Politician Insists On Need To Reform Governance In Iran

Hackers posted on the website photos of leaders of the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), Maryam and Masoud Rajavi, as well as a photo of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei with a large red X, drawn on his face.

The MEK website claimed "rebel groups" that support it had defaced 62 portals, 77 servers, 280 computers of the ministry and wiped out 30 terabits of dataincluding backup files of all servers of the ministry in Tehran and in several provinces. The report said the ministry sent all employees home until further notice due to the systems damage.

While Masoud Rajavi is widely thought dead, the MEK insists he is merely in hiding waiting his return to Iran. The MEK allied to Saddam Hussein during the 1980-88 Iran war and helped the Iraqi dictator put down the 1991 risings in Iraq, when tens of thousands died.

In 2003, MEK, according to the United States army’s official account, fought with Iraqi troops against the US-led invasion, but despite Iraqi calls for the group to be held accountable over human-rights violations the US relocated the MEK in 2013 from bases in Iraq to Albania, where they run a well-financed media and social media operation.

In January, a MEK spokesman said a ten-second hacking of several television and radio channels of Iranian state broadcasting might have been done by supporters in Iran. The hackers put up pictures of the Rajavis, and one of Khamenei in a gun sight. The Iranian leader was badly wounded in 1981 in one of many bombings attributed to the MEK.

On February 1, the web-based streaming platform of IRIB, Telewebion, was hijacked in the middle of a live broadcast of the Iran-United Arab Emirates soccer match, broadcasting calls to rebellion as “the regime’s foundations are rattling.”

In August 2021, a mystery hacktivist group calling itself Tapandegan (Palpitations), previously known for the 2018 hacking electronic flight arrival and departure boards in Mashhad and Tabriz, released security camera footage from Tehran's Evin prison. Tapandegan said the images came from hackers called Edalat-e Ali (Ali's Justice) and were being circulated to draw attention to prisoner abuse.

In October 2021, gas stations in Iran were hit by an attack disrupting payments, leading to long queues for two days that prevented customers using the government-issued electronic cards for subsidized fuel. ‘Predatory Sparrow’ claimed responsibility, but Iranian officials blamed outside forces, widely taken to refer to Israel.

The MEK was listed by the US from 1997 to 2012 as a ‘foreign terrorist organization,’ but was subsequently removed from the list. The group has cultivated links with many politicians in the US and Europe, paying large sums for attendance or speeches at MEK rallies.

The commentary by Esfahan University academic Mohsen Ranani, published by reformist newspaper Etemad in Tehran on Saturday, has met with angry reactions from Iran's conservative press.

Ranani's social commentary was also carried by many Iranian websites and quoted by dozens of Iranians on social media as a serious critique of the social and political situation in Iran. The commentary was taken from a speech by Ranani in Esfahan last week.

The academic said that the Iranian government pretends not to hear what critics and intellectuals say about the country's problems while officials openly call them "social germs" in their speeches. As a result, it appears that intellectuals have nothing more to say.

This, he said, has left only those who want regime change and pseudo-artists who crack jokes about everything, as the only groups who can win the hearts and minds of young Iranians.

The academic said young Iranians can either choose to be like Rouhollah Zam, the rebel journalist who was abducted abroad and hanged in Iran in 2020, or they can be careless and ignorant like Amir Tatallou, the controversial singer and a rebel in his own right who cooperated with Ebrahim Raisi's election campaign in 2017 but was later jailed and finally fled to Turkey where thousands of young Iranians go to attend his concerts.

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Under these circumstances, the only hope for a rational and ethical change in Iran can be pinned on Iranian women, Ranani said, adding that they are going forward step by step and taking back the self-confidence and rights men took from them in the course of history.

He suggested that Iran's male activists should give their place to women who act, instead of writing articles or delivering speeches. Ranani opined that women do not stage revolutions or riots as Iranian men did in the 20th century upheavals. He named several prominent female activists currently in Iranian prisons.

Ranani said that Iranian women will impose change on Iranian men, and traditional patriarchal government. "Their weapon is silence and calm resistance. They are armed with non-violent steadfastness," Ranani said, adding that "No power can resist against this silent resistance."

