Here’s an interesting interview at Tehran Bureau on the working class and the Green Movement: “The Green Movement cannot succeed unless it raises social justice demands, which include workers’ demands at the center. During the Khatami era, Reformists failed because they did not take the demand for social justice seriously, and did not make efforts [...]

This highly emotional HBO documentary on the death of Neda Agha Soltan is a must see.

This is one of the few times you’ll see me agree with Fareed Zakaria. Here he speaks about the possibility of regime change in Iran and sharply and convincingly criticizes McCain’s wishful thinking.

My friends in Iran say that Iran was dead today and that nothing happened on the streets. Of course, they couldn’t be everywhere at all times. Here’s footage of a protest at Sharif University.  Here’s footage of a protest at Tehran University. And here’s footage of rooftop chants the night before. Still, they’re all a far [...]

Foreign Policy – Excerpt: But it is time to get Twitter’s role in the events in Iran right. Simply put: There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran. As Mehdi Yahyanejad, the manager of “Balatarin,” one of the Internet’s most popular Farsi-language websites, told the Washington Post last June, Twitter’s impact inside Iran is nil. “Here [...]

“Mr Karroubi, a year has passed since the eventful month of Khordad 1388 (22 May-21 June 2009). Yet this month is considered to be a historic one in Iran: the epic election victory of Mohammad Khatami on 2 Khordad 1376 (23 May 1997), the brave resistance that led to the liberation of the southern city [...]

Tehran Bureau – Excerpt: “Ahmad Yazdanfar, senior aide and advisor to Mir Hossein Mousavi and head of the team of bodyguards that protects him, has been arrested by the Islamic Republic’s security forces. A former officer in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Yazdanfar has been Mousavi’s bodyguard since 1983, and protected him at the height [...]

There are some slogans with which I can identify and there are others that I think are either politically immature or underdeveloped, but one slogan from the recent protests at Shahid Beheshti University really fascinated me. The protesters declared: ما اهل کوفه نیستیم ، نیمه راه بایستیم The translation reads something like this: We are [...]

I met the journalist, Iason Athanasiadis, when I was a graduate student at Harvard. He was there through a fellowship and sat in in one of my classes a few times. He later gave me a documentary on the Lebanon war (2006) that he had made. I respect him as a journalist, he’s fearless and goes where [...]

The number of attendees at the pro-government rallies on Thursday is staggering, STAGGERING, and serves as a wake up call to anyone who thinks that the regime does not have proponents. See the video here.

Foreign Policy – Excerpt: “Now, many of the greens are experiencing a sort of idealism hangover. Mohammad Sadeghi, the 27-year old Iranian-German who administers Mousavi’s official Facebook page, admits that he doesn’t know what comes next. He has always managed to be one step ahead of the manifold events of the past year, but now [...]

The Guardian – Excerpt: “Anyone who has spent time in Iran and the Middle East knows about the hospitality of this region. It’s extremely disrespectful for a host not to offer a guest food or drink. To suggest that free food and drink were one of the motivating factors that brought hundreds of thousands out [...]

Excerpt: “What’s at stake now is not just the survival of the reformists, but the very possibility of Iran’s eventual transition toward a democratic system. By reneging on its promise of justice and political liberties—and by refusing to take part in a national debate about what the ideals and goal of the republic should be—the [...]