I reckon we ought to be a part of (better somewhat belated than never) this:
An online protest Tuesday of Iran’s crackdown against bloggers made an impact – even on Iranian officials.
So says a leader of the Committee to Protect Bloggers, the group that organized the effort to decry the jailings of Iranian bloggers Arash Sigarchi and Mojtaba Saminejad.
Reuters on Tuesday reported that Sigarchi was jailed for 14 years on charges ranging from espionage to insulting the country’s leaders, a move probably linked in part to the timing of the protest, said Curt Hopkins, the committee’s director. “I think there’s got to be some connection,” Hopkins said.
A message left with the Iranian mission to the United Nations was not immediately returned.
Hopkins’ group – whose deputy director is Ellen Simonetti, the former Delta Air Lines flight attendant fired over photos of herself in uniform that she posted on her blog – asked those who maintain Web logs to call attention Tuesday to the plight of Iranian bloggers through posting banner ads and contacting government officials.
Some notable members of the blogging community took up the cause. They included Jeff Jarvis, who runs the BuzzMachine site, and Glenn Reynolds, who’s behind Instapundit.
Hopkins said the response was just as impressive around the world. Hits on the committee site jumped from a daily average of about 500 to about 3,000 just during the Asian daytime hours. “It’s been going like gangbusters,” he said. “We’ve had people from Brunei and Saudi Arabia, and Japan and Russia.”
Notice how, what with this being from News.com (www address: news.com.com, which I rather like), it is full of links. Old Media stuff which has merely been shoved online but without links, even to things mentioned in the text with .com in them, or to bloggers that they deign to name, are starting to look, even to a www latecomer like me, very dated.
As for Iran, my understanding of Iran now is that it is rapidly moving towards being a very sensible country, and that a little pressure from outside, of the sort described in this posting, will be all that is required. It only needs for the priests to stop getting above themselves and go back to being priests, and to let politics be done by politicians, with plenty of overlap between these two trades, but nevertheless a distinct separation of realms also.
Any attempt at military conquest from outside is, or at least should be, out of the question. Mind you, it does help that the country next to Iran has been conquered. When that happens, and you then say things like “… out of the question …”, it still causes flutters, even if, like me, you absolutely mean it. They do not know that, is the point. Without the Iraq invasion, the Iranian government would not be nearly so bothered about all this blog chatter. Anyway, it all looks like a situation well worth watching.
I would love to be able to say that I saw this kind of thing coming before Iraq was even invaded, and, looking back to then, I reckon I did. Many of the comments on that posting also look even cleverer now.
You have a nation of more than 65%, who are younger than 25 y/o. Well educated and aware citizens need to know only that DEMOCRACY and its adherents are with them. (See Ukraine)
They have enough power via a democratic process, to undo the workings of the Pasdaran and the holy men who try to insist on a religious brotherhood, rather than a nation which esposes to be religious.
Allow the Iranians to control their own political will and don ‘t impose ours. We are only allowed to impose our views and pressures, when they the Iranians insist upon promoting dangerous activities both within and without their national borders.
“Mind you, it does help that the country next to Iran has been conquered. ”
is that what my country is doing? conquering? don’t you mean liberating.
I think you have lost your sight picture. You’ll never hit the target like that.
Military action IS a part of Diplomacy. Read your Clausewitz or your Machiavelli.
Now it is unreasonable and unneccessary to do a large scale ‘Liberation’ such as in Iraq. That doesn’t remove all military options from the table. Plenty of room for Afghanistan or Norway type operations. The USA could even go the Israeli type route and do targeted assasinations of Mullahs and their gunmen.
The euros will never get the Iranians to stop working on their nukes. Israel will never allow the Mullahs to build nukes. A real serious war is inevitable, unless the Mullahs can be persuaded to stop. That will require military action. So the question becomes, Will the USA use it’s unstoppable B2’s and conventional weapons or will Israel use TBM and SLCM with nuclear warheads?
Israel is not going to just sit and watch while Jews are slaughtered. That plan didn’t work so good 60 some years ago and it won’t be replayed.
“It only needs for the priests to stop getting above themselves and go back to being priests, and to let politics be done by politicians”
Brian Micklethwait, you don’t have a clue of what a sham Islam is: Islam is politics.
According to Ali Sina, an ex-Muslim
“in Islam, politics and faith are intertwined“.
Joel
I have a lot more of a clue about Islam than you discourteously presume.
Christianity, politics and faith were all intertwined when Christianity was at the same civilisational stage that Islam is at in Iran a very short while ago, namely during and just after the Protestant Reformation. Then – in England the switch happened around 1700 – Christianity started behaving itself, after many years of idiocy and bloodletting. (The key variable, by the way, is the level of literacy.)
In other parts of the Islamic world than Iran (I believe the main culprits are Pakistan and Saudi Arabia), the idiocy is still in full swing, and this affects those parts of the Islamic world who are past all that nonsense and are now more inclined towards sanity, because the idiotic bits send missionaries to the sane bits, and this complicates matters.
But in Iran, as I understand it, the younger generation has had a bellyful of Old Fanatics telling it what’s what, and sanity is poised to break out, just as it did in England in or around 1700, and for all the same reasons.
Some historians are still puzzled by why this change happened in England. How come everyone suddenly became so sensible? – they ask in amazement, still. If, in about 1680, someone had predicted an end to Christian craziness in England in the near future then that someone would have been told by people like you that that someone didn’t have a clue about the nature of Christianity. Had Christianity continued as it had been, that would have been true. But it didn’t.
When Christianity ruled the roost, in what is still called Christendom, it too demanded power over people that would now be called political rather than merely religious. It too was a total way of life which you deviated from at your extreme peril.
Which is not to say that there are not crazy people in Iran still trying to do crazy things. And I agree with Stehpinkeln that smaller scale ops against specific threats from said nut-jobs might well now be in order, on purely self-defence grounds. Might.
I am puzzled by why you call Islam a sham. It all seems to be pretty out in the open, as far as I can see. I have never met, or heard of, a Muslim fanatic, of the pre-sanity variety, who did NOT say that “Islam is a way of life”.
Only Western apologists for Islam’s brutalities and crazinesses call it totally cuddly and innocuous.
Speaking as a rock solid atheist, I think Islam is not a sham. It is just plain crackers. Ditto Christianity. Even more so, actually. But, mercifully, there are degrees of crackers-ness, and I repeat, Iran is right now engaged in making that switch.
“Speaking as a rock solid atheist”
No such thing. Everyone worships and serves some power. The only relevant question is which or whom, do you serve.
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PREDICTION: A VIEW OF NEW YORK AT 11th SEPTEMBER 2015 http://www.alah.hu