An Open Letter to UFPJ
*Ardeshir Ommani, July 18, 2009
Dear UFPJ’s Leadership Group,
UFPJ has asked in its Action Alert of 7/9/09 that people join the “United 4 Iran” Global Day of Action on July 25. Is UFPJ confident that the leaders and proponents of this action are not being financed by NED and other “pro-democracy” fronts awash with some of the $400 million that the U.S. Congress has provided to the National Endowment for Democracy, the CIA, the USAID - U.S. Agency for International Development and others for the explicit purpose of subversion, acts of sabotage, financing, equipping and training upper echelon Iranian-Americans who are ready to serve the U.S. foreign policy objectives of infiltrating and penetrating the security spheres of the Iranian nation? By supporting and attempting to create credibility and prestige for these newly-hatched anti-Iran networks, UFPJ’s legitimacy will be on the line, considering that NPR on July 10, 2009 reported that the majority of demonstrators in Washington, DC were from the Mojahedin Khalq, a terrorist organization.
In your July 9, 2009 Action Alert on Iran, you conveniently stated that, “What followed” Iran’s presidential election on June 12 “remains unclear,” which meant you had no lucid knowledge of the laws governing Iran’s electoral process, the way the Tenth presidential election unfolded and the events that took place during the four weeks after the election.
Given this admission one may ask what was the UFPJ leadership doing when during the first two weeks after the election at least 50 thousand articles and news reports appeared in newspapers, magazines, TV and radio stations and electronic sites in the United States and media around the world. It was truly one of the most written and talked about elections in recent memory. By asking UFPJ’s leadership some not so complicated questions it may help the rest of us to separate the murky issues from those that could be understood with statistical data and common sense. Unfortunately, in your Action Alert, you did not express which issues you were clear about.
Questions that UFPJ should answer:
Was it honestly unclear to your group which candidate won the election?
Was it also unclear to your group that the U.S. administration openly tried its utmost to demonize the government of Ahmadinejad and blemish the authority and character of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and conversely, by throwing doubt on the health of the election, it supported the defeated candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi?
Was UFPJ’s group aware that the U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, Vice President Joseph Biden along with quite a number of aggressively conservative U.S. House Representatives and Senators, including Lugar and John McCain, who called for “bomb, bomb, bomb” Iran had condemned the Iranian government for allegedly disregarding the “principles of human rights,” in the same manner that was a common practice of George W. Bush with regards to Iran and to Iraq before the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq and mass murdering the people of that country?
Is it honestly unclear to the leadership of UFPJ that the U.S. corporate media imbedded with the biggest shareholders of the electronic industries of Twitter and Facebook and in lockstep with the numerous intelligence services tried their utmost to incite greater riots and increase the odds for greater destruction of property and more bloodshed?
Was it unclear to the UFPJ leadership that British and U.S. intelligence services were busy days and nights, feeding the media frenzy around the world with touched up pictures and photo-shopped provocative images, with the aim of creating, deepening and expanding the crisis to other cities of Iran? Was it really hard to imagine that the Western powers were aiming to destabilize Iran and as in the Ukraine and Georgia carry out their “color revolution”? At least in Iran and this time, the U.S. and its allies were unsuccessful because a much greater majority refused to join a small minority whose leaders’ objectives have been to throw Iran once again back into the arms of the U.S. and domestically make the rich richer and the poor poorer. The U.S – U.K – France governments have also been disappointed with their unsuccessful attempts in Zimbabwe, Sudan, Venezuela, and recently in Moldova.
Was the Board of the UFPJ aware that in the last few months many articles have appeared that explained the organizational and the constitutional framework of the Iranian election, and that many foreign news media were present before, during and after the election? Did they know that the defeated presidential candidate Hossein Mousavi had 40,676 representatives in the country’s polling centers all across Iran’s 30 provinces? Didn’t they read as others did that in every polling station there were at least 3 representatives from the Guardian Council, 3 from the Interior Ministry and 8 representatives from a total of four presidential candidates, which made a total of 14 (more in the larger cities) poll watchers in each voting center?
