Afraid to Cheer!

Today’s evening, Iran’s national soccer teem beat South Korea in a quarter-final match of Asia’s Nation’s tournament. In FIFA Ranking, South Korea is the best of Asia and Iran is the second best. (This ranking may well change by Iran’s winning South Korea) So clearly tonight’s match was an early final. Note that like most of the world, Soccer is the most popular game in Iran and winning a strong teem like S Korea in Asia’s most important tournament and being qualified for the semi-finals makes Iranian youth really happy. But yet when I went out squandering the streets, unlike many other countries and our own country in previous tournaments, there was no mass cheering and street celebration of the victory. People seemed so apathetic were the same people who use to cheer from night to the morning the nights after winning important soccer matches, the cheering which usually tended to become a political rally of decrying the theocratic Islamic Republic regime.
I, personally believe the reason the youth were so tranquil this time, was the preemptive measures taken by the government. Thousands of cops are ordered to patrol the populated streets and plazas of youthful regions of big cities. Although they are said to do this job for enforcing law and order to drivers, but carrying clubs as long as 3 feet and teargas and even machine guns, makes this judgment meaningless. Black Land-Cruiser cop cars which are only used for controlling chaos and tormenting youngsters who wear clothes or treat in ways which are considered western like and un-Islamic, are frequently seen. Many of the youngsters have been arrested and punished for the same crimes or for riding with or talking to a young member of the opposite sex who was not their sister/brother, wife/husband!(i.e. a boy/girl friend).
Many stores selling comfortable and colorful clothes for women have been attacked in Tehran by police forces because those clothes were considered opposing Islamic values! Some girls wearing such clothes have faced atrocities from the vigilante revolutionary forces like Basij. Atrocities like putting the girl’s foot in a pocket full of beetles or even cutting their wrists with razors all as a punishment of those parts of bodies being visible in the public!
With so much increased unprecedented pressure on youth, nobody dares to think about cheering because youth cheering contains singing and dancing which completely oppose Islamic Republic’s so called values! Dictatorships in Iran do not last by enjoying the nation, they last by torturing and terrifying them! More on this soccer match

Zahra Kazemi is said to be raped before being murdered !

