LCCC ENGLISH DAILY NEWS BULLETIN
January 06/2018
Compiled & Prepared by: Elias Bejjani

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Bible Quotations
Do everything without grumbling or arguing,  so that you may become blameless and pure, “children of God without fault in a warped and crooked generation.
Philippians02/12-30/:"Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed—not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence—continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling,  for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose. Do everything without grumbling or arguing,  so that you may become blameless and pure, “children of God without fault in a warped and crooked generation.” Then you will shine among them like stars in the sky  as you hold firmly to the word of life. And then I will be able to boast on the day of Christ that I did not run or labor in vain.  But even if I am being poured out like a drink offering on the sacrifice and service coming from your faith, I am glad and rejoice with all of you.  So you too should be glad and rejoice with me. I hope in the Lord Jesus to send Timothy to you soon, that I also may be cheered when I receive news about you. I have no one else like him, who will show genuine concern for your welfare. For everyone looks out for their own interests, not those of Jesus Christ. But you know that Timothy has proved himself, because as a son with his father he has served with me in the work of the gospel.  I hope, therefore, to send him as soon as I see how things go with me. And I am confident in the Lord that I myself will come soon. But I think it is necessary to send back to you Epaphroditus, my brother, co-worker and fellow soldier, who is also your messenger, whom you sent to take care of my needs. For he longs for all of you and is distressed because you heard he was ill.  Indeed he was ill, and almost died. But God had mercy on him, and not on him only but also on me, to spare me sorrow upon sorrow.  Therefore I am all the more eager to send him, so that when you see him again you may be glad and I may have less anxiety. So then, welcome him in the Lord with great joy, and honor people like him,  because he almost died for the work of Christ. He risked his life to make up for the help you yourselves could not give me.

Titles For Latest LCCC Bulletin analysis & editorials from miscellaneous sources published on January 05-06/18
Provinces Lead the Center in Iran's Protests/Brenda Shaffer/The Washington Institute/January 05/2018
Iran's Coercive Apparatus: Capacity and Desire/Saeid Golkar/The Washinton Institute/January 05/2018
Sexual Harassment East and West/Denis MacEoin/Gatestone Institute/January 05/2018
The world must act — and act now — to stop the crackdown in Tehran/
Dr. Majid Rafizadeh/Arab News/January 05/2018
Is the Arab spring coming to Iran/Dr. Azeem Ibrahim/Al Arabiya/January 05/18
Game of chess and storm in a teacup/Tariq A. Al-Maeena/Al Arabiya/January 05/18
Iran between domestic and foreign threats/Abdulrahman al-Rashed/Al Arabiya/January 05/18

Titles For Latest LCCC Lebanese Related News published on January 05-06/18
Hezbollah leader ridiculed after he reveals $1300 monthly salary from Iran
Berri Says Aoun Wants to 'Undermine Taef Accord, Monopolize Power'
Aoun underlines Socio Economic Council's fundamental role in new economic plan
Aoun Urges Respect for Constitution, Judiciary amid Berri Spat
Residents Slam Firefighting Response after Blaze Kills 3 in Beirut
Gemayel Blasts Government over Sovereignty, Economy
Hariri Fails to Make Breakthrough in Decree Row, AMAL Won't Boycott Cabinet
Hariri receives French and Egyptian ambassadors
Sleiman welcomes new Saudi envoy, calls for bolstering relations
Geagea welcomed Saudi ambassador in Maarab: Summer cloud passed quickly, left no trace on historic relations between two countries
Berri, General Maronite Council tackle current developments
Antiquities Directorate: Piccadilly Palace Theater listed on historic buildings' inventory
Army: News of officer's arrest on charges of assisting terrorists false
Khoury, Swiss ambassador tackle bilateral relations
ISF refutes circulated news on officer arrest