Was UFPJ interested to know that in the span of the two years prior to the election on June 12, three statistical surveys were performed by a U.S.-based company named Terror Free Tomorrow, the Center for Public Opinion Poll? In all those comprehensive surveys, the last of which was done May 11 to May 30, 2009, the findings just 13 days before the actual election, were that President Ahmadinejad hands up would win the election with a ratio greater than two to one! The survey was done in Farsi from outside the country by an institution that serves BBC, ABC, and others. The last study was published prominently and the head of the study interviewed on various news stations. How could the leadership of UFPJ have missed this important information? “While Western news reports from Tehran in the days leading up to the voting portrayed an Iranian public enthusiastic about Ahmadinejad's principal opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, our scientific sampling from across all 30 of Iran's provinces showed Ahmadinejad well ahead.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/14/AR2009061401757.html
Did the UFPJ Board know that Mousavi announced himself the winner 15 hours before the result was nationally announced by the Interior Ministry? Did the Farsi-language speaking UFPJ’ers know that Mr. Mousavi had boasted in pre-election rallies and campaign literature long before the election that if he is not the winner of the June election, the election must be fraudulent and he will contest it?
Was the UFPJ leadership ignorant of another well-publicized news item that after Mousavi willfully declared the election fraudulent, the 12 members of the Guardian Council, the highest legislative body of the land, invited him to attend its meeting to present his documented grievances and his alleged irregularities? Doesn’t UFPJ leadership know that Mir Hossein Mousavi refused to attend and preferred to instigate his supporters by taking his case to the street, where the clashes between brick-throwing and fire-burning rioters on one hand and the civilian supporters of Ahmadinejad on the other resulted in the deaths of 20 persons, eight who were Iranian security officials? Provocateurs, supporters of the monarchists from the Shah’s era, and some infiltrated terrorists from the anti-Islamic Mojahedin Khalq, for several days set fires, broke glass windows and doors of state owned properties and small shopkeepers, destroying private cars, city buses, and over 700 banks, but UFPJ claims to be ignorant of these facts, by proclaiming the demonstrators as “peaceful and carrying out their elementary right to protest their government”. Now UFPJ is calling for those in the “peace and justice movement” to demonstrate against the Iranian government in the streets of NY on July 25th. For the sake of comparison, many people must know that on June 14, the day after the election in Iran, a single bomb in Iraq killed 70 people instantaneously and injured 183 persons. But no U.S. media splashed this news on the front page of any mainstream media outlet or cared to discuss it on national TV programs, and no peace and justice organization called an action to protest that violation of human and civil rights! Furthermore, no Iraqi citizen was invited to give his analysis about the insecurity and fatalities caused by the U.S. invasion and continued occupation of that country, albeit, when President Obama boastfully declared in Ghana the same week that the U.S. will not impose any social system on any country in the world. What a colossal fib!
We have another question for UFPJ: How would the New York Police force treat UFPJ members if they lit fires in the middle of Park Avenue, smashed buses, or attempted to put a police precinct on fire with fuel canisters?
What amazes us that while by its own admission UFPJ states that they know very little about all the complexities of the Iranian election, yet they are asking us to take sides, thereby dividing the peace and justice movement along one more sensitive and hot issue – Iran.
As decision-makers in the UFPJ, you wrote that you “feel compelled…to stand in solidarity with the people of Iran and their elementary right to protest their government…” The Iranian people do exercise their right to peaceful assembly, as reported as recently as July 17, 2009 in the Washington Post, following Rafsanjani’s speech at Friday prayers: “Shortly after the sermon, thousands of Mousavi supporters demonstrated around Tehran University.” As an Iranian American dual citizen, and after spending two and a half months in Iran from March to May, and being in Iran regularly over the past four years, I find your assumption in this claim to be biased, either by total ignorance of the social and political freedoms in Iran or made out of the American cultural superiority concept that only recognizes its own brand of ‘democracy’ as legitimate. I can attest that there are more opposing viewpoints appearing in more than 52 daily newspapers in Tehran alone than in the New York Times, Washington Times and the Financial Times of London put together.
