Presidential Elections in Iran

According to Mehdi Yahyanejad, manager of a Farsi-language news site based in Los Angeles, "Twitter's impact inside Iran is zero ... here, there is lots of buzz, but once you look ... you see most of it are Americans tweeting among themselves." The Alexa rankings confirm that Twitter's penetration in Iran is nearly 0%.

Western media led by BBC and European leaders , except Obama to some extent ,have gone ballistic about the so called ‘stolen election’ in Iran , basing reports mostly on twitters. Unfortunately such western disinformation is lapped up by lazy and enslaved Indian media barring some exceptions , thus maligning the president elect of a great civilisation Iran. One can only have contempt for such slavishness.

Indian media treat Thomas Friedman like a great journalist , he, who among other things , described the US led illegal invasion of Iraq as the noblest mission to bring democracy to Iraq and the region .More than a million Iraqis have died since the invasion and brutal occupation , creating more than a million widows , 4 million orphans , 4 million refugees and destroying the country for generations .there is little coverage of this in western and Indian media .Every other day dozens of people are being killed but western media has instead gone in overdrive over 10 Iranians killed in street revolutions , encouraged and inspired by the west.

Wrote Seumas Milne in the Guardian of 18 June--"the western media, whose cameras focus so lovingly on Tehran's gilded youth and for whom Ahmadinejad is nothing but a Holocaust-denying fanatic. The other Ahmadinejad, who is seen to stand up for the country's independence, expose elite corruption on TV and use Iran's oil wealth to boost the incomes of the poor majority, is largely invisible abroad.

"While Mousavi promised market reforms and privatisation, more personal freedom and better relations with the west, the president increased pensions and public sector wages and handed out cheap loans. So it's hardly surprising that Ahmadinejad should have a solid base among the working class, the religious, small town and rural poor – or that he might have achieved a similar majority to that of his first election in 2005. That's what one of the few genuinely independent polls (the US-based Ballen-Doherty survey) predicted last month, when the Times reported Ahmadinejad was "expected to win".

"But such details have got lost as the pressure has built in Tehran for a "green revolution" amid unsubstantiated claims that the election was stolen. The strongest evidence appears to be some surprising regional results and the speed of the official announcement, triggered by Mousavi's declaration that he was the winner before the polls closed. But most official figures don't look so implausible – Mousavi won Tehran, for instance, by 2.2m votes to 1.8m – and it's hard to believe that rigging alone could account for the 11 million-vote gap between the main contenders."

Gajendra Singh is a regular contributor to The Rebel.
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Original source: www.ziopedia.org/articles/iran/presidential_elections_in_iran_2009062410304/

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Last updated 26/06/2009

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