Titles For Latest LCCC Bulletin For Miscellaneous Reports And News published
on January 05-06/18
France believes that Turkey’s future should be in Europe, says Macron
US warns Iran at formal UN Security Council meeting on protests
50 killed says Iran opposition, as mass protests enter ninth day
Iranian resistance issues list of demands urging UN to take action
Iran tries to censor coverage of protests by media based abroad
Armed groups clash at key Libya border post
Russia Says U.S. 'Interfering' in Iran over Demos
Bombshell-Filled Book Claims Trump Team Worried about His Fitness for Office
Saudi Intercepts Ballistic Missile near Yemen Border
France Seeks Greater Role for West in Syrian Crisis
Erdogan accuses US, Israel of 'meddling' in Iran, Pakistan

Latest Lebanese Related News published on January 05-06/18
Hezbollah leader ridiculed after he reveals $1300 monthly salary from Iran
Al Arabiya/January 06/2018/Activists in Lebanon ridiculed the announcement, during an interview with a TV station, by Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah that his monthly salary, from Iran, was $1300. Nasrallah, who tried yesterday to deflect the condemnation of Iranians shouting in the streets against Tehran’s funding of the Hezbollah militia while more than half of the Iranian people live below the poverty line, refused to disclose the amount paid to his militia from Iran.

Berri Says Aoun Wants to 'Undermine Taef Accord, Monopolize Power'

Naharnet/January 05/18/Speaker Nabih Berri has blasted President Michel Aoun's stance on the controversial officers seniority decree, accusing the president – without naming him – of seeking to monopolize power and to “undermine” the Taef Accord. Stressing that the solution is to return the decree to Finance Minister Ali Hassan Khalil to sign it, Berri told his visitors that the Taef Accord, which ended the civil war, had sought to prevent the monopolization of power in the hands of one person. “The sectarian statements do not intimidate me. If someone thinks so, I tell them that my stance is principled and that my rejection is based on the Constitution and the Taef Accord. Nothing will stop us from taking our constitutional right,” several newspapers quoted Berri as telling his visitors. “This insistence on violating the Constitution is aimed at undermining the Taef Accord. They do not want the signatures of the ministers of finance and interior. Have we forgotten that they fought the Taef Accord and stood against us in the past?” Berri added. “Perhaps some have forgotten that the Lebanese paid 150,000 victims in the civil war as a price for the Taef Accord, to prevent the state's decision from being monopolized by one person, but rather by a Council of Ministers that represents the country's consensus,” the Speaker went on to say. Berri also emphasized that “decrees cannot enter into effect before being published (in the official gazette), and so far the decree is yet to be published.” The Aoun-Berri spat broke out after the president and the premier signed a decree granting one-year seniority to a number of officers. Berri and Finance Minister Ali Hassan Khalil have insisted that the decree should have also carried the finance minister's signature. Aoun and his aides have argued that the decree did not require Khalil's signature because it did not entail any “financial burden,” a point Berri and officials close to him have argued against. Ain el-Tineh sources have meanwhile warned that the decree would tip sectarian balance in favor of Christians in the army's highest echelons. The officers in question were undergoing their first year of officer training at the Military Academy when Syrian forces ousted Aoun’s military government from Baabda in 1990. They were suspended by the pro-Damascus authorities until 1993 before they resumed their officer training course as second-year cadets.

Aoun underlines Socio Economic Council's fundamental role in new economic plan

Fri 05 Jan 2018/NNA - President of the Republic, Michel Aoun, on Friday underlined the vital role of the Socio-Economic Council in preparations underway for Lebanon’s new economic plan. President Aoun urged all political parties in the country to cooperate for the sake of the success of such a novel economic plan, which would revive all production sectors after a long downturn. Aoun's fresh words on Friday morning came during his meeting with the new board of the Economic and Social Council, led by Charles Arbid. The delegation thanked the President for his support in the activation of the Council's work. Addressing the delegation, Aoun called on all state institutions to uphold the Constitution and laws, saying they should be their reference points. The President also underscored the need to abide by laws and respect the judiciary. On the other hand, Aoun met respectively with the Lebanese Ambassador to Venezuela, Elias Lebes, and Lebanon's Ambassador to Mexico, Sami al-Nmeir, on the occasion of their assumption of their diplomatic duties there.