First of all, I want to apologize for not answering  an Indian fiend’s question about the root of Ancient Persian and Ancient Indian Languages. In this blog, we are focused on events and facts of the present time not thousands of years ago. There are many other sites that have valuable content about Zoroastrian people and Avestan language and it’s ties with Sanskrit which can easily be found by a web-search. Since none of the authors of this blog is a historian, we cannot give you any answer unless what we might find in the web and finding a content in the web and putting it in the web again, is less than clever action! So please ask us question’s about today’s Iran, it’s government, the way people live and deal with the government etc. Anything regarding Iran in the present time!
Today, CNN world news showed a very short report about Zahra Kazemi’s assassination trial. Shirin Ebadi,  the Iranian  winner of noble peace prize and the lawyer of Zahra Kazemi, vowed to carry on the case in International courts because she has done all she could within Iran’s laws for bringing the murderer to justice. The murderer, clearly, was Saeed Mortazavi, Tehran’s general prosecutor, who is greatly loved by the supreme leader. Not only because of his, and his fractions’, violent attitudes and that the time the death is said to have happened Zahra Kazemi was in his custody, but also  because he tried his best to feign her death a result of a heart attack! He even allegedly threatened the doctor of the last hospital of Kazemi not to report the reality. This reality was that Kazemi was killed by strike of something hard to her head not a heart-attack! So, if contrary with what French national news agency reported, Saeed Mortazavi didn’t kill the journalist personally, why did he try his best to feign the death as caused by something like Heart Attack?
In the court now, some members of the so called reformist government’s Information Ministry are being prosecuted not anyone of the judiciary or Saeed Mortazavi himself. Let me inform you that in Iran’s present dual government, all the ministries are parts of the elected reformist part and tend to disagree the other part of the government, the unelected minority handpicked by the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei. So it is natural that a judiciary all top members of which are directly or indirectly assigned by Khamenei, would never prosecute someone so much loved by him! What happened after the scandal of murder broke out, was that the elected part of the government tried to use this opportunity to make Mortazavi step down or be ousted from his post and get rid of him, but in return, the judiciary controlled by Khamenei’s unelected portion of the government, prosecuted members of the elected part who were totally innocent and this way evaded the conviction.
The latest news is that innocent convict from the information ministry, Mohammad Reza Ahmadi Aghdam, was declared innocent but no one is considered guilty now and the reformist government, have had a deal not to follow the case anymore in return for Ahmadi Aghdam’s vindication. How is Shirin Ebadi going to deliver Mortazavi to justice, I don’t know! Currently, anyone who have publicly condemned Mortazavi to killing Zahra Kazemi, From former parliament members to lawyers and journalists,  is being summoned by the revolutionary court for incrimination and no one even dares to talk against him, not even an international Celebrity and human right activist like Shirin Ebadi. What she says is merely practicing the justice and she vows to do it trough international organizations.
There are other news coming from Iran’s underground media about Zahra Kazemi’s being raped before killed. In the news comes that Canadian embassy requested Kazemi’s being raped to be discussed in the court but all they got was harsh disagreement. They also requested that her body be given to Canadian authorities and delivered to Canada for experiments which would reveal whether she was raped, but this too faced disagreement. After her death, Zahra Kazemi’s mother tried to take the body to be entombed in Canada but the government didn’t deliver the body to her and finally she was obliged to bury her daughter in Iran. After the Canadian ambassador told the rape stuff, Saeed Mortazavi is quoted  to have said something vulgar in Persian that the most polite translation I can find for that is: “She was in no way a sexy or fuck-capable  woman for us!”
Reading the memories and quotations leaked from regime sources about what they did to the political prisoners in mid 80s, reveals that rape is very common in Islamic Republic jails. In Islamic rule, a virgin girl cannot be executed, so whenever the Leader’s guard (Sepah) wanted to execute a young female political activist who was much likely to be a high school or college student attracted to opposition party of Mojahedin e Khalgh, they took a mullah to present a temporary marriage of the girl with one of the Sepah agents and the agent raped her the night before execution and after that, the execution was performed and simultaneously the law of Islam was satisfied. In the case of Zahra Kazemi, she was a 50 year old mother and had nothing to do with virginity but Iran’s extremist Hezbollah members are kind of freak that even a female donkey cannot be safe from them. If like Abu Ghoraib jail in Iraq, somebody took pictures of these acts and published them, it would be a good scandal for Islamic Republic Regime. Iran is poor in matters of technology and instruments like Handy Cams and digital Cameras or cell-phones  with camera are so luxuries that just the richest afford to have them, therefore even if there were someone with enough conscience, he would  not be likely to have the image taking device required for making the media fad. So these regime agents who have conscience and want to expose the dirty face of Islamic regime, can do nothing better than publishing their memories in texts and usually via internet and the above report is extracted from sources like that. 

Iranians are Persians not Arabs!

