Monday, June 15, 2009

Iranian Scandal

Take a few moments to skim through Andrew Sullivan's excellent round up of Friday's fraudulent Iranian presidential election and its aftermath. Polls leading up to the election suggested that the reformist candidate Mir Hussein Mousavi led Ahmedinejad comfortably. The final "tally" instead showed an Ahmedinejad landslide. The central government then shut down YouTube, cell phones and text messaging, kicked out foreign journalists, and put all the opposition candidates under house arrest. To their credit, the Iranian people have risen up, are demanding an end to the thuggery and deception of the current theocratic regime. Are they on the verge of revolution? Will the voice of the people be crushed?

It seems to me that this is a major news story. But you'd never know it by watching the MSM news or reading most American newspapers. (My local rag, the Plain Dealer, mentions the Iranian election on page A17 of the Sunday paper via an AP wire snippet.)

7 comments:

joegrind said...

Al Jazeera: live video 24/7

http://english.aljazeera.net/

Anonymous said...

Maybe the reason the Plain Dealer and other papers have the story buried is because a rigged election in Iran is sort of a "dog bites man" story. The uprising of the Iranian people marching in the streets, on the other hand, should be front page news.

Chelsea said...

It's been all over CNN.

Norma said...

Why is Andrew so sure their election was any more fraudulent than ours?

Jeffrey Parks MD FACS said...

Norma-
You mean the 2000 Presidential election?

Chelsea-
CNN was two days late.

Anonymous said...

bradley effect

nemsova said...

you're right on, buckeye, it is a major story. brings to mind, of course, the 1989 eastern-european protests that brought down the governments of egermany, czechoslovakia, hungary, and then ultimately the soviet union; and by comparison tiananmen square. which way will this go, and how different would things been in 1989 with the internet and twitter?