Aoun Urges Respect for Constitution, Judiciary amid Berri Spat
Naharnet/January 05/18/President Michel Aoun on Friday stressed that state institutions should abide by “the Constitution and the laws,” amid an ongoing row between him and Speaker Nabih Berri over a controversial officers seniority decree. “My choice is to resort to the Constitution and the laws,” Aoun added in a tweet. He also urged respect for the judiciary. The Aoun-Berri spat broke out after the president and the premier signed a decree granting one-year seniority to a number of officers. Berri and Finance Minister Ali Hassan Khalil have insisted that the decree should have also carried the finance minister's signature. Aoun and his aides have argued that the decree did not require Khalil's signature because it did not entail any “financial burden,” a point Berri and officials close to him have argued against. Ain el-Tineh sources have meanwhile warned that the decree would tip sectarian balance in favor of Christians in the army's highest echelons. The officers in question were undergoing their first year of officer training at the Military Academy when Syrian forces ousted Aoun’s military government from Baabda in 1990. They were suspended by the pro-Damascus authorities until 1993 before they resumed their officer training course as second-year cadets.

Residents Slam Firefighting Response after Blaze Kills 3 in Beirut

Naharnet/January 05/18/Three people were killed and three others were injured, two seriously, in a fire overnight in an apartment building in the Beirut neighborhood of al-Zaydaniyeh.The National News Agency identified the dead as Fatima al-Koush, Ali al-Koush and Lara al-Koush, with residents and media reports saying they died of smoke inhalation. “A.L. Qabbani and K. Qabbani are still in the intensive care unit of the American University of Beirut Medical Center,” NNA added. Prime Minister Saad Hariri and High Relief Commission chief Maj. Gen. Mohammed Kheir inspected the blaze site overnight and offered condolences to the families of the victims. As the dead were laid to rest on Friday, residents of the area decried authorities' response, saying firefighters were late to arrive at the scene and that they only had two oxygen breathing apparatuses.

Gemayel Blasts Government over Sovereignty, Economy
Naharnet/January 05/18/Kataeb Party chief MP Sami Gemayel on Friday launched a fresh attack on the government. “The Council of Ministers has become an 'administrative board' that has no jurisdiction over decisions related to sovereignty and foreign ties,” Gemayel tweeted. “The Council of Ministers has been a failure, even in terms of addressing the simplest living affairs and social conditions of citizens,” he added. “The Council only knows how to approve taxes and shady deals and how to impoverish people,” Gemayel lamented.

Hariri Fails to Make Breakthrough in Decree Row, AMAL Won't Boycott Cabinet
Naharnet/January 05/18/Prime Minister Saad Hariri has so far failed to make a breakthrough in the spat between President Michel Aoun and Speaker Nabih Berri despite the several meetings he has held with the parties, media reports said. Hariri, who met Aoun twice on Thursday, “did not manage to make a breakthrough, seeing as Baabda is still clinging to its stance that the seniority decree has entered into effect and cannot be reversed while Ain el-Tineh is still insisting on the finance minister's signature on the decree,” An Nahar newspaper reported on Friday. The premier also met Thursday with Finance Minister Ali Hassan Khalil, who confirmed that Hariri's talks have so far failed to achieve any progress but reassured that AMAL Movement's ministers do not intend to suspend their participation in cabinet sessions. Aoun is engaged in a spat with Berri over a controversial decree granting one-year seniority to a number of officers. After the decree was signed by Aoun and Hariri, Berri and Khalil insisted that the decree should have also carried the finance minister's signature. Aoun and his aides have argued that the decree did not require Khalil's signature because it did not entail any “financial burden,” a point Berri and officials close to him have argued against. Ain el-Tineh sources have meanwhile warned that the decree would tip sectarian balance in favor of Christians in the army's highest echelons. The officers in question were undergoing their first year of officer training at the Military Academy when Syrian forces ousted Aoun’s military government from Baabda in 1990. They were suspended by the pro-Damascus authorities until 1993 before they resumed their officer training course as second-year cadets.