The IRGC-linked Javan newspaper said in a commentary that the academic was simply angry because the government has ignored him and accused Etemad of being a "radical media outlet" that has gone beyond the frontiers of press freedom in the Islamic Republic. Ironically the commentary in Javan was authored by a woman, Kobra Asupar.

Asupar also said that Ranani's comment about Iranian youths having no role models apart from Zam and Tatallou was an invalid and irrelevant generalization. About his comments regarding women, Asupar said that Iranian women played a major part in the Islamic revolution in 1979. So, Ranani cannot say that "good women have supported a bad revolution!"

Meanwhile, hardline daily Kayhan also lashed out at the academic, attacking his background as a reformist, claiming that reformists have plundered public resources and now pretend to be innocent. The Kayhan then blamed the reformists for all of Iran's problems and mentioned former President Hassan Rouhani and former Vice President Es'haq Jahangiri's brothers' involvement in corruption cases to prove its case and said that Ranani should be accountable for his support of reformist government's "harmful" economic policies.

The Kayhan called Ranani's commentary "an outrageous shift from plundering the people's resources to claiming to be following their demands."

In a nearly hour-long interview with Iran International television, the French-British journalist said she had "no direct line" to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's office or any relationship, "professional or otherwise", with any of its officials.

She also told Iran International that she wished she had not written the article in The Times of Israel, which fueled allegations of infiltration against her.

The revelation of her article led to a scandal in Iran, with some military, political and religious figures being accused of having ties to “an infiltrator”. There were even accusations that government officials slept with Shakdam and leaked sensitive information.

Khamenei's website, to which Shakdam contributed 18 articles between 2015 and 2017, has denied any relations with her and has deleted her contributions. Shakdam told Iran International that an editor from Khamenei's office contacted her by phone to ask her to contribute articles and analyses but insisted that contact with the said person and others was made only through emails thereafter.

However, on January 16 2020, soon after Iran fired missiles at Ain al-Assad air base in Iraq hosting US forces, in retaliation for the killing of IRGC Qods Force Commander Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad, Shakdam published an article in Citizen Truth about the attack in which she claimed she had been given exclusive early access to an official statement issued by Khamenei's office. She said that according to her exclusive information over a hundred US soldiers had been killed in the attack.

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When asked by Iran International who provided her with the document, she said that the individual was from "within Khamenei's office" and had volunteered the information because they wanted it to be published, but she refused to identity her source for safety reasons.

Asked why her articles were removed from Khamenei.ir website, she said as an antisemitic regime that advocates annihilation of Jews, Iranians did not want the writing of a Jew on the Supreme Leader's website.

"It was an embarrassment for them," she said adding that she did not not know if they were aware of her Jewish ancestry when she wrote for Iranian media. "When I reclaimed my history, they had an issue with me … Of course, it's anti-Semitism … I'm just shocked at the level of hatred for someone based on their ethnicity."

But some hardliner Iranian media, such as the flagship Kayhan newspaper, have defended her and said she was no spy. "Maybe they're interested in the truth, maybe they're not interested in misinformation and peddling lies," Shakdam said about Kayhan defending her.

Shakdam wrote numerous articles and gave many interviews to Iranian state media over the years in which she defended the Islamic Republic's official propaganda, and now insists she was not lying at the time.

"In my mind Iran was being mis-portrayed in the media and I felt the need to set the record straight. Now I do believe that I was being used by the regime and they used my naivety and probably lack of understanding geopolitics at the time, to their own end, but it doesn't mean that I was lying.” She claimed she fell for such propaganda because she did not agree with policies of Saudi Arabia, not just in Yemen but in the region, and felt that Iran needed to be defended.

"Because I have been to Iran and met with Iranians and seen it for myself what the regime has done to Iran and how it functions in opposition to the values that it claims to protect … I realize that there was a dichotomy, a great hypocrisy, so I decided to distance myself from the regime," she said.

