t have the power to do as he pleases for personal gain. As a fundamental principle, in the Islamic Republic, no one is free to do as he pleases, not even the “Supreme Leader.”  Everyone is subject to the law—that law being the shari’a. By appearing to commit a blatant dishonesty in order to put his own man in the drivers seat, Khamenei has cost himself an aura of impregnable authority, and this will hurt him because, for all the military and police resources at his command, the Supreme Leader’s authority ultimately derives from rectitude and religious learning, not bodyguards and guns.  As soon as people stop believing in his rectitude, guns won’t save him.

No doubt Khamenei calculated that his decree would stop all the protests dead and that life would then do what life does: go back to normal.  But the protests didn’t stop and so Khamenei found himself caught out in cold.

Therefore, he went to the next step and called on his military resources, because what else could he do? The revolution of 1979 suppressed whole currents of revolutionary passion unrelated to Islam, and those sentiments have been festering and heating up under the skin of the Islamic Republic for decades. The Khomeinist regime cannot let that magma keep welling to the surface.  The trouble is, the division in Iran runs vertically.  This is not a confrontation between a homogenous oppressed underclass and a monolithically united tyranny.  Leading members on both sides of the divide are highly placed insiders. In calling out the troops, the regime turns its guns on itself.  To justify this action, it has no recourse but to redefine some founding members of the Islamic revolution as disloyal outsiders. Even if it succeeds in thus rebranding men like Rafsanjani, it damages the legitimacy of the state structure as a whole: success is failure.

Furthermore, to keep the opposition scattered and disorganized, the regime has no choice but to stopper up their channels of communication. That means it has to disrupt the Internet, shut down Facebook, stop the Twittering, and keep cell phone text messages from getting through.  These, however, are the power technologies of our time. These are what make societies effective, powerful, and modern.  In shutting down these systems, the regime is dragging Iran back into a primitivism that can only reduce the country to third-tier status—and Iranians can feel this. So all such actions offend the yearnings still alive in the Iranian soul for strength, self respect, and a high standing in the world.

In short, every step the regime can take to shore up its strength must cost it some credibility and squander some of its ability to keep presenting itself as the champion of Iranian pride. If a plurality of the nation comes to feel that these Khomeinist clerics are good Muslims but bad for Iran, they are finished.  Their only possible hope then will rest with some outside force inserting itself into the fray and giving them a convenient scapegoat, someone like John McCain, who incredibly enough said today that the United States “should lead”  the Iranian revolution.  But then, if the Khomeinists of Iran depend on John McCain to save their hides, they’re probably dead men walking already. 

Hey people, thanks for sharing your point of views and letting us know how you think of it.

But what I ask you is that please everybody calm down, this is how we can share our thoughts and talk about it.

gkisseberth: yeah, you think right, the election stuff was jast the spark. Iranian ppl have many things in their minds for protesting.

But you know what, ppl who are making the biggest chaoses right now are not normal ppl and not the ones who are looking for great values or sth, they're just some insurgents and rioters who love these kind of things.

But don't agree with you that there are lots of evidences for election's being fake, how about if we say those evidences are fake too?

I'm not saying it was a valid election, but at least I don't pretend I know a lot about invalidity either.

arabhamid: Thanks for your support again. yeah, I know my government, they can even handle bigger than this easily. Even if they're forced to use much more violence.

elections r real. how could it be -the falsification of 12 mln of votes???? nonsense

"you're not the speeker man or the represent of Iranians.

If you take care about your countries, that would be better."

You don't give a damn about the Iranians and free elections either. You just hope that Ahmadinejad stays in power because his government is hostile to Israel.

Most of the population of Iran is under 30 years old. They're young and vibrant and want more freedom than the mullahs give them.

amir; 

I posted this in it'd own thread on the 13th…

Saturday, June 13, 2009

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 candidateswho 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.