April 6, 2005
Myth of the moderate Rafsanjani
There is something I like about American neo-conservatives: They don't differentiate between Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former president of Iran, and Ali Khamanei, the supreme leader of Iran, in terms of their involvement in various violations of human rights and accounts of corruption in Iran.
This is extremely important now, because I see many Western journalists are poised (or paid) to see Rafsanjani as a powerful moderate politician who can change Iran toward a more open and less dangerous Iran.
Most of the opposition leaders and intellectuals were murdered under Rafsanjani's watch by his own intelligence and security apparatus.
Enough to say that the Supreme leader never felt necessary to establish an intelligence organization parallel to the one run by the Khatami's government, during Rafsanjani's presidency.
Posted by hoder at April 6, 2005 2:56 PM
Like I have said before, if left up to the people, I don't think Raf has a chance. But as with most things in Iran, it really isn't up to the people now is it?
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What happens when everytime a new leader comes in and he goes out to slaughter another set of intellects because these are his perceived enemies? Very soon I suppose there will onely be idiots and goons who willmake up the population of Iran! That would be sad isn't it?
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akbar_Hashemi_Rafsanjani i'm afraid my arabic/farsi script-reading ability is too weak to tell if there's already a farsi version of this article in http://fa.wikipedia.org In any case, interlanguage links among the wikipedias in different languages are (mostly AFAIK) done by humans, not robots. Let's suppose (for this short explanation) that Rafsanjani's name written in Farsi looks like %56HGS%682 to the cut/paste user (this is just an example: it's definitely wrong). In that case, on the farsi article, you Edit it and add [[en:Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani]] at the beginning or end and save, and in the english article, you Edit it and add [[fa:%56HGS%682]] and save. And those people who try to build Walls between us will have one more problematic river flowing between the two not-so-unrelated cultures... If you can read farsi and english, please feel welcome to link corresponding articles in the (en) and (fa) wikipedias.
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I agree with you about the myth of Rafsanjani, but he seems to have the ability to unify the parts of the Iranian government that have been at war with each other for the past ten years. It remains to be seen whether this will make things better or worse for ordinary Iranians.
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I don't think people see him as "moderate" but rather as a "pragmatic" hardliner. As in: a bad guy, to be sure, but someone with whom the US can deal because he is rational, unlike a fellow like Janatti.
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