“If you want to know where they are all being kept,” said Todd Winstrom, “they’re down in the hole.”
Winstrom, a staff attorney for Disability Rights Wisconsin, was talking about what happens to mentally ill offenders when they enter his state’s prison system. Without treatment options—and without anyplace else to put them—these prisoners quickly end up in solitary confinement, where they may remain for months or years.
Since solitary confinement has been shown to cause severe psychological trauma in prisoners without underlying psychiatric conditions, it would be difficult to imagine a more damaging place to incarcerate the mentally ill.
Rarely are the victories of the Islamic Revolution so clearly expressed in the Western world as a February 2010 NewScientist article which gives deep burial to a long campaign against Islamic Fundamentalism.
It might be the Chinese year of the tiger, but scientifically, 2010 is looking like Iran’s year. Scientific output has grown 11 times faster in Iran than the world average, faster than any other country.
It comes as no surprise: Under the Ahmadinejad administration, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been topping the rankings of scientific output growth for the past several years.
Dynamic messianism
Though widely demonized by Anglo-Pharisee propaganda, the uniqueness of the messianic view of Shia Islam plays a major role in this: The concept of waiting for Imam Mahdi to come and establish a perfect Islamic government on earth – defined by Justice ruling – is not a passive crossing of arms, but an urgent responsibility that must be enacted by believers towards improving the condition of the world.
One could thus say that the idea of luxurious resorts and skyscrapers in Dubai bringing us closer to a paradise on earth, regardless of how many millions of brethren in kind die at the doorstep as an associated cost of the pompous infrastructure, is as alien to Shia Muslims as the minority of minorities in Iran who question the legitimacy of Ahmadinejad’s government: Not even the 30% who didn’t give him their vote in the last elections, but a yet smaller percentage of them who carried on gladly backing an obvious coup attempt against their own nation. Such Burj Al-Dubai fantasies are precisely what their dissent craves for, and what their commanders promise them.
Science – or rather our modern simplification of it – is one of the great side-beneficiaries of such a world view, since empty pride in such applied academicism is not seen as an end on itself, as is the case of our secular West. Such crippled concept lacking any regards for the Divine – an inevitable dimension of human existence in the sight of any traditional wisdom – is never valued more in the core of the Islamic Revolution’s Weltanschauung than the practical tool it is, with its own limited purposes. It is interesting to notice that the same is the case for money, but that is the topic for another post.
By now, the standard claims about Iran’s “stolen election” have been repeated so many times by the establishment Western media, as well as by those on the left who took the bait, that almost everybody is hooked on it and unable to wiggle free. Undoubtedly, many foreign activists sincerely believe that they are supporting democracy inside Iran, and large numbers of Iranian dissidents truly are struggling for a more open and decent society and political order. But if Iran’s 2009 official election result is valid, and if there is strong majority support among Iran’s citizens for the structure and general character of its Islamic Republic, then these foreign activists, including the collection of Nobel laureates gathered around Wiesel, and those on the left who like to invoke “solidarity with the anti-Ahmadinejad movement,” clearly are not aligned with majority opinion inside Iran. We are not quite sure what to call this toxic mix of opposing the majority will of a foreign country’s citizens and doing so in the name of “democracy,” while feeding into the regime-change program of the United States and Israel. But strong currents of Orientalism as well as imperialism are clearly running through it.
“El plan que existe detrás del movimiento foquista de jóvenes, que ya no son jóvenes, se pusieron viejos antes de tiempo porque están al servicio del capitalismo, los hijitos de la burguesía detrás de ese foquismo enloquecido fascista y violento, hay un plan que ha funcionado en otros países de Europa, como la Revolución Naranja; es una estrategia imperial’, explicó el comandante Chávez a los líderes estudiantiles congregados en la Sala Ríos Reyna, durante la juramentación del Frente de Juventudes Bicentenario 200.
Revolución Verde: protestas en Irán contra el presunto fraude electoral y en apoyo del candidato de la oposición Mir-Hossein Mousavi.”La ‘revolución verde’ de Teherán es el más reciente caso de las «revoluciones de color» mediante las cuales Estados Unidos ha logrado imponer gobiernos sometidos a su tutela en varios países sin tener que recurrir a la fuerza”, señala Meyssan
When on February 11, 2010, millions of Iranians from 818 large and small cities across the country and from all walks of life, young and old, men and women, workers and professionals, turned out to celebrate the thirty-first anniversary of the Islamic Revolution, it was despite the threats and demagogueries of the Western leaders and corporate mass media.
These pillars of the western propaganda industry also desperately longed to see that a minority of upper-middle class opponents in Tehran would seriously challenge the authority of the government and inflict damages on Iran’s social order and harm its reputation and credibility among nations around the world, but especially, within those of the Middle East. Over and over, these biased newscasters predicted that the reform movement would once again demonstrate en masse and challenge the social system. But what actually took place gave rise to great disappointment and consternation, apparent on the gloomy expressions of the talking heads and news anchors covering Iran’s celebration. The resolute and militant participation of more than fifteen million Iranians in Tehran, Esfahan, Kerman, Ardabil, Ahwaz, Shiraz, Qom, and many more cities deeply disappointed the American and Western European conservative forces who witnessed the nation’s determination in upholding national unity and furthering the realization of economic, political, national defense and social developments, especially in actualization of Iran’s civilian nuclear industry. Some layers of the opposition forces such as the groups of monarchists, followers of Reza Pahlavi, the son of the old Shah, along with the terrorist organization of the Mojahedin Khalgh and some liberal-left groups with imaginations far greater than their actual force, were financially and technologically assisted by such agencies as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a visible extension of the CIA, and had planned, just as on previous occasions, to highjack the National Day of Celebration…
