Our Quote of the Day comes from the site Threat Watch which contends the world media missed events in Iran yesterday when the regime there implemented its own, patently brutal, horrorific version of Tiananmen Square. Here’s part of the post:
Iran has executed its Tiananmen Square. Baharestan Square has become synonymous with barbarity, cruelty, massacre and inhumanity.
An Iranian blogger (whose URL I will not publish) live blogging from Baharestan Square in central Tehran today captures but brief glimpses of the unimaginable horror that took place today. Bus loads of protesters were stopped and unloaded from their buses by “black-clad police” and literally herded. When the massing was sufficient, as the barely controllably distraught Tehran caller to CNN described first hand, hundreds of the regime’s Basij thugs poured out of an adjoining mosque and commenced a massacre with axes, clubs, guns and gas.
From the live blogger’s eyewitness account:
–More than 10.000 Bassij Milittias get position in Central Tehran, including Baharestan Sq.
–Army Helycopters flying over Baharestan and Vali Asr Sq.
–The streets, squares and around BAHARESTAN (Approx. South-eastern of Tehran) is swarming with military forces, civilian forces, the security motorists
–The croud have moved to the south of baharestan, the situation is bad, the shooting has started
–In Baharestan Sq. in the Police shooting, A girl is shot and the police is not allowing to let them help
–In Baharestan we saw militia with axe choping people like meat – blood everywhere – like butcherThis is the Iranian regime, wading into its own unarmed people and axing them to death, bludgeoning women (seen as the greatest threat to the regime) and throwing them to their deaths from pedestrian bridges. The same Iranian regime whose embassy officials are invited to American embassies around the world to celebrate on July 4th, of all things, a successful revolution.
There’s more including a photo on the site of someone apparently killed by being axed to death.
The site also posts this CNN video (referred to in the above post):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEtVRgZ3Szw&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fthreatswatch.org%2Frapidrecon%2F2009%2F06%2Funimaginable-horror-in-tehran%2F&feature=player_embedded
Could this be the case — that the world media missed this? Yes.
The Iranian regime has effectively shut down many of the ways the world can find out in detail what is going on. Early on during the protests it started controlling those reporters still there and going after Iranian journalists by intimidation or jailings so the traditional eyes and ears were not only not there but the traditional journalistic system of even shaky verification of reports from the scene had broken down. Blog posts and Twitters are either not confirmed or not entirely confirmed. Yes, they are carried and reported on but generally don’t get the same weight in the world’s mainstream reporting as actual verified news reports from the scene.
Could the world be missing this kind of crackdown also involves ax-chopping butchery? Without compelling, visuals, sounds, and reports from the scene…the answer is yes. 100 percent confirmed? No. Probable from a regime that not only has its riot troops open fire on civilians but then reportedly charges families a bullet fee for the bullet of their dead ones if they want the body? Yes. Probable from a regime that reportedly was so furious at dissent soccer players giving a sign about their solidary with protesters to the world by wearing green that they have been banned for life from soccer? Yes.
Probable from a regime that did this:
The Iranian authorities have ordered the family of Neda Agha Soltan out of their Tehran home after shocking images of her death were circulated around the world.
Neighbours said that her family no longer lives in the four-floor apartment building on Meshkini Street, in eastern Tehran, having been forced to move since she was killed. The police did not hand the body back to her family, her funeral was cancelled, she was buried without letting her family know and the government banned mourning ceremonies at mosques, the neighbours said.
“We just know that they [the family] were forced to leave their flat,” a neighbour said. The Guardian was unable to contact the family directly to confirm if they had been forced to leave.
The government is also accusing protesters of killing Soltan, describing her as a martyr of the Basij militia. Javan, a pro-government newspaper, has gone so far as to blame the recently expelled BBC correspondent, Jon Leyne, of hiring “thugs” to shoot her so he could make a documentary film.
Unfeeling? Brutal? Doesn’t give a fig about what it’s own opponents or the world thinks? Yes.
It’s a regime in survival mode and if necessary, look for it to do whatever it has to do to reduce the numbers of those who dare to stand up to the regime by going out into the street and therefore increase the body count numbers of those Iranians willing to take actual action to oppose it if necessary by…increasing the body count.
Literally.
Cartoon by Taylor Jones, Politicalcartoons.com. This cartoon is copyrighted and licensed to run on TMV. All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.