Dear UFPJ’ers, today your group politically, morally and ethically is standing on the same platform that George W. Bush and the infamous neocons stood not long ago when they called for “regime change” through bombing, sanctions and attacking Iran. However, when it became clear that such a military action had no support and was opposed around the world, even by some of the elite Western governments who are helping the U.S. military in Afghanistan and Iraq, they changed their tactic: regime change with a soft touch, carried out by a segment of the Iranian population that has been pro-western for longer than Ahmadinejad has been in office.
Members of UFPJ who have spoken openly against the Islamic Republic, and are supporting the chants “Marg bar dictator!” of the protestors in northern Tehran are objectively weakening the government in the Middle East that has been the defendant and supporter of the people in Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon. Internationally, it was President Ahmadinejad that strengthened Iran’s alliance with the people in Syria, Lebanon and Palestine to resist the daily and yearly aggression of the Zionist state. It has been the government of Ahmadinejad who has strengthened the Middle East peoples’ ties with Latin American nations, specifically deepening ties with the governments of Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, Brazil and with China, Russia, Malaysia, and the 118 countries in the non-aligned nations, and built relations with 53 Moslem countries. This is the government that our western-oriented Iranian Americans are standing against, and who UFPJ is giving a platform to.
Do UFPJ members know that Mir Hossein Mousavi’s camp has been opposing the policies of President Ahmadinejad regarding Iran’s support for the Palestinian and other Arab people struggling against oppression? Do they realize that Mousavi is against building relations with the socialist-oriented countries of China and Russia? Perhaps UFPJ’s leadership has grievances with China and Russia also, and that makes it easier for them to align themselves with the anti-Ahmadinejad camp.
I would like to end my questions to the leadership of the United For Peace and Justice with some quotes from President Ahmadinejad’s address to the Durban Review Conference on Racism in Geneva on April 20, 2009, and ask them to please let me know which part of this statement they believe stands against peace and justice: http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=92046
“Ladies and gentlemen, let us take a look at the UN Security Council which is one of the legacies of World War I and World War II. What was the logic behind their granting themselves the veto right? How can such logic comply with humanitarian or spiritual values? Would it not be inconformity with the recognized principles of justice, equality before the law, love and human dignity? Would it not be discrimination, injustice, violations of human rights or humiliation of the majority of nations and countries? The council is the highest decision-making world body for safeguarding international peace and security. How can we expect the realization of justice and peace when discrimination is legalized and the origin of the law is dominated by coercion and force rather than by justice and the rights?
Coercion and arrogance
is the origin of oppression and wars. Although today many proponents
of racism condemn racial discrimination in their words and their
slogans, a number of powerful countries have been authorized to
decide for other nations based on their own interests and at their
own discretion and they can easily violate all laws and humanitarian
values as they have done so.
Following World War II, they
resorted to military aggression to make an entire nation homeless
under the pretext of Jewish suffering and they sent migrants from
Europe, the United States and other parts of the world in order to
establish a totally racist government in occupied Palestine. And, in
fact, in compensation for the dire consequences of racism in Europe,
they helped bring to power the most cruel and repressive racist
regime in Palestine.
The Security Council helped stabilize
the occupying regime and supported it in the past 60 years giving
them a free hand to commit all sorts of atrocities. It is all the
more regrettable that a number of Western governments and the United
States have committed themselves to defending those racist
perpetrators of genocide while the awakened-conscience and
free-minded people of the world condemn aggression, brutalities and
the bombardment of civilians in Gaza. The supporters of Israel have
always been either supportive or silent against the crimes.”
Proponents of peace and justice, again, I ask you to please tell me which statement of the President of Iran stands against peace and justice?
Ardeshir Ommani, *Co-Founder, American Iranian Friendship Committee (AIFC)
