A reporter recently told US President Donald Trump he had a moral responsibility to help Iran as it is hit by the new coronavirus. No mention was made about Venezuela. Why Iran and not Venezuela? Steve Ellner explains why.
Iran
IRANIAN authorities blocked internet access on January 14, with pressure continuing to mount on the theocratic regime as student protests calling for a new revolution swept the country.
According to the internet-tracking organisation NetBlocks, Iran experienced an outage at 5.25pm local time with “high impact to almost all providers” for a duration of 10 minutes.
The government was previously accused of blocking the internet as security services moved against protesters during demonstrations in November.
The following statement, translated by Farhang Jahanpour, was issued by students taking part in a protest at the Amirkabir University of Technology in Tehran on January 12. The protest followed the downing of Ukraine Flight 752 by Iranian Air Defence Unit anti-aircraft missiles on January 8 and violent attacks on protesters at the funeral of Iranian military leader Qasem Soleimani, who was assassinated in Iraq by the United States in a military strike on January 3.
Anti-war networks and progressive parties have urged the federal Coalition not to support the Donald Trump administration’s latest attack on Iran, that began with the illegal assassination in Iraq of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani and deputy commander of the Iraqi government-affiliated Popular Mobilisation Forces Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis on January 3.
It took the popular uprisings in Iraq and Lebanon, following the earlier uprisings in Sudan and Algeria this year, for the Iranian masses, especially unemployed and student youth, to gain the courage to go out into the streets in large numbers again. For the first time since the December 2017–January 2018 uprising, they are mobilising to call for an end to the Islamic Republic.
Union leader Esmail Bakhshi, student and civil rights activist, Sepideh Gholian, and four activist journalists were sentenced to long prison sentences by the Iranian regime on September 7.
Remember when Donald Trump campaigned for office in 2016 on getting the United States out of “endless wars”? He did, in part, to distinguish himself from the pro-war Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton.
Now, Trump and his band of hawks are pushing for a new war, most likely with Iran.
The United States and Britain are ensuring that tensions remain high in the Straits of Hormuz as they continue beating the drums of war against Iran.
It is supposedly in our name that the PM would send Australians to kill and die in Iran. A war there would almost certainly result in a catastrophe that would compound and eclipse the regional destabilisation caused by the US and Australia during the invasion of Iraq and the ongoing war in Afghanistan, writes Hector Ramage.
A range of US policies have been deliberately designed to provoke an Iranian response, writes Phyllis Bennis.
Neither the United States nor Iran really wants war, we are told, because the reality of such a conflict is too horrific to contemplate. But the Gulf tanker crisis and the US response shows that we are alarmingly close to open hostilities.
It is true that there are voices in the US defence establishment calling for restraint. It appears to be the case, too, that the Iranian government is operating on the assumption that the US does not want a war. But there are several reasons why such assumptions are not a sound basis for judgement.
Protests are continuing throughout Iran by teachers, nurses, labourers, retirees, oil industry workers, bazaar traders and shopkeepers, truck drivers, farmers, the unemployed, students, and other sectors, writes Minna Langeberg.
The current wave of protests continue those from December, which were brutally suppressed by the regime. They signal the deep crisis of legitimacy of the regime, as expressed by one of the most enduring slogans that emerged, “Fundamentalists, reformists, the game is over”.
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