American Morning
Fmr. prince: Security forces join protesters in the streets
[cnn-photo-caption image= http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2009/images/06/23/intv.pahlavi.cnn.art.jpg caption="Former Iranian Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi tells CNN there are reports some security forces have been joining protesters in the streets of Tehran."]
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will be sworn in for a second term sometime between July 26 and August 19, state-run media reported Tuesday. Many Iranians who have disputed the official outcome of the June 12 vote have taken to the streets to protest the results.
Reza Pahlavi, the former crown prince of Iran, says there are reports some security forces have been joining protesters in the streets of Tehran. Pahlavi’s father was the shah of Iran who was deposed in the Iranian Revolution of 1979. He spoke to John Roberts on CNN’s “American Morning” Tuesday.
John Roberts: The Guardian Council has ruled that the election results will stand and if there were irregularities they are not enough to swing the outcome of the election. There will be no new elections. What do you expect the reaction on the ground will be?
Reza Pahlavi: As we have all monitored the evolution of the situation, the supreme leader who has always been the final decider has drawn pretty much the line in the sand last Friday. And as such, I think the campaign that we have seen is now moving towards the direction of defiance and is going to be a resistance that will have to be sustained if indeed there's any hope for democracy in my homeland one day.
Roberts: There's debate as well over how much support the United States should give the protesters and the reform movement there in Iran. The White House is worried that coming out too strong in support could do more harm than good. What do you think?
Pahlavi: Well John, this is beyond a camp or another. This is not a question of election results anymore. This has become a defiance against a regime that has denied every right to its citizenry. When the chants on the streets in Tehran and other major cities in Iran and across the country are turning to “Death to Khamenei,” I don't think it could get as clear as that back home. The regime is now under question. The legitimacy is lost. The legitimacy now stands with the people. But there are also matters of ethics and moral responsibility, if I may say also. Something that the regime is trying to create [is] confusion between what could be considered as interference as opposed to standing for human rights and justice.
Neda's story lives on
By CNN's Carol Costello and Bob Ruff
The power of a single image can move mountains – and governments.
In 1970, during the Vietnam War, John Filo snapped a Pulitzer Prize winning photograph that may have tipped public opinion against that war.
John Filo’s black and white image showed 14-year-old Mary Ann Vecchio kneeling in grief over a Kent State student gunned down by Ohio National Guardsman who had been sent to the campus to quell an anti-war demonstration.
At the time many Americans already were numbed by repeated images of their soldiers dying in Vietnam, but the sight one of their sons or daughters gunned down at home was too much to take.
During World War II, Joseph Rosenthal also won a Pulitzer Prize for snapping a photograph of Marines raising the American flag after winning the battle of Iwo Jima. The photo helped raise badly needed war bonds and boosted the morale of a war weary nation. They even turned the photo into a statue at the Arlington National Cemetery.
But it doesn’t always work out that way.
President Obama too hands off on Iran?
President Obama is taking a lot of heat from Republicans and conservatives for not being more critical of the Iranian government as protesters face violence from security forces in Tehran.
Citing sources in the administration, the New York Times reports Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would like him to take a stronger stand.
Expert: Protesters want civil rights, not revolution
[cnn-photo-caption image= http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2009/images/06/22/intv.dabashi.cnn.art.jpg caption="Hamid Dabashi tells CNN Iranian protesters want civil rights not revolution."]
More election protests are expected today in Iran. Some say the massive show of support for the opposition candidate signals a revolution in the making.
Hamid Dabashi, a professor of Iranian studies at Columbia University, doesn’t quite see it that way. He spoke to John Roberts on CNN’s “American Morning” Monday.
John Roberts: Let me ask you first of all, the declaration from the Guardian Council that yes it appears there were some voting irregularities; some three-million more votes were cast than people eligible to vote, but at the same time they say it wouldn't affect the overall outcome of the election. What effect do you think that will have on the demonstrators today?
Dabashi: Well it simply acknowledges that there are certain irregularities as Mr. Moussavi and other opposition candidates have indicated. To what degree this will satisfy Moussavi’s camp and other oppositional figures remains to be seen. In his Friday sermon, Mr. Khamenei in effect prejudiced the decision of the Guardian Council by siding completely with Ahmadinejad and saying that his position is very close to me. So I don't believe whatever the conclusion of this particular round of calculations by the Guardian Council might be is going to have much effect on the demonstrations…
These scenes you're seeing coming from Iran…it is important for your audience to know the reason you see these scenes of confusion and chaos is these people have been denied their constitutional right for peaceful protest. Under Article 27 of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic, Iranians are entitled to peaceful protests and not even under the condition of so-called national security are they to be denied their constitutional rights. So it is really the custodians of the Islamic Republic who are in violation of their constitutional right rather than the other way around.
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Commentary: Iran conflict isn't class warfare
Hamid Dabashi is the author of "Iran: A People Interrupted." He is Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York. His Web site is www.hamiddabashi.com/
[cnn-photo-caption image= http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2009/images/06/22/art.hamid.dabashi.jpg caption="Hamid Dabashi says it's wrong to view the conflict in Iran as a battle of the middle class vs. the poor."]
By Hamid Dabashi
Special to CNN
(CNN) - In a short essay that Abbas Amanat, a scholar of 19th-century Iran at Yale University, was asked to write for The New York Times on the current crisis in Iran, he asserted that what we are witnessing is "the rise of a new middle class whose demands stand in contrast to the radicalism of the incumbent President [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad and the core conservative values of the clerical elite, which no doubt has the backing of a religiously conservative sector of the population."
This learned position of a leading scholar very much sums up the common wisdom that Iranian expatriate academics are offering an excited public mesmerized by the massive demonstrations they witness on their television sets or computer screens and eager to have someone make sense of them.
In part because of these hurried interpretations, the movement that is unfolding in front of our eyes is seen as basically a middle-class uprising against a retrograde theocracy that is banking on backward, conservative and uneducated masses who do not know any better. While the illiterate and "uncouth" masses provide the populist basis of Ahmadinejad's support, the middle class is demanding an open-market civil society.
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Filed under: Commentary • Iran