Iran after the elections: 6 July

Hi - if you're here from a Twitter update check the bottom of the post.

There seems to be some dispute over the political affiliations of yesterday's group of clerics (The Assembly of Qom Scholars and Researchers) that published a statement yesterday condemning the election and calling the new government illegitimate - whether they are reformists or not. The Wall Street Journal has also weighed in with its own article, calling them politically neutral. I would be inclined to go with their interpretation, as it notes that 1) they did not endorse a candidate, and 2) after the election was over they had sent a congratulatory message to Ahmadinejad (this was on the assumption that the election was fair).


If you're looking for the lyrics in Persian spoken in the middle of the song released a few days ago by the Freedom Glory Project (you can hear them 3:57 into the song), here they are.

If you need to cut and paste them you can find them here.

I noticed a lot of tweets in Persian yesterday on Mousavi forming a new party that linked to this article in Persian, and now CNN has some details here. Trying to form a new party is win-win - technically there's nothing wrong with the legality of the move, and the only response by the establishment is either to accept it (in which case there is a new party where Mousavi was running as an independent before) or deny it (which won't look good on the current administration if it can't even accept the existence of other parties).

Good idea: there's a post here on Balatarin.com on a tweet here in English on an easy method of protest someone has done and recommended to others: he/she's changed his router's SSID to "Ahmadinejad is not my president". Steps for changing the SSID can be seen here. If you want to write "Ahmadinejad is not the president of Iran" in Persian just use this: احمدی نژاد رئیس جمهوری ایران نیست

Here's an interesting video from CNN about Ayatollah Sistani, who lives in Iraq but is originally from Iran and very influential there. Sistani was actually the first Ayatollah I knew about in any detail as a few years ago on a forum somewhere was a thread on his website, which went into quite a bit of detail about what people should and shouldn't do and so we had quite a bit of fun with that. It turns out that he specifically avoided meeting with Ahmadinejad when he visited Iraq whereas he had met with Larijani and Mottaki when they were there.



Sarkozy's tone on the situation is also quite good (good = drawing attention to the situation and criticizing without providing Ahmadinejad's side with any ammunition), saying that "Iran deserves better" (L'Iran mérite mieux). The long version of what he said was "The Iranian people deserve better than the leaders of today (that they have)" (Le peuple iranien mérite mieux que les dirigeants d'aujourd'hui). Article en français here.