| After several months of discussions, a group of Iranian Americans finally converged and founded the “Progressive American-Iranian Committee” (PAIC).
This new organization is particularly focused on counteracting the Iranian regime’s web of influence in the US.
Hassan Dai interviewed Kayvan Kaboli, a co-founder of PAIC, and discussed this new group’s manifesto and their means of achieving their goals.  | | | | Congratulation
On behalf of “PAIC” we would like to extend our congratulations to the President-elect Mr. Barack Obama. This historic event is a significant illustration of the American democracy at its best. Once again this victory demonstrated that USA is the land of opportunities for all its residents including the minorities and the immigrants. The Iranian Americans as one of the minority immigrants are confident that their adopted country, the USA, would respond in the same tone to their needs and would recognize their choices in the same admirable manner in their efforts to establish democracy in their native land. | |
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Tonight, I am particularly pleased to have the opportunity to express my views and exchange ideas about the current situation in my beloved homeland Iran, focussing in particular on the negative role which the Islamic regime continues to play in both the national life of the Iranian nation as well as in regional politics and international affairs.
| | | | A House committee has rejected the Bush administration's new initiative to promote democracy in Iran, but it did approve $71 billion in emergency funds intended mostly to finance the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Republican-led House Appropriations Committee on Wednesday granted the administration almost all of the $67 billion it wanted for the wars, but it cut most of the $75 million President George W. Bush had sought for new pro- democracy efforts in Iran, calling the plan poorly justified. | |
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| Someone please call that freedom-loving president, please.
 All of this preemptive appeasement inevitably weakens the forces of democratic revolution in the Middle East and elsewhere, as it greatly cheers the tyrants who, just a few months ago, were seriously considering the best place to take early retirement. The president seems to have bought into all the worst slogans of the State Department and the CIA: Stability is more important than revolution, exit strategy trumps victory, and so on. It may get him love letters from Foggy Bottom, and maybe even benign treatment from the New York Times, but it will also get him new attacks, both in Iraq and elsewhere (most certainly including our own country), and it will fuel a new counterrevolution that will make our mission far more perilous.
| | | | | It's symptomatic of the failure of strategic vision from which our chatterers and leaders currently suffer, that so many words and so much energy are being wasted on the immense charade that goes under the name of Iranian "elections." Any normal person familiar with the Islamic republic knows that these are not elections at all, and for extras have nothing to do with the future of the Iranian nation. They are a mise en scene, an entertainment, a comic opera staged for our benefit. The purpose of the charade, pure and simple, is to deter us from supporting the forces of democratic revolution in Iran. | |
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|  Los Angeles - USA - June 10, 11, 12, 2005.
Click here for additional photos communicated to Iran-Shahr on June 12 at 23:55 EDT.
Reza Pahlavi of Iran starts a 3-day hunger strike in solidarity with his imprisoned compatriots inside Iran who have been undergoing the same act of civil disobedience over the past several days in political protest to the theocratic regime of Tehran. | | | | Today, we are not republicans or monarchists. We are not left or right.
Today, we are all the fighters for Iran's freedom path. | |
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| | Reza Pahlavi was here in Paris to address the European-American Press Club in the early days of June. In advance of the meeting he was talking informally to a group of his compatriots and I joined in. Before seeing him I was worked up and restless. A combination of admiration, natural reserve and a deep veneration for what he represents had joined together to put me on edge. As soon as I saw him though I felt alright. His reassuring smile came to my rescue. He behaved towards all those who were present as though they were members of the same family; his family. Not the slightest aloofness could be detected in this man; not an iota of condescension. | | | | Will any Western leader proclaim the Iranian elections a fraud?