Hariri receives French and Egyptian ambassadors
Fri 05 Jan 2018/NNA - The President of the Council of Ministers Saad Hariri received today at the "Center House" the French Ambassador to Lebanon Bruno Foucher and discussed with him the developments in Lebanon and the region and the bilateral relations. Hariri also met with the Egyptian, Nazih Naggari. After the meeting, Naggari said: "I congratulated Prime Minister Hariri on the New Year and wished him and Lebanon success. We talked about a number of regional and bilateral issues that were discussed during Premier Hariri's visit to Egypt last November. We seek to strengthen the relations between the two countries and enhance them on the economic level. We in Egypt are always keen to support Lebanon, the Premiership and Prime Minister Hariri personally."Hariri also received MP Mohammed Hajjar and talks focused on the waste crisis and its impact on the health of the citizens in Iqlim el-Kharroub, Chouf and Aley. Hajjar said that Hariri was very understanding and approved that these areas be included in the next waste plan.

Sleiman welcomes new Saudi envoy, calls for bolstering relations
Fri 05 Jan 2018/NNA - Former President Michel Sleiman welcomed on Friday newly appointed Saudi Ambassador to Lebanon, Walid al-Yacoub. Sleiman underlined the need to strengthen and reinforce Lebanese-Saudi ties, deeming such relations as important and historic. The former president also stressed the importance of dissociating Lebanon from regional conflicts, urging all political factions to abide by this principle, which in his words, protects Lebanon and maintains its best relations with its Arab brethrens, notably the Saudi Kingdom.

Geagea welcomed Saudi ambassador in Maarab: Summer cloud passed quickly, left no trace on historic relations between two countries
Fri 05 Jan 2018/NNA - Lebanese Forces leader, Samir Geagea, received in Maarab the new Saudi ambassador to Lebanon Walid Al-Yaqoub in the presence of Information Minister Melhem Riachy. In the wake of the meeting, Geagea said "I have had the honor of receiving the Saudi ambassador in Lebanon, although the Kingdom does not need an ambassador in Lebanon." "What happened in the past two months in the relationship between Lebanon and the Kingdom is a summer cloud, as we see at times between friends and allies." He stressed that "this cloud passed quickly and did not leave any impact on the historical relationship between the two countries.""We must strive to restore this historic relationship between the two countries," he said, stressing that "all parties in Lebanon must abide by the policy of self-dissociation. "We are putting the Lebanese interest at risk for regional reasons, interests and goals that have nothing to do with our country." Whether he will meet with Prime Minister Hariri anytime soon, the head of the Lebanese Forces said: "We will see".

Berri, General Maronite Council tackle current developments
Fri 05 Jan 2018/NNA - House Speaker, Nabih Berri, on Friday afternoon met at his Ain Tineh residence with a delegation of the executive council of the General Maronite Council, led by its head Wadih Al-Khazen. Talks reportedly touched on most recent developments in Lebanon and the broad region. On emerging, Al-Khazen said that the visit was a chance to discuss with the Speaker the current situation on the local arena, notably the recent row over the officer seniority decree. In this regard, Al-Khazen quoted the Speaker as saying that the spat over the officer promotion decree can be resolved as long as the matter is subject to the terms of the Constitution and the national accord. Al-Khazen relayed that the Speaker has no intention of escalation; yet, he [Berri] maintains his stance opposing the officer seniority decree. On the other hand, Berri received at noon Jordanian Ambassador to Lebanon, Nabil Masarwi, with whom he discussed most recent developments and the bilateral ties. The Speaker also met with Vice Speaker Farid Makkari, with talks reportedly touching on the overall situation.

Antiquities Directorate: Piccadilly Palace Theater listed on historic buildings' inventory

Fri 05 Jan 2018/NNA - Antiquities' General Directorate of the Culture Ministry announced that the acclaimed Piccadilly Palace Theater has been listed on the general historic buildings' inventory, in view of its weighty historic and cultural significance. Piccadilly Palace Theater bears property #2328 in Ras Beirut Real Estate zone. The Ministry issued decree #186 dated 18/1/2017 in this regard, and was published in the Official Gazette #1 dated 4/1/2018.

