Soundtrack of the Revolution

Every revolution has its own victims. A political revolution terminates the regime in charge in favor of a new regime. This change dramatically affects every facet of life, as it outmodes and prosecutes old values to be replaced with new ones. Those who belonged to the old system, especially ex-government officials in high ranking, are surrendered or sacrificed in the process. One of the early victims of the Islamic Revolution was joy, or celebration, and happiness in general! For instance, it was forbidden to clap hands in response to an atmosphere of delight, or in appreciation of. As Islam (categorically Shia) is the religion of weeping and mourning, anything that would elate someone was banned. Among the first instruments of joy were musical and game apparatuses, as they have traditionally been forbidden by Islam. Of course Islam’s attack on women was almost at the same time. Ironically, no matter how much Khomeini and his followers tried to keep women hidden in a sack, and in spite of daily violence against them, women in Iran are considered exemplary for all women in the Middle East. In addition to their success in education and music, they have changed the rigid hijab decree by many fashionable forms, and as of today they are still fighting against the roots of it. A speech was distributed in social media of the most reactionary and fossil brain mullah who professed what Khomeini and other mullahs have always had in mind, but they have never dared to verbalize it. He said: “God created three kinds of animals. One that is for carrying human’s load, such as donkey, mule, and horse. A second kind for humans to eat, such as cow, sheep, and chicken. And finally he created a third kind for men to enjoy, called women. Of course, in order for human being not to get scared of them, He created them like humans! There should be (or there may be) another book specifically about this subject, however it was mentioned briefly here since women have been more involved in music, and its sanction has impacted them more. But, like other liberties that Islamists tried to impede and did not succeed, music, film, and other expressions of art which were not approved by Khomeini at the beginning, found new ways of expressing themselves, and continues to expand.

FASTING

What is the most popular way of losing weight? This has been a long-time question for those who believe they have an extra layer of fat. Forget low carb, Atkinson, exercise, calorie count, calorie restriction and all the old ways of losing weight. The new way is in fact one of the oldest way of discharging extra layer, although it was not necessarily undertaken to lose weight.

عمر خيام؛ نابغه پرسشگر - مستند

عاشقانه= فروغ فرخزاد

ای شب از رویای تو رنگین شده سینه از عطر تو ام سنگین شده ای به روی چشم من گسترده خویش شادی‌ام بخشیده از اندوه بیش همچو بارانی که شوید جسم خاک هستیم ز آلودگی‌ها کرده پاک

با تو ام دیگر ز دردی بیم نیست
هست اگر، جز درد خوشبختیم نیست

ای تپش‌های تن سوزان من آتشی در سایۀ مژگان من ای ز گندم‌زارها سرشارتر ای ز زرین شاخه‌ها پُر بارتر ای در بگشوده بر خورشیدها در هجوم ظلمت تردیدها

The Costs of 9/11 Continue to Mount

By Paul Craig Roberts

September 11, 2018

Source: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50236.htm

This is the 17th anniversary of 9/11. During the years that have passed large numbers of experts have established conclusively that the official government account of the event is false. Every year fewer people believe the unbelievable conspiracy theory that a handful of Saudi Arabians outwitted the entirety of the US National Security State and attacked with hijacked airliners the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eTzV7HvKHU

Nevertheless, the official story still stands, just as the official story of President Kennedy’s assassination still stands despite majority disbelief, just like the official story of Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty still stands despite all evidence to the contrary. In the US the government never corrects its proven lies.

People all over the world are amazed that Americans could witness videos of the two towers blowing up floor by floor and the obvious controlled demolition of Building 7 and conclude that they were witnessing buildings collapsing from asymmetrical structural damage and limited, short-lived office fires.

The 9/11 fabrication and the Osama bin Laden myth were used by the Cheney/Bush regime to destroy the civil liberty protections in the US Constitution and to elevate the executive branch above both domestic and international law. This has culminated in yesterday’s declaration of US lawlessness by President Trump’s National Security Advisor, John Bolton, who stated that the US government will use any and all means to protect US and Israeli war criminals from prosecution by the International Criminal Court. The cost of 9/11 far exceeds the WTC buildings and the lives that were lost. The real cost is the US Constitution, the separation of powers, civil liberty, and the rule of law.

ای بی وطنان، میگم خفه

Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II- Part Four

A war is a feud between two leaders. The science of sociology combined with history reflects this simple fact that people generally avoid hostility and find ways to settle conflicts in a peaceful manner. Reading through war documents, we realize that the rulers of so called democratic countries go through so much fabrication and unending explanations and struggles in order to convince people to participate in wars. In dictatorships, people have no choice anyway. And, there are multitude of reasons why leaders of a country ignite a war to begin with. At the very beginning of the revolution in Iran, Khomeini had showed his true identity to people, and Iranians realized that he was not the soft hearted human loving religious man he claimed to be before the collapse of the old regime, but a hard headed theocrat who did not have any love for his country or people, and a brutal dictator. As people started demanding their rights at the beginning of the post-revolution Iran, he realized that a war was the best thing to keep the society under his leash. He started egging on Saddam Hussein, as it is documented. Saddam, another brutal ruler, received American blessing and support to start his aggression: “During Iraq’s epic struggle against the Ayatollah Khomeini, the United States of course had more than spoken to Baghdad. Washington- choosing Iraq as lesser evil against Shiite extremism- was responsible for huge amounts of weaponry, military training, sophisticated technology, satellite-photo intelligence, and billions of dollars reaching a needy Hussein, who was also lavishly supported by Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, they being concerned that Iran’s anti-monarchist sentiments might spread to their own realms. Indeed, there is evidence that Washington encouraged Iraq to attack Iran and ignite the war in the first place. And during this period on American support of Hussein, he was certainly the same odious, repressive, beastly thug as when he later came under American moralistic rhetorical fire. Similarly, absent Washington’s prodding, the UN did not condemn Iraq’s invasion, nor did it impose any sanctions or lay down any demands. Even as it officially banned arms sales to either combatant, the US secretly provided weapons to both. The other bête noire of the region, the Ayatollah, received American arms and military intelligence on Iraq during the war, so as to enhance the ability of the two countries to inflict maximum devastation upon each other and stunt their growth as strong Middle-East nations, (P. 332).” It is worth repeating this fact that Khomeini also went to Iran as the leader of the revolution with American blessing, and the aim of the war for the west was to destroy Shah’s ammunition stockpile.

