Iran Protests. So Much Bullshit.

I didn't post on Iran's protests yesterday because Britain had some shocking news of it's own. In Northern Ireland 20 Romanian families were forced from their homes by a Protestant hate mob. The families had sustained a week of sustained racist attacks while the police stood back and watched. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/8106482.stm This is eerily reminiscent of the start of the Northern Irish Troubles in the 1960's when Catholic families were driven from their homes by Protestant gangs or Hitler Germany when Jews and Roma were forced into ghettos. Obviously this stunned every right thinking person in the UK and forced Iran off the news agenda.

Of course the BBC, who recently spent £250million setting up a dedicated Persian service, have taken it on themselves to promote the Iranian unrest as far and wide as possible are still reporting on events but their coverage has become something of a fact free zone. This is partly because the Iranian authorities have rather sensibly stopped BBC journalists mixing with the protesters making it difficult for them to collect and disseminate information. Mainly though this sharp drop in normal editorial standards seems to be because the facts don't support Britain's official line that the protests are growing by the day and the Iranian establishment could be undermined at any moment.

This lack of credible reporting has forced be to trawl through Iranian blogs and Twitter pages to find out what is really going on. The first thing that struck while doing this was this message;

" If you have a Twitter account, log in now and change your location and time zone to Tehran. Apparently, the Iranian gov't is sweeping Twitter looking for dissidents and this will help obfuscate"

I'm not sure how credible the claim is but the use of inflammatory language is certainly having an effect. These two Twitter pages; http://twitter/StopAhmadi http://twitter/Change_for_Iran both claim to be located in Iran when in fact they're being updated from IP addresses in Israel. The users are believed to be members of the Israeli Defence Force's Corp of Bloggers http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1056648.html That of course would be the same Israeli Defence Force who have spent the last five years planning to launch airstrikes against Iran.

Of the more genuine Iranian postings on the web there seems to be one topic that has been totally omitted from the discussion - The election itself and why exactly people think it was rigged. Instead the posting seem to be all about exchanging increasingly wild claims about the protests themselves. These include rumours that the real death toll is in the hundreds, mythical walkouts by medical staff and civil servants and best of all that the security personnel being used are members of Hezbollah bussed in from Lebanon. That last one fits in exactly with the Israeli claim that Iran is responsible for all the terrorism in the world from Afghanistan to Somalia.

This moving away from discussion about the election the protests are supposed to a be a response too into a self-feeding frenzy about the protests themselves is something I've seen from Western Anarchists time and time again. The idea is to whip the protesters into such a state of hysteria that the protests continue long after the original cause has been proved to be false or simply forgotten. Mousavi, the protests leader, seems to be following this tactic himself. Today he has called for another large demonstration but this time it won't be about the election. Instead the protest will be to mourn those who were killed in earlier demonstrations. This seems to be an admission by Mousavi that the election was not rigged so he needs to find a new cause to sustain his popularity.

An international day of action has been called in support of the Iranian protests for June 20th. I don't expect there to be too much of a turnout from the British protest scene. They're all too busy debating whether or not by allowing themselves to get whipped up into a hysterical frenzy over the G20 protests they ended up helping the BNP getting elected, increased racial tensions in Northern Ireland and help Britain to take a firm leap towards fascism.

Incidentally if you type the words Iran, unrest and chaos into google one of the first articles you come up with is this one http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1543798/US-funds-terror-groups-to-sow-chaos-in-Iran.html which detail how under the Bush presidency the CIA spent millions of dollars funding Iranian militant groups in order to undermine the Iranian state. It's interesting because it specifically mentions the Azeri groups that a driving Iran's current protests.