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Sat, Jan 29, 2011 | Press TV

Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast

Iran Asks Egypt to Meet Public Demands Despite Its Own Crackdown on the Green Movement

Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast has called on political leaders in Egypt to follow the “rightful demands” of their people.

“Iran expects Egyptian officials to listen to the voice of their Muslim people, respond to their rightful demands and refrain from exerting violence by security forces and police against an Islamic wave of awareness that has spread through the country in form of a popular movement,” Mehmanparast said Saturday.

He further pointed out that Tehran attaches great importance to the fulfillment of public demands in Egypt and added, “Iran regards demonstrations by the Muslim people of this country as a justice-seeking movement in line with their national-religious demands.”

Mehmanparast went on to say that the Islamic Republic of Iran is “closely following up and monitoring developments in Egypt.”

The protesters say they have been emboldened by the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia, which saw the overthrow of President Zein El Adbdin Ben Ali.

Mubarak on Friday night ordered the cabinet to step down and pledged to work for more democracy and press ahead with social, economic and political reforms.

He expressed regret over the loss of innocent lives during the anti-government demonstrations but defended the role of government forces in the violent crackdown on protesters. [Press TV, Sat, Jan 29, 2011]

In our assessment, this is a rather hypocritical demand from the Iranian government as they are responsible for the crackdown on Iran’s democratic Green Movement after the 2009 june elections. Iran supports Islamic terrorism in the region with weapon smuggling to Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hizbullah in Lebanon and supports anti-West and anti-Israeli Islamists.

As Jon Lee Anderson puts it in his article (August 16, 2010) “Letter from Tehran: After the Crackdown”:

The protests, which had started over election fraud, had grown into huge demonstrations against the Islamic regime, the largest in Iran since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini overthrew the Shah, in 1979. But in the weeks that followed, Iran’s ultimate political authority, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, endorsed Ahmadinejad’s victory and condemned the protests; riot police and Basij, armed with knives and guns, were sent into the streets to attack the protesters. Between forty and eighty people were killed, Mousavi’s nephew among them, and thousands were arrested.

In show trials held in August, more than a hundred detainees were paraded in court, many of them thin and pale and clearly terrified; according to Amnesty International, many detainees had been beaten, tortured, and raped by guards and interrogators, often at secret detention centers. Several “confessed” to an improbable range of political crimes, including treason. Since then, most have been released on bail, including the Iranian-Canadian Newsweek correspondent Maziar Bahari, who fled the country. But hundreds of others have been sentenced to harsh prison terms, and at least five sentenced to death. Two have already been hanged for the crime of moharebeh—warring against God.

The Green Movement continued to hold intermittent demonstrations through the end of last year and, in diminishing numbers, into the spring. But the movement has been constrained. Days before a rally planned for June 12th, the anniversary of the election, Mousavi and Karroubi called it off, explaining that they were doing so for the “safety of the people.”

During the campaign, Mousavi spoke out brazenly for women’s rights and for normalizing relations with the United States, and denounced Ahmadinejad’s statements questioning the reality of the Holocaust. Now he rarely leaves his home in north Tehran, appearing only in pictures and statements on his own Web site. He and the other reformist leaders have been living under an informal house arrest, subjected to heckling and assaults by pro-regime mobs whenever they venture out.

Read more in the NewYorker.

So much for the rights of the Iranian people.