Army: News of officer's arrest on charges of assisting terrorists false
Fri 05 Jan 2018/NNA - The Army Command - Orientation Directorate - issued on Friday the following clarification: "A local newspaper published in its issue dated January 5, 2018, an article titled 'The arrest of an officer on charges of assisting terrorists', stating that the Directorate of Intelligence arrested an officer of the Internal Security Forces at the rank of lieutenant, based on the confessions of Sheikh Al-Mustali Mustafa Al-Hujairi, Abu Takiyeh.It is important for the Army Command to deny this news as it calls for accuracy in dealing with any information related to the military institution, and returning to it for verification of the validity of information before publication."

Khoury, Swiss ambassador tackle bilateral relations

Fri 05 Jan 2018/NNA - Minister of Economy and Trade, Raed Khoury, met Switzerland's Ambassador to Lebanon, Monica Schmutz Gurekis, with talks touching on relations between Lebanon and Switzerland and the possibility of stimulating bilateral trade and economic relations through joint activities between Lebanese and Swiss companies in sectors of mutual interest. The two sides also reviewed Khoury's participation in the economic forum to be held in Davos at the end of this month.

ISF refutes circulated news on officer arrest
Fri 05 Jan 2018/NNA - Internal Security Forces Directorate General on Friday refuted in a statement what has been circulated by some media outlets and social media websites about the arrest of an officer on charges of "assisting terrorists." The Directorate General stressed that the circulated news is "categorically groundless." The news item published by one of the newspapers on 5/1/2018 said that the army intelligence arrested an ISF officer, of a lieutenant rank, on suspicion of smuggling arms, food and fuel to the terrorist groups in the outskirts. The ISF elaborated that said officer had been arrested earlier on different charges. The ISF Directorate General urged all media outlets to exercise precision and objectivity in disseminating news, and solely obtain their accurate information from the Public Relations Department.


Latest LCCC Bulletin For Miscellaneous Reports And News published on January 05-06/18
France believes that Turkey’s future should be in Europe, says Macron
Arab News/January 05/18/ANKARA: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron met on Friday in Paris. The pair discussed Middle East issues with a particular focus on Syria, as well as bilateral cooperation, including the joint Eurosam consortium between Turkey, Italy and France which will develop air- and missile-defense systems and is expected to reduce Turkey’s security vulnerabilities. During Erdogan’s visit, an agreement was signed between ASELSAN, the prominent Turkish defense electronics company, and the Eurosam consortium.
At a meeting in Brussels in May, both presidents agreed to cooperate on counterterrorism efforts. Turkey and France have been primary targets of several Daesh terror attacks, and some 700 French nationals are believed to have joined the terror group in Iraq and Syria.
This common threat is forcing Ankara and Paris to collaborate on monitoring the activities of French militants who may try to return to their home country. In an interview with French television prior to his Paris visit, Erdogan reiterated Turkey’s determination to crack down on foreign militants within its borders.
Turkey has deported about 5,600 foreign fighters so far, while 54,000 were barred from entering in the first place. During his joint press conference with Macron in Paris, Erdogan said: “Turkey and its friends should fight together against terror groups Daesh, the PYD/YPG and the PKK.” The two latter are Kurdish groups which Turkey regards as terrorist organizations. France and Germany have long opposed Turkey’s application for membership of the EU. But Turkey seems to have renewed emphasis on its membership bid in 2018 after years of strained ties. In an interview with France 24 on Thursday, Turkish presidential spokesperson Ibrahim Kalin said Turkey considers the EU membership a “strategic aim,” and “wants to overcome the troubles and open a new page.”
Macron said, “France believes that Turkey’s future should be in Europe,” but stressed that it needed to apply rule of law and democratic standards. Erdogan, however, firmly underlined that, after 60 years of “waiting at the gates,” Ankara would no longer request membership if the Union failed to deal with it “fairly.” Erhan Icener, an academic from Istanbul Zaim University, considers the Paris meeting an important step toward normalization of Turkey-EU relations. “Kalin’s recent statement to France 24 is significant, considering the high tension between Turkey and some European countries, and pessimism about the future of Turkey–EU relations since the July 15 coup attempt,” Icener told Arab News. “Those in the EU who care about Turkey should opt for engagement rather than isolation,” he added. Iceren believes the pragmatic Macron is the right political figure to open dialogue between Turkey and the EU, which, he said, will help the Turkish government “explain its domestic steps and policies in the post-July 15 period to its European partners.” However, experts warn against expecting too much from Erdogan’s visit. “Any real progress for Turkey’s integration with the EU still depends on the political will on both sides,” Iceren said. “I expect the results of this meeting will not be limited to bilateral cooperation and dialogue between France and Turkey but extend to Turkey’s further integration with the EU.” Ozgur Unluhisarcikli, Ankara director of German Marshall Fund of the United States, agreed.“Erdogan’s visit can facilitate cooperation between Turkey and France in areas ranging from economy to the Middle East,” he told Arab News. While some expect Macron to play the role that Merkel played in Turkey before the fallout between Germany and Turkey, this is unlikely for two reasons, he suggested. “First, the perception of Turkey in the EU is much worse than it was back then,” he said. “Second, Macron does not have the same influence that Merkel has in the EU. However, this visit could help reverse the vicious cycle in EU-Turkey relations.”


