More in ‘Iranian elections’

On Tablet Magazine today, Senior Editor Michael Weiss explains how the suppression and unrest that followed Iran’s June presidential elections have pushed President Obama’s policy toward that country to resemble President Bush’s. Pondering this week’s parasha, which depicts Moses and the Israelites at the Promised Land’s gates, Liel Liebovitz to considers whether any of us ...

With Iran’s feared Basij militia continuing the task of cracking down on opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi and his supporters, Ahmadinejad has been able to get back to focusing on the work that’s really important to him: orchestrating spectacles at international summits.
The Jerusalem Post is reporting that Iran’s delegation staged a walkout this morning ...

Is Iran like Venezuela? Or China? Both? Neither? How about Stalinist Russia? Discuss, for ten points, in light of today’s developments: A leading dissident and former member of Iran’s fearsome Revolutionary Guard, Mohsen Sazegara, tells NPR that his former colleagues, not the ayatollahs, were responsible for staging a military coup to keep Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in ...

With foreign journalists confined to their offices, the Internet blocked, and fewer opposition protesters venturing into the streets following yesterday’s bloody clashes outside Iran’s parliament building, Tehran has turned suddenly quiet. A planned vigil for the 19 people killed in the violence that has wracked Iran since the contested June 12 presidential election was called ...

With so many Jews voicing their unease—some publicly, some privately—over President Obama’s speech at Cairo and his words last week amid a desperate struggle for democracy now under way in Iran, I retreated to my study with a copy of the remarks President Bush delivered to the Knesset on the 60th anniversary of the Jewish ...

If Twitter is to be believed, today’s opposition protests outside Iran’s parliament have turned deadly; several papers, including the London Times, are running unconfirmed reports from bloggers inside Iran who claim three people have been shot, while the messaging service itself is teeming with reports of tear gas and widespread beatings and arrests in Baharestan ...

Roya Hakakian is unhappy with American news coverage of Iran. Instead of treating Iranian civil society as a subject worthy of regular attention, the Iranian Jewish writer argues, U.S. media outlets focus obsessively on the smokescreen of Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Ignoring the complex relationship between the country’s citizens and rulers, journalists are left ill-prepared to interpret news like the last two weeks’. Hakakian’s writing may prove an antidote—a journalist for CBS, a memoirist, and a poet, she has written searingly but lovingly about her homeland since she left Tehran for the United States in 1985. Hakakian spoke with Tablet from her home in California about the future of the Ahmadinejad regime, the reaction of Iran’s 30,000-strong Jewish community, and how the whole thing reminds her of 1979.

Iran’s Guardian Council rejected calls to annul the violently contested June 12 presidential election, cementing its stand against the throngs of opposition protesters challenging the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Spokesman Abbas Ali Kadkhodaei told state-run English-language Press TV early Tuesday “no major fraud or breach” has been uncovered, despite Monday’s admission by the council that ...

Benjamin Netanyahu keeps coming up with new ways to placate Barack Obama. First he acknowledged a two-state solution for the first time, delivered to a far-right audience a mere ten days after Obama’s celebrated Cairo address. Now comes this interesting tidbit, in an interview with the German newspaper Bild: “There is no conflict between the ...

Is Twitter an evil Israeli plot to stir worldwide unrest? Depends who you ask. According to the Jerusalem Post, an anonymous writer posting to the Charting Stocks website charged that “right-wing Israeli interests are engaged in an all-out Twitter attack with hopes of delegitimizing the Iranian election and causing instability within Iran.” The author went ...