John McCain: The View from the Middle East

September 4, 2018
By As`ad AbuKhalil
Link: https://consortiumnews.com/2018/09/04/john-mccain-the-view-from-the-middle-east/

It is not unusual that Arabs and Americans look at the same event from divergent lenses. Take, for instance, a scene from John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign when he told  a woman in the audience who had called Obama an Arab: “No, Ma`am. He is not an Arab. He’s a decent family man.” 

That brief exchange has been tweeted and retweeted thousands of time in the last few days following McCain’s death. It has been promoted by people in mainstream media (and think tanks and academia) as evidence of the civility, “classiness”, and lack of prejudice of McCain.  Yet, Arabs saw something entirely different in that exchange.  They saw bigotry from McCain, who was denying that Obama was Arab in the same way one denies that someone is a Nazi.  He clearly implied that an Arab can’t be a decent family man.  In fact, Gen. Colin Powell was the only U.S. politician who pointed this out at the time.  But a new image of McCain is being formulated before our eyes.

For Arabs in the Middle East and in the U.S., the view of McCain does not conform to the hagiography of U.S. media.  People in the region remember well that McCain supported every U.S. and Israeli war, invasion, or attack against any Arab target. They remember that he was a major proponent of invading Iraq and argued for the expansion of U.S. wars into Iran, Libya and Syria in the wake of Sep. 11. 

The destruction of Mosul. (Wikimedia Commons)

The Other Side of John McCain

August 27, 2018
By Max Blumenthal in Washington
Link: https://consortiumnews.com/2018/08/27/the-other-side-of-john-mccain/

As the Cold War entered its final act in 1985, journalist Helena Cobban participated in an academic conference at an upscale resort near Tucson, Arizona, on U.S.-Soviet interactions in the Middle East. When she attended what was listed as the “Gala Dinner with keynote speech”, she quickly learned that the virtual theme of the evening was, “Adopt a Muj.”

“I remember mingling with all of these wealthy Republican women from the Phoenix suburbs and being asked, ‘Have you adopted a muj?” Cobban told me. “Each one had pledged money to sponsor a member of the Afghan mujahedin in the name of beating the communists. Some were even seated at the event next to their personal ‘muj.’”

The keynote speaker of the evening, according to Cobban, was a hard-charging freshman member of Congress named John McCain.

During the Vietnam war, McCain had been captured by the North Vietnamese Army after being shot down on his way to bomb a civilian lightbulb factory. He spent two years in solitary confinement and underwent torture that left him with crippling injuries. McCain returned from the war with a deep, abiding loathing of his former captors, remarking as late as 2000, “I hate the gooks. I will hate them as long as I live.” After he was criticized for the racist remark, McCain refused to apologize. “I was referring to my prison guards,” he said, “and I will continue to refer to them in language that might offend some people because of the beating and torture of my friends.”

‘Hanoi Hilton’ prison where McCain was tortured. (Wikimedia Commons)

Killing Hope- Part Three

In October 1, 1965 six Indonesian generals were murdered by a group of junior officers who claimed that those generals were supporters of CIA who had planned to oust the first president of the country, Sukarno, and their action was to prevent it. General Suharto: “a man who had served both the Dutch colonialists and the Japanese invaders- and his colleagues charged that the large and influential PKI [Communist Party] was behind the junior officers’ ‘coup attempt’, and that behind the party stood Communist China, (P.193).” This so-called coup was an excuse for Suharto to encourage people, in particular Moslems, to initiate a Communist killing macabre: “The Indonesian people were stirred up in part by the display of photographs on television and in the press of the badly decomposed bodies of the slain generals. The men, the public was told, had been castrated and their eyes gouged out by Communist women. (The army later made the mistake of allowing official medical autopsies to be included as evidence in some of the trials; and the extremely detailed reports of the injuries suffered mentioned only bullet wounds and some bruises, no eye gougings or castration.),(P. 193,194).” Murdered Indonesians during those years are reported to be between half to one million. There are accounts of Muslim men banding known Communists together and mass killing them: “Twenty-five years later, American diplomats disclosed that they had systematically compiled comprehensive lists of ‘Communist’ operatives, from top echelons down to village cadres, and turned over as many as 5,000 names to the Indonesian army, which hunted those persons down and killed them…Robert Martens, a former member of the US Embassy’s political section in Jakarta, stated in 1990: ‘It really was a big help to the army. They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that’s not all bad. There’s a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment.’, (P. 194).”