4/2/2024

Iran

Continued 2/2

Propaganda

Propaganda in Iran originates from the Iranian government and "private" entities, which are usually state controlled. In The Islamic Republic of Iran propaganda is also about the information that is not broadcast to viewers due to censorship. Aided by Western technology from Nokia and Siemens, the Iranian government has created one of the most sophisticated censorship platforms created in modern times.

The flags of nations are considered propaganda. Not only is the flag itself a representation of propaganda, but the flags of other nations, such as the United States and Israel, are used in Iranian Propaganda. Burning of the U.S. flag and Israeli Flag seem to occur at rallies against each. Flag burning is a propaganda tool, such as burning Effigies of world leaders.

On October 8, 2006, cleric Seyyed Hossein Kazemeini Boroujerdi was arrested for opposing Velaayat-e Faghih, advocating the separation of religion from state, and defending the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. After eleven years as a political and religious prisoner, Boroujerdi defrocked, abandoning his status as an Ayatollah, and became an anti-religion activist. The Iranian state allegedly tried to have him killed after accusing him of apostasy.

In June 2007, the Special Clerical Court prosecuted him behind closed doors. The authorities have not provided any official accounting regarding his prosecution and sentencing. According to his associates, he was initially sentenced to death, but upon appeals his sentence was reduced to 11 years in prison, ten of which must be served in exile in city of Yazd. He has been deprived of access to an independent attorney throughout his prosecution and imprisonment."

An Iranian Anat fist crushes an Iraqi jet emblazoned with the flags of the United States and Soviet Union. 1980s

Iranian Justice System has also been known to espouse propaganda. This is especially true in the prison system of Iran where Political prisoners were "incessantly bombarded with propaganda from all sides ... radio and closed-circuit television ... loudspeakers blaring into all cells even into solitary cells and `the coffins` [where some prisoners were kept] ... ideological sessions.".

Any reading material of a secular nature such as Western novelists, or even religious material that didn't agree ideologically with the Islamic Republic such as work by Ali Shariati was banned. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a special unit within the Armed Forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran has practiced for Psychological Operations against military targets. According to Ayatollah Khamenei, "the main priority of the country is to confront (enemy's) soft warfare which is aimed at creating doubt, discord and pessimism among the masses of the people," Ayatollah Khamenei said last year, addressing a large and fervent congregation of Basij (volunteer) forces."

The Basij are the local and grassroot supporters of the Iranian government. "The mission of the Basij as a whole can be broadly defined as helping to maintain law and order; enforcing ideological and Islamic values and combating the "Western cultural onslaught"; assisting the IRGC in defending the country against foreign threats; and involvement in state-run economic projects.". With the IRGC's help and support, Basij members are trained in propaganda and political warfare techniques using media outlets.

There are about 21,000 volunteer "reporters" that have trained with the IRGC on multiple waves of communication and media, which include social networks, television, radio, print media, and the internet. According to Reporters Without Borders, "In Iran, the Revolutionary Guards recently announced their ambition to build their own spinternet by launching 10,000 blogs for the Basij, a paramilitary force under the Guards.

This comes at a time when the Internet has become a major force in exposing corruption in the highest ranks of the Iranian leadership." As well, cyber-police "are here to create a cyber police force inside the people’s mind,” said Hesamedin Mojtahed, the officer in charge of the booth. “People want to be informed of the dangers on the Internet,” he said. “We are here for them.”

Iranian government proxies operated unattributed Facebook pages devoted to praise of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and condemnation of the Palestinian occupation. This particular network was removed in May 2019.

In August 2018, Twitter suspended 770 accounts originating in Iran for engaging in coordinated manipulation. In October 2018, Twitter publicly shared data on the 770 accounts on their Election Integrity Hub. In a study focusing on the Arab world, the researchers found that more than half of these accounts generated Arabic content to target Arab Twitter users. In this study, it was found that the Arabic tweets were not aiming to socially engage with other Arab users but rather to promote certain websites, and more than 69% of the links shared were to pro-Iran Arabic-language news websites.

Logos of the International Union of Digital Medium (IUVM), a cluster of ostensibly independent websites that aggressively repackaged and re-broadcast Iranian state media. The cluster operated, undetected, for five years before being identified in August 2018.

Hovyiat (Identity") is a biweekly TV program that was produced and aired on Iran's IRIB TV1 in 1996. The program's objective was said to be "confrontation with western cultural invasion.". The series targeted a broad range of Iranian intellectuals (secular as well as religious modernists), archeologists, artists, scientists and national leaders as Mohammad Mosaddeq. It has been described by critics as part of an "ideological campaign" by the Ministry of Intelligence "to paint Westernized [Iranian] intellectuals and artists as unpatriotic, un-Islamic, a threat to Iran's national and religious identity," and which included the "chain murders" of Iranian intellectuals that also occurred during the 1990s.

The show is said to have "specialized in naming intellectuals as `hired agents` of the Baháʼís, Zionists, Freemasons," and foreign powers. A signature of the program was the morphing of an image of American Benjamin Franklin on the American hundred-dollar bill, "into the face of the Iranian intellectual under attack.". One Iranian dissident, Faraj Sarkohi, was kidnapped by security officials after (amongst other things) publishing an article "critical" of `Hoviyyat.` He was "tortured to `make and remake` videotapes confessing to being a `foreign spy` and giving outrageous lies about his own and his colleagues' sex lives," before being released.