US warns Iran at formal UN Security Council meeting on protests
Agencies/January 06/2018/The UN Security Council on Friday opened a meeting on the deadly protests in Iran, at the request of the United States. The formal meeting was preceded by closed-door consultations requested by Russia, which has accused Washington of interfering in Iran's national affairs and maintains the protests are not a matter for the council. But in the end, Moscow's envoy did not try to block the formal session from taking place.
US warns Iran at UN
US Ambassador Nikki Haley warned Iranian authorities on Friday that the world is watching as Tehran responds to anti-government protests. "The Iranian regime is now on notice: the world will be watching what you do," Haley told an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council on the situation in the Islamic republic. The United States called the meeting despite fierce criticism from Russia, which accused Washington of interfering in Iran's internal affairs. "The Iranian people are rising up in over 79 locations throughout the country," Haley told the council. "It is a powerful exhibition of brave people who have become so fed up with their oppressive government that they are willing to risk their lives in protest." Haley accused the government of funding a pro-regime military campaign in Syria, backing Shiite militias in Iraq and supporting a crony elite while ordinary Iranians struggle. The Iranian people are telling their government to "stop the support for terrorism, stop giving billions of our money to killers and dictators, stop taking our wealth and spending it on foreign fighters and proxy wars," said Haley.
French ambassador to UN
Delattre stated that however worrying, recent Iran events do not constitute per se a threat to international peace and security. He added that changes in Iran will come from the people and not from abroad.
British ambassador to UN
Rycroft said too often Iran’s legitimate security interests in middle east pursued in way that destabilizes, at times threatens others, supports terrorism, distorts Iranian economy.
Kuwaiti envoy to UN
The Kuwaiti envoy to the UN Mansour Al-Otaibi demanded that the Iranian authorities respect the peaceful demonstrators right to the freedom of expression.
UN security council held closed-door talks on Iran
The UN Security Council went into closed-door talks on Friday on the deadly protests in Iran with Russia and the United States at odds over whether the top UN body should discuss the demonstrations. Russia requested the consultations and was set to call for a procedural vote to try to block an open meeting requested by the United States on the anti-government demonstrations, which President Donald Trump has openly supported. Heading into the council chamber, US Ambassador Nikki Haley gave reporters a thumbs-up and answered "yes" when asked if she had the nine votes needed for Friday's meeting to go ahead. For a new agenda item to be discussed at the Security Council, at least nine of the 15 council members must support holding the meeting. No vetoes apply. Russia accuses the United States of interfering in Iran's national affairs and maintains the protests are not a matter for the council, which deals with threats to international peace and security.
Anti-government protesters demonstrated in Iran on Sunday in defiance of a warning by the authorities of a tough crackdown. (Supplied) .A total of 21 people have died and hundreds have been arrested since December 28 as protests over economic woes turned against the Iranian regime, with attacks on government buildings and police stations. Pro-regime rallies were held in Tehran after Friday prayers, the third straight day of marches in support of the government, which has declared the unrest over. Diplomats had expected Russia to call a procedural vote to try to block the meeting, but in the end, Moscow's envoy did not make that request. Heading into the council chamber, Haley gave reporters a thumbs-up and answered "yes" when asked if she had the nine votes needed for Friday's meeting to go ahead. Over the past days, the United States has lobbied hard to win support for the Security Council meeting, especially from the six new non-permanent council members, diplomats said. For a new agenda item to be discussed at the Security Council, at least nine of the 15 council members must support holding the meeting. No vetoes apply. (With AFP, Reuters)