      An American friend of me, an 18 year old boy from South Dakota,  Sent me a message that revealed he still thought I am an Arab! To him and all dear Americans I want to say here load and clear that Iranians, except a small minority in the south, are not Arabs! Iran is a multicultural society by the way, and although the dictatorship government tends to pretend another way, it is also multilingual. The majority are said to be Persian (Fars), speaking the language of the ancient Persian emperors like the great Cyrus. Unlike Arabic, Persian has a lot in common with roman and Latin languages like English. Notice that we use almost the same words for Brother, Mother, Father, Daughter, Pajamas, and many other things as English speaking people use and these lead many historians believe that our language and the European languages have the same root!  This Persian language have experienced lots of alterations through the 3000 time period, and one of them is it’s alphabets. Our ancient alphabets are said to be the root of Latin alphabets and are the ones used in monuments and stone works like Persepolice. That ancient script is called the nail script. But after invasion of Arabs which lead to 200 years of their ruling Iran, our language imported lots of words and also the alphabets from Arabic. The same thing happened to countries like Egypt, Syria, present Iraq(separated from Ottoman Empire), Libya, Jordan, Algeria etc. and made them totally loose their ancestral language and get melted in Arabic. But this didn’t happen to some nations and they, with all the pressures coming from racist Arab empire, preserved their languages and ancestral cultures, although apparently converted to Islam. Those two Great Nations and cultures are Persian and Turkish which also constitute the majority of Iranian nation. According to official statistics 1 third of Iranian people are Persians and Another third are Turkish. The rest are from smaller linguistic minorities such as Kordian, Arabs, Gilaks, Balouchs, Lors, etc. From long ago and after getting free from Arabs ruling, which happened by the aid of Turkish Iranians, Persian have been the formal language of the country and means of communication between different cultures. We have had all Turkish, Persian, Mongolian and Arab Rulers but all these except wild brutal Arabs, conserved a great deal of respect for Persian language. This is not the case about other popular language of Iran and Persian Governments since Reza Shah’s Regime, Tried their best to oppress the Turkish language and destroy the culture of Iran’s Turks and forced them to not read or write in their own language, and do it in Persian. About this chauvinistic act started in Reza Shah’s period and continued until Khamenei ’s kingdom and even the so called liberal Khatami’s administration as well,  I have a lot to say and you will hear more if you keep visiting our blog. But this post was all about we are not Arabs! Some of ultra nationalist Persians even tend to belittle Arab culture and consider Arabs as Locust eating pirates who attacked our country and destroyed our ancient culture and raped our women and…. . This racist radical view is not shared by liberal writers of this blog, but whether or not a Persian hates Arabs, He/She is not an Arab!