Shakdam said she could not stand by a regime that called out "for genocide of an entire people on the basis of their religion and ethnicity", not just Israel but all Jews, and destabilized other countries. "It's not a criticism against the Iranian people, it's criticism against a political system."

“It is not possible to confront these people with the police and weapons,” said Alamolhoda, who is Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s representative in the shrine city of Mashhad. “If a woman in the street removes her headscarf, she must face the complaints of the people to see that she has no place…In such a case, you can be sure that she will wear even two scarves."

Alamolhoda said that law enforcement forces, including the morality police charged with regulating public behavior including dress codes, were not a solution “and even make the situation worse.”

He cited Kamenei as ordering “to fire at will”, metaphorically giving a green light for religious zealots to confront women in the streets, which sometimes leads to physical attacks.

Despite the cleric’s ruling out “weapons,” at least eight acid attacks in Esfahan in 2014 carried out by vigilantes were blamed by some, including Hadi Ghaemi of the US-based International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, on calls from conservative figures for more ‘Islamic’ standards in dress codes. Alamolhoda spoke out on the issue in January, suggesting that that loose-fitting hijab should not be accepted in public.

According to the producer, the hardliner guests and the host opposed to the nuclear deal, JCPOA, were ready to start the show from an hour before the scheduled live broadcast. The hosts including an unnamed academic and a member of the parliament Yaser Jebraili, as well as four other likeminded hardliners, all Paydari members like the program's host were suddenly told that plans have changed, and they can go home.

This was taken by many political observers in Iran as a sign that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei who controls the state television no longer tolerates opposition to a deal with the West, whatever the reason.

During the next two days, commentators in Tehran said that in the latest turn of events, the Raisi administration is frowning at ultraconservative Paydari party's maneuvers to influence ongoing events including the attempts to forge a deal with the West to save Iran's ailing economy. Paydari has a strong presence in the conservative-dominated parliament.

Reformist daily Aftab Yazd wrote on Thursday, March 10, that "some of the conservatives [in the Raisi administration] who until yesterday opposed a deal with the United States now want direct talks between Tehran and Washington. This comes while some other conservatives [such as Paydari members] insist on their opposition to any deal with the West."

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Aftab Yazd mentioned the talk show as an example to make a point. The daily characterized the development as an indication of a deepening divide between Paydari and other conservatives loyal to Raisi and Khamenei. The daily pointed out that almost the same thing happened in 2015, when Iran signed the JCPOA, and opponents had to keep silent under pressure from the government.

On Thursday, President Ebrahim Raisi was quoted as having said that that the government still supports the idea of reaching to an agreement in Vienna as the country needs to make sure that sanctions on Iran are lifted.

Meanwhile, Mohammad Mohajeri, a leading conservative figure, and the former editor of hardliner daily Kayhan, said that an agreement between Iran and the United States will put an end to the anti-JCPOA activities of Paydari. He said the reason why its members have recently began criticizing Raisi and his chief negotiator Ali Bagheri-Kani is that they wish to restore their own shaky and errant identity as a political group.

Paydari was in fact former president Mahmud Ahmadinejad's support base a decade ago, but later many of its members distanced themselves from him as he fell out of favor with Khamenei.

Meanwhile, moderate website Rouydad24 opined in an analysis that it was clear from the beginning of Raisi's term that sooner or later his administration would fall out with other conservative groups. However, few thought that a divide could take shape within a matter of just six months.

The website pointed out that support for the Raisi administration hinges on various groups scrambling for their economic stakes in the system. As soon as the Raisi stops giving them their expected share, they begin to criticize the government.

Criticism of the administration is also fashionable in IRGC media outlets. On Thursday, IRGC mouthpiece Javan Newspaper pointed out in a sarcastic frontpage headline that "Prices refuse to obey orders;" a reference to the fact that Raisi never suggests a solution for economic problems and keeps issuing orders for prices to come down or for poverty to disappear. 

As Mohajeri predicted, Paydari could end up as the victim of a new political situation marked by a deal with the United States. Paydari's existence depends on an atmosphere of infighting among various conservative groups, he said. “As soon as a faction’s interests are harmed, it is likely to stand up against other conservatives.”