The cheerless creatures who rule the Islamic republic of Iran have developed a particularly wicked use of torture. Not only do they use the full panoply of physical and psychological horrors on their captives, but they then send the victims back into their homes and neighborhoods for brief periods of “parole” or “medical leave,” so that their friends and families can see with their own eyes the brutal effects of the torture. The clear intent of this practice is to intimidate the population at large, to break the will of would-be dissenters and opponents, and to maximize the effects of the victims themselves, for the brief respite from the pain of the prisons is mercilessly accompanied by the certainty that the agony will soon resume. | |
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| | Iran's reigning mullahs and the reformists who would mend the regime's theocratic ways finally have something in common: Iranians don't like either of them. That will likely mean thick voter apathy when the country elects a new president on June 17. | | | | | On Thursday June 2, Reza Pahlavi of Iran was the guest of the EU-US Press Club in Paris, France, taking question from foreign-based Iranian media, and major international media (CNN News, Fox News, France TV, Financial Times, Al-Hayat, Radio Free Europe, RFI, KRSI, NITV, Radio Israel, VOA and others) | |
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| | Reza Pahlavi offers a sound investment plan for the political future of his country. He warns the Iranian people and the international community against any further squandering of hope on dodgy schemes and bankrupt ideas churned out by the ruling clerical establishment and its cohorts. The Islamic Republic he argues is one of the greatest international shareholders in terrorism and repression. It has poured the valuable resources of the country into creating fear and instability throughout the world. “It is high time now to open a moral and political account for the future of the Iranian people on the basis of universally agreed upon values of democratic governance.” There can be no doubt such an account will in no time yield a huge peace dividend that would tremendously benefit not only Iran, but also the whole global community. The ameliorating effects of a democratic and politically progressive Iran in the heart of the troubled Middle East cannot be exaggerated. | | | | | In an interview with Saeid Ghaem-Maghami of KRSI - Radio Sedaye Iran, Reza Pahlavi calls on the people of Iran to turn boycotting of the June 17 'elections' into a massive civil disobedience movement. | |
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|  As Iran appears to move closer to resuming nuclear activities, support has been quietly building in Congress for new U.S. sanctions, including penalties that could affect multinational companies and this country's foreign aid recipients.
The legislation would put the United States on a more confrontational course than the one pursued by President Bush. He has supported European efforts to offer Iran incentives in exchange for abandoning its nuclear program. | | | | What we know, and what we don’t do.
It is long past time for the president to show that he is serious about winning the war against terror; it can't be done by speeches alone, and it doesn't require armed invasion. But it does require action: political action to support and aid the forces of democratic revolution in Iran, Lebanon, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. | |
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|  Why does Reza Pahlavi get so much media attention?
Why does the mere mention of his name bring up so much lively debate on web sites, Internet chat rooms, Iranian TV and radio shows?
Why did people hail Reza Pahlavi as their leader during the recent disturbances in Iran?
Why is there a ban on the mention of the name of "Shah" in the Islamic Republic's press?
According to some of his critics Reza Pahlavi is a common unemployed suburban father, or as Elaine Sciolino of the New York Times claims a "footnote in history."
Other denouncers claim that Reza Pahlavi has a total of two to three thousand followers worldwide mostly composed of toothless balding octogenarian imperial generals and corrupt former courtiers in Paris, London and Los Angeles and is therefore "white noise" in Iranian political statistics.
Unlike most Iranians who generally first prepare the answers and then ask the questions, I have to admit that I do not know how many people would vote for Reza Pahlavi if there was a referendum held today nor do I claim to know the answer to some of the questions above. | | | |  Blessed be we, who live in exciting times. Not only are we participating in a global struggle against tyranny, but, if we look carefully enough, we can see the collapse of the conventional wisdom about the relationship between tyrannical rulers and their subjects. We're in the midst of a great paradigm shift, which, as any decent Hegelian will tell you, involves both a transformation of the world and of the way we understand it. In such rare times, both pundits and policymakers need to constantly challenge their own assumptions about the way the world works, because those assumptions age, along with the world they once described. | |
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| You might have the impression that Ivy League "neoconservatives' wearing pinstripe suits inside the wonky think tanks in Washington, D.C., are currently plotting the overthrow of the mullahs running Iran. They and their hawkish Pentagon pals have checked the box next to Iraq on their to-do list (now that elections have happened), and are strategizing the best way to take down the tyranny in Iran. (Then we'll move on to Syria, and get ready for the draft, folks, we're fixing the world!)