Soccer, Iranians' only real fun

 
This blog is still experiencing a visitor famine. Although there have been some traffic increase due to few advertising policies based on free services, but it is still a lot less than acceptable and I hope you to help this blog become something! If you are one of those interested in anything relevant to strange country of Iran, then you have no reason not to help this blog. If you like our blog, then tell your friends about www.persianliberals.tk and if you don’t like it, tell is via comments how can we change it to a blog desirable by you.
After all, today’s evening Iran’s national soccer teem beat Thailand 3-0 in Asia’s Cup of Nations, the most renowned soccer tournament of Asia. Soccer, not only the most popular sport in the world, but also the most loved game in Iran. Unlike games like Basketball or baseball, Playing soccer doesn’t need much facilities (at least in a way played widely in Iran) and young boys can play it so easily with a plastic-made cheep ball and two stone pieces used for marking goals instead of those steel-made bars and net. In every Iran’s alley, especially in seasons of temperate weather, there is at least one such temporary soccer playground built and up to 10 young boys are busy playing it. Although the game which is widely played in Iran’s alleys and streets may seem much different with standard soccer, but it is based on the same principles and this is what makes Iranian youth have soccer skill in their blood. Only a very small percent of those many soccer lovers have enough financial power to pursue their love in standard grass soccer field(contrary to the game on street asphalt mentioned before) and a lesser percentage of them can make it to become global stars like Hamburg’s Mahdavikia and former Birenmunchen player, the legendary Ali Daei. Whenever there is an Asian soccer event involving Iran’s national teem, the nation try to watch (or if no TV accessible, listen) the game. For a nation like Iran’s, having pop music, dancing, drinking, dating and almost all pleasant funs of life banned by the fundamentalist government, soccer is one of the very few pleasures that doesn’t have any Islamic rule and governmental legislation against it and though it can be said to be the only real fun of Iranian people, who are also desperately oppressed by worsening economical problems. In times that Iran is the winner, as happened this evening, unlike anywhere else in the world, people and youngsters are not allowed to cheer in the streets and police will respond any public movement of that kind with violent attacks by clubs, teargases, water canons and even bullets! There are two reasons for this brutal attitude of police. First is that in the Mullah’s extremist version of Islam, any act of cheering and happiness is against Islam! This has itself 2 major reasons: one is that for a fascist regime, like Islamic Republic of Iran to survive, people should always leave with ideology and death. Be always ready to die and to kill for the survival of the dictator monarch! All the revolutionary slogans of Iran have this same essence of culture of death not life! One famous sample of that is the value of martyrdom, holy death, in Islamic Republic creed based originally by late Ayatollah Khomeini.  So death has nothing to do with happiness! 90% of Iran’s religious events in Iran  have something to do with death, like many anniversaries of death of an Islamic saint. Some of these so called saints,  like Fatima, have more than one death anniversaries due to different historical stories narrated about their death date! So if you want to govern in an Iranian theocratic dictatorship, you better keep the ideology of death and morning alive and these two have nothing to do with cheering and happiness!
Another reason for Iran’s government’s opposition to acts of joy like cheering and dancing is the danger felt about relationship between young boys and girls! It is considered a big sin in Iran’s Islam for a young boy and young girl to meet and intercourse(not necessarily sexual!) before getting married according to Islamic rules! So any event of cheering and dancing and music may present a chance for young girls and goys to meet, choose and start a relationship together. Iranian boys and girls however do not follow this belief of sin and have invented ways to start a relationship which usually leads to either marriage or liaisons, without being caught and flogged by police and the cops are always trying to hamper this processes. About these things I will tell you very interesting stories later, but any street cheering and celebration, even some of the Islamic mourning ceremonies, are used by the youth as an opportunity to meet members of opposite sex and find a new mate and though is hated by cops.
The second and more important reason of Iranian government being against the street celebration of soccer events is that in recent years, due to encouragements practiced by Iranian dissidents living I exile via the internet or their satellite TV stations, any public gathering of youth tends to become a street rally against the Islamic Republic government, Mullahs and their ideology. Young people, mostly teenager boys, easily convert any such gathering to an anti-regime  session of slogan-crying, tearing and disrespecting pictures of Leader Khamenei and sometimes throwing stones to police forces and mosques and some times showing their sadness and hatred of Mullah’s regime in acts of vandalism. This also applies to religious ceremonies like Ashura as well(as happened in Mirdamad square of Tehran earlier this year). Mullah’s are extremely afraid of any protest to begin and get developed and create events like 8th of July (famous 18th of Tir in Persian calendar) and therefore they take both threatening and  preemptive measure to prevent any such event that may lead to their fall. Of these measures are filling the streets with anti-chaos forces armed with teargas, clubs and machineguns (hope thee is plastic, not metal bullets in them!) to threaten youngsters and also publishing parasite waves which makes digital devices for receiving Persian satellite TVs out of order, and therefore stops Iran’s youth from being encouraged for protest by Iranian exile dissidents. There are some rumors that when 3 years ago Iran’s national teem lost to Bahrain, although it one a strong teem like Ireland in Tehran but lost to Bahrain and missed the world cup 2002, this defeat was due to bribing or threatening some of the players by secret agencies of government, because at that time after each game of Iran’s national teem, a country wide protest was held in Iran. If the teem won, the protest was started by celebration and dancing (which is as mentioned before, itself a great defiance of regime’s values) and if the teem lost, it started as an objection to the loss. So the secret agents are said to have bribed a few players to make the teem lose the game against Bahrain and not go to the world cup, because if it did go to the world cup, other matches would be on the way and the protests where widening throughout the country and police was unable to control them. But now, I think after preventing same events to happen at the anniversary of July 8th, the police is successful in terrifying youth and preventing any cheering. the result will be long life for the fascist ideology and dictatorship regime. It is also one of the death anniversaries of saint Fatima as well and though any cheering can be interpreted as blasphemy! 
 

Iran’s women, Misogynism or Pearlism?