Religious Tollerance

Zoroastrians, Jews, and Christians were officially recognized and protected by the government. Shortly after Khomeini's return from exile in 1979, he issued a fatwa ordering that Jews and other minorities (except those of the Baháʼí Faith) be treated well. In power, Khomeini distinguished between Zionism as a secular political party that employs Jewish symbols and ideals and Judaism as the religion of Moses. However freedom of religion and belief was systematically violated in law and practice. The authorities imposed on people of all faiths, as well as atheists, codes of public conduct rooted in a strict interpretation of Shi’a Islam.

Kamran Samimi, third from left, with other members of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of Iran, in an undated photo. Everyone in the photo was executed by the Iranian government in Dec. 1981, except for Guiti Vahid, far right.

“the Baháʼís are not a sect but a party, which was previously supported by Britain and now the United States. The Baháʼís are also spies just like the Tudeh [Communist Party].”.

One non-Muslim group treated differently were the 300,000 members of the Baháʼí Faith. Starting in late 1979 the new government systematically targeted the leadership of the Baháʼí community by focusing on the Baháʼí National Spiritual Assembly (NSA) and Local Spiritual Assemblies (LSAs); prominent members of NSAs and LSAs were often detained and even executed. "Some 200 of whom have been executed and the rest forced to convert or subjected to the most horrendous disabilities.".

The authorities continue to commit widespread and systematic human rights violations against members of the Baha’i minority, including forcible closure of businesses, confiscation of property, bans on employment in the public sector, denial of access to higher education and hate speech campaigns on state media. According to a US panel, attacks on Baháʼís in Iran increased under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's presidency. The United Nations Commission on Human Rights revealed an October 2005 confidential letter from Command Headquarters of the Armed Forces of Iran ordering its members to identify Baháʼís and to monitor their activities.

On 14 May 2008, members of an informal body known as the "Friends" that oversaw the needs of the Baháʼí community in Iran were arrested and taken to Evin prison. The Friends court case has been postponed several times, but was finally underway on 12 January 2010. Other observers were not allowed in the court. Even the defence lawyers, who for two years have had minimal access to the defendants, had difficulty entering the courtroom. The chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom said that it seems that the government has already predetermined the outcome of the case and is violating international human rights law.

Further sessions were held on 7 February 2010, 12 April 2010 and 12 June 2010. On 11 August 2010 it became known that the court sentence was 20 years imprisonment for each of the seven prisoners which was later reduced to ten years. After the sentence, they were transferred to Gohardasht prison. In March 2011 the sentences were reinstated to the original 20 years. On 3 January 2010, Iranian authorities detained ten more members of the Baha'i minority, reportedly including Leva Khanjani, granddaughter of Jamaloddin Khanjani, one of seven Baha'i leaders jailed since 2008 and in February, they arrested his son, Niki Khanjani.

In 2019, the Iranian government made it impossible for the Baha’is to legally register with the Iranian state. National identity card applications in Iran no longer include the “other religions” option effectively making the Baha'i Faith unrecognized by the state.

Shah in Exile

The Shah's government suppressed its opponents with the help of Iran's security and intelligence secret police, SAVAK. Such opponents included leftists and Islamists. By the mid-1970s, relying on increased oil revenues, Mohammad Reza began a series of even more ambitious and bolder plans for the progress of his country and the march toward the "White Revolution".

But his socioeconomic advances increasingly irritated the clergy. Islamic leaders, particularly the exiled cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, were able to focus this discontent with an ideology tied to Islamic principles that called for the overthrow of the Shah and the return to Islamic traditions, called the Islamic revolution.

The Pahlavi regime collapsed following widespread uprisings in 1978 and 1979. The Islamic Revolution dissolved the SAVAK and replaced it with the SAVAMA. It was run after the revolution, according to U.S. sources and Iranian exile sources in the US and in Paris, by Gen. Hossein Fardoust, who was deputy chief of SAVAK under Mohammad Reza's reign, and a friend from boyhood of the deposed monarch.

Mohammad Reza fled the country, seeking medical treatment in Egypt, Mexico, the United States, and Panama, and finally resettled with his family in Egypt as a guest of Anwar Sadat. On his death, his son Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi succeeded as heir to the Pahlavi dynasty. Reza was crowned formally as Crown Prince on October 26, 1967 in Tehran.[ Reza Pahlavi and his wife live in the United States in Potomac, Maryland, with three daughters.

As of 2013, Reza Pahlavi established the National Council of Iran in Paris that serves his government in exile to reclaim the former throne after overthrowing the current Islamic Republic government. However, in February 2019, Pahlavi launched an initiative called the Phoenix Project of Iran. According to the National Interest, this is "designed to bring the various strains of the opposition closer to a common vision for a post-clerical Iran."

Conclusion

Obviously Iran has been mutilated unrecognisable with misery of Marxist Islam, any realistic chance of restoring monarchy in the country has more of less gone; but I wouldn't forgive them, nor would I ever recognise such an inhumane republic. Forgiveness is for masochistic idiots who get off on being face slapped inconsolable. Maybe victims become so sick psychologically they enjoy it, but I wouldn't know, I don't believe I am even near there yet.

4/2/2024