But that image couldn't be further from the truth. Some of those Beltway types are cheering from the sidelines, but they are merely cheerleaders for the Iranian kids who are ready and willing to do the heavy lifting.
It's that band of youth clamoring for a new day in Iran. They do it in the streets of Tehran, and on the Internet on their blogs. They're willing to put their lives on the line speaking out can be a dangerous business.
As one student writing under an alias has put it: "we will continue to shed our blood, if that is what it takes to obtain the freedom we seek.' | | | |
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| | The Islamic republic does not have "an awkward relationship" with Zoroastrianism. It forbids Zoroastrian practices, including the celebration of the Zoroastrian New Year, Norooz. Forget about "guarded recognition;" there is a ban. The mullahs know something that al-Reuters apparently either doesn’t know, or doesn’t choose to report: that there is a big Zoroastrian revival under way in Iran, another sign of the hollowness of the Islamic republic, and the hostility of the Iranian people to their leaders. And to say that the authorities "beat up and gassed" some "revelers" is quite an understatement, since, on the evening of March 15h, there were very large-scale demonstrations all over Iran, combining the Norooz celebrations with calls for the downfall of the regime itself. Effigies of top mullahs were burned in the streets. | | | | | An imprisoned Iranian writer has received an award from Human Rights Watch in recognition of the 17 years he has spent in jail for his views. Taqi Rahmani, 45, a writer and political activist, has been imprisoned several times since 1981. | |
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| | Has there ever been a more dramatic moment than this one? The Middle East is boiling, as the failed tyrants scramble to come to terms with the political tsunami unleashed on Afghanistan and Iraq. The power of democratic revolution can be seen in every country in the region. Even the Saudi royal family has had to stage a farcical "election." But this first halting step has fooled no one. Only males could vote, no political parties were permitted, and only the Wahhabi establishment was permitted to organize. The results will not satisfy any serious person. As Iraq constitutes a new, representative government, and wave after wave of elections sweep through the region, even the Saudis will have to submit to the freely expressed desires of their people. | | | |  The global web blog community is being called into action to lend support to two imprisoned Iranian bloggers. The month-old Committee to Protect Bloggers' is asking those with blogs to dedicate their sites on 22 February to the “Free Mojtaba and Arash Day”. Arash Sigarchi and Mojtaba Saminejad are both in prison in Iran. | |
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| | In a country where free speech has price, Iranian bloggers are having a bonanza - and the hardliners have begun to take notice. | | | | | The BBC World Service website recently released the results of their 2004 presidential poll. Of the sixteen linguistic ethnical groups surveyed, Persians were overwhelmingly the most supportive of President Bush. In fact, over fifty two percent of Iranians preferred Republican George W. Bush to challenger John Kerry who'd received a minuscule forty two percent of the vote. Thus, surprisingly, unlike in the United States where the presidential race was relegated to a couple of percentage points, in Iran - President Bush won by a landslide. | |
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| | Internet cafes and Western-style food courts are booming in Tehran, with young people telling CBS News they almost wish the United States would liberate them. | | | | | An election that was not supposed to happen because the so-called resistance in Iraq -- and its sympathisers in the West -- did not want it has produced results that the doomsters did not expect. | |
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| | Isn't it revealing that autocrats and dictators around the globe bother to stage phony elections in order to claim legitimacy? Remember Saddam Hussein telling Dan Rather in 2002 that he had won 99 percent of the vote? Fidel Castro routinely claims to receive overwhelming majorities in his rigged elections, and throughout Africa, potentates of various stripes adopt the title "president" without any true democratic backing. | | |
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