Category: Iran

Iran’s totalitarianism, weak civil society could prompt ‘social explosion’

     

Prominent Iranian artists, inside and outside the country, have reacted to the brutal crackdown of recent protests in Iran, The Independent reports (HT:FDD). Amnesty International says Iranian authorities are continuing… Read more »

Iran ‘a powder keg’: Protests ‘strike at heart of regime’s legitimacy’

     

  The head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard threatened the U.S. and its allies Monday as he addressed a pro-government demonstration attended by tens of thousands of people denouncing last week’s… Read more »

Iraqi freedom vs. Iranian domination – or failed state?

     

For more than a month, Iraq’s protesters have withstood bullets and stun grenades, tear gas and water cannons, as they chanted, danced and called for the ouster of the entire… Read more »

New social movement challenging Iraq’s sectarian politics

     

The largest mass protests to hit Iraq and Lebanon in decades are posing a direct challenge to the influence Iran has gained in both countries as demonstrators seek to overturn… Read more »

Time to recognize the ‘new faces of Iranian protest’

     

  The Islamic Republic of Iran has come under fierce criticism amid reports that the judiciary amputated a man’s fingers for theft in the latest in a series of incidents… Read more »

‘Coups and Revolutions’: non-state actors, dysfunctional states impede Arab democracy

     

The slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi “has become the symbol of our collective moral conscience, the voice for the voiceless in the Middle East,” his fiancée Hatice Cengiz wrote in… Read more »

Bipartisan democratic unity can counter ‘brotherhood of authoritarianism’

     

If Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party are allowed to crush Hong Kong’s democracy movement, it will mark a grave and significant victory for authoritarian ideology over democracy, says… Read more »

Captive Society: What do Iran’s leaders really fear?

     

What do Iran’s leaders really fear? New York Times columnist Bret Stephens asks. Above all, a revival of the Green Movement that nearly toppled the regime following the stolen presidential… Read more »

Revisionists pose ‘civilizational challenge’ to Western liberal democratic order

     

  The resurgence of threats to liberal democracy — external and internal — does not refute the principal thesis of Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History?” says a prominent analyst…. Read more »

A dissident’s tale: How to help Iran’s democracy movement

     

Opposing the Iranian regime doesn’t have to mean sanctioning its banks and oil, argues Abbas Milani, the director of Stanford University’s Iran studies program. Milani cannot be called a squish… Read more »