Great thanks to Dear Raul (www.lastdiary.blogspot.com) for commenting and linking and if you read this post please tell me more about mailing Blogspot staff to be included in a feature because I don’t know what is that all about. About Misogynism in Iran, I would rather say misogynism is not a good word. Women are not hated by Iranian culture, but they are liked too much! For example in our university, big and comfortable busses are dedicated to transporting girls but boys, although having bigger bodies, have to tolerate tiny, uncomfortable minibuses! When people get in the metro, the only public transportation device in which men and women are not separated, men usually tend to get up and leave their seats to women who don’t have any seat and are stood up but the reverse never happens! This masculine attitude of giving your seat to a female person, no matter how younger and healthier the woman,  is considered as a very Islamic and divine behavior and things like these two happen in many other cases as well. All the hard works like repairing the house or servicing the car or doing the daily shopping, and hardest of all, earning money, are the man’s duty and woman only has to do the cooking and babysitting! There is a quote from an ancient Islamic woman who is said to be sacred(Fatima the daughter of prophet Mohammed, who married at 10 and died at 18) that Islamic woman hidden in Hijab is like a pearl hidden in a shell! So Iranian women and girls are treated like jewels! They don’t have much freedom and right to choose their way of life and sometimes, even their husband, but they are kept safe and sound! I have always been a feminist and tried to replace Iranian and Islamic conventional values limiting women with western women’s liberation values, not just because of affection for women, but mostly because I believe it is better for men as well as women! That is because in the current situation, all the difficulty and responsibility of a family life is on the shoulders of Iranian man alone! You cannot imagine how difficult is it in Iran to earn money. In Iranian conventional culture, woman is supposed to be a housewife, never leave the house alone, and do only the child bearing and housework and man is supposed to get out in the morning and return home in the evening with lots of money! This traditional life created no problem when in the previous pro-American regime of Shah, Iran was a very wealthy country with twice amount of present oil export and less than half of the present population and no American sanctions. Women were also either poor and too illiterate to claim any right, or so rich and free   to enjoy themselves with following fashion and going to the movie theaters and dance clubs and spending the money easily earned by the husband! So both man and woman were satisfied with the conventional man-out woman-in way of life. But now things are changed a great deal. The mullah’s government is one of the most corrupt governments in the world, and about this corruption and it’s effects on people’s lives I will tell you more later. American sanctions and so-called Islamic economic values which are actually some stupid anti-prosperity rituals aimed at managing the today’s society’s economy with the ways used for managing the economy of ancient Arabia in Prophet Mohammed’s period, explosion of population in the first decade after the Islamic revolution which was itself a result of  mullahs beliefs that contraception is a  non-Islamic behavior, also added to the corruption of mullahs and their prince lings, have together crippled the Iranian economy during these 26 years. About this economic collapse and it’s relationship with theocracy I also have a lot to tell you and Inshaallah I will. On the other hand, girls are deprived from pleasures like dancing, singing, bike-riding or playing most kinds of sports in the public, and they have nothing to do except to use their brains! So they are gradually getting more educated than boys.  More than 60 percent of Iranian university students are female. An educated woman, doesn’t easily accept the pearl in shell custom and she wants not to be the pearl, but a free human-being. Also man alone cannot earn enough money for the family, even if he has 3 jobs. About the hardship of earning in so-called Islamic Iran, I think it is enough to mention that with a simple working class, single job salary, it takes 20 years of working and saving as much money as one can to own a house and a car of his/her self. So this is the time that old costumes are incapable of keeping the wheels of society rolling. The other factor of conflict causing is advances in communication technology which makes it easy for the Iranian youth to get acquainted with the world outside the borders of Iran and it’s freedom and liberalism values and this phenomenon  acts to weaken Iranian youth’s belief in Islamic and theocratic values and limitations like Hijab! So at least in today’s Iran, it is more about pearl in the shell(can be called Pearlism!) than about being misogynist.

Women in iran? we have so much to say

A dear friend, apprently from US, finally left us a comment. I want to give a reply to that comment which can also contain interesting material for other readers. Women in Iran are absolutely banned from earning money from their beauty and feminine disguise! There are no fashion shows, modeling business, dancing, and no Iranian girl can become a music or dance star unless she leaves Iran. Although some pretty girls have profitted their beauty in cinema industry in recent years, but they have their own problems. normal people look at actress girls as if they are whores! and that does make some sence because the majority of female actresses in Iran's cinema are raped or slept with by ussually old male directors, so either the girl can tolerate this atmosphier, where she can well be called a whore by iranian logic, or she cannot and that results in acts like suicide or withdrawal from cinema industry.
it is a common news that some girl killed herself after being raped by a famous director but newspapers in this country do not dare to mention the name of the director, neither the courts are likely to prosecute him, because justice in Islamic Republic of Iran is only practiced against the poor!
with such a situation, what is a talented ambitious Iranian girl to do? she cannot earn money, carier, honor and fame from her beauty, so she goes to mental works like directing! it is no surprise that 25percent of iranian films are made by Female directors and most of them are great movies aimed at not only entertaning the viewer, but also expressing the problems of the society and fostering feminism and human rights! i am a dan of american movies but no american movie was as interesting for me as is Fifth Reaction, a film made by iranian female ultra feminist director, Tahmineh Milani.
about fear, we persian liberals are not afraid of Americans, but of fascist Hizbullah iranian hackers! we are not going to oppose americans in this blog, wbecause we see them as liberators not invadors! So leave us comments and provide links to us in your blog pleae!

The most important problem for travellers to Iran!

Iran is an ancient country with dosens of tourist attractions and monuments and buildings as old as thousands of years. But whay exactly iran is not as famous as it should be among western tourists? there are two major reasons: one is an unreasnable fear from iranian people common among westerners and specially americans. they think all iranians are terrorist and antiweserners. This sentiment is totally wrong! although iranian government is the most important sponsor of alqaeda and global terrorism and the biggest enemy state of USA, But this doesn't mean people are the same way. never foprget that Iran's government is a dictatorshiop and desires of a dictatorship government has nothing to do with the desires of it's people. In fact, as someone who live in Iran and have seen and talked to several muslems from other countries, i believe in no other muslem country people are more fond of america than iran. don't believe what you see on tv and people rallying and crying anti USA slogans! those are a very small minority. a charecteristic of iranian nation is that it always creates dictatorship regimes and then defies them. whatever the dictatorship government tells people as the truth, will be regarded by the majority(specially youngsters) as the ultimate lie! so if you are american and you travel to Iran, you are much more likely to be warmly wellcomed by the poeople, except the ones you meet are of rare fscist minorities like Basij and Ansaar. Don't believe? ask the american athletes who have travelled to iran in recent years as Wresteling and Basketball teems!
but yet there is another aspect of Iran's tourism industry that really tends to deter all nonmuslems from travelling to this country and that is the rool of Hijab! according to this oldfashioned islamic rool(which is not obayed by many modern muslems) women should were wide dresses covering all their bodies, even in the hottest seasons of the year, and worst than that, they have to cover their hair with some stupid thing called the scarf! so if you are of the gentle sex and want to travel to the ancient country of iran, you have to tolerate the heat of wether and are not allowed to even oncover your hair! so much for legs and arms! even men are not totally free with their clothing. you are not allowed to walk around with shorts or shirts with sleeves that are sorter than a certain limit! so the big problem for a summer time trip to Iran is comfort of clothing which yet remains unsolved!

What is it you wish to know about Iran?

As we told you before, we are about to write here all one westerner need to know about Iran. We just don't know where to start from. In order to become Salam Cox of Iran, we need support from you. You can support us either by exchanging links with us via the orange colored form at the left of this page or simply by leaving comments telling exactly what you think of Iran, or what questions you have in your mind about it. Yet we don't have more than trivial a\mount of visitors here but we expect more of these few occasional visitors in the case of support. We will follow some traffic garnering policies in coming days and during it, we will gradually publish some articles discussing critical issues relevant to Iran and it all will be better with your comments. So, sopport us with your links and coments!

we are coming!

Remember www.persianliberals.tk! We will soon become Salam Cox of iran! visit this blog in cming days to get familiar with the real face of Iran! Hear the truth about this controversial country from Iran Liberals! we, writers of this blog, are some iranian Dissident youngsters(all below 25) trying to do something in favour of developing freedom and democracy in Iran and all middle east. some of us are muslem and some are not! we have alot to tell you about islam, islamic government, theocracy, women's rights in Iran and etc. come see this blog! Coming Soon!