50 killed says Iran opposition, as mass protests enter ninth day
Al Arabiya.net/AFPS/January 06/2018/Protests that have rocked Iran have reached the ninth consecutive day on Friday amid rising calls for more demonstrations under the slogan “The Friday of Anger for our Martyrs” referring to the 50 protesters who were killed so far by Iranian security forces, according to the opposition. Activists called for nationwide protests hours after Friday prayers so as not to clash with pro-regime protests that include students of religious institutions, Revolutionary Guard supporters and the Basij militia. According to the government, the official number of deaths since the uprising is 22. However opposition announced that the toll has reached 50 on Friday.
Kashan city on Friday.
Further protests are expected to take place after a match in the ‘Tractor Sazi’ stadium in Tabriz, the central province of Azerbaijan. Local sources in Tabriz said that roads leading to the province have been blocked with police checkpoints. Amid social media calls for anti-regime protests in Tabriz, security forces are inspecting buses and interrogating match goers, local sources added. Pictures are being shared on social media of security forces kicking people out of buses and telling them to go home. They also said that military barracks have been set up there since Thursday night, and security forces were lined up all along the roads leading to the province, blocking people from going for the match. Meanwhile, protesters around the country are being arrested. According to the opposition, more than 3,000 people have been arrested, while the regime admitted to arresting only half that number.
Opposition from influential figures
Hesamodin Ashna, President Hassan al-Rouhani’s adviser, recently criticized the leader of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard for saying that the protests were over. “CNN and other media outlets largely covered the Revolutionary Guard leader’s statements, and this is not in the favor of Iran’s reputation, as it is known that the authority to speak on protests lies with the police and is announced through the interior ministry only, not the Revolutionary Guard which has more serious responsibilities.”Meanwhile, in their first official reaction to the uprising, the National Trust Party headed by Mehdi Karroubi who has been under house arrest for seven years, blamed the protests on the regime. “Those in power should know that violent confrontation with demonstrators will have more negative consequences and that problems must be resolved through constructive dialogue between the government and demonstrators. The problem will not be solved by imprisonment, house arrest and violence,” the party said in a statement. Many Iranian celebrities have also voiced their support of the uprising. Mohsen Makhmalbaf, a well-known Iranian film director said in a statement on Thursday, “The violence imposed by Khamenei on the protesting youth through his religious oppression and by both the reformists and the benevolent conservatives is apparent.”A number of other celebrities including famous singer Googoosh, Dariush Eghbali, Mahnaz Afshar, Taraneh Alidoosti and several others also voiced their support for the anti-regime demonstrations.

Iranian resistance issues list of demands urging UN to take action
Al Arabiya/January 06/2018/The Iranian Resistance urged the UN Security Council to defend the legitimate and inalienable right of the Iranian people to overthrow the religious fascism ruling Iran and to attain the freedom for which they have been demonstrating, in a statement issued Friday.
The Resistance also requested that the Security Council to strongly condemn the mullahs’ regime and hold it accountable for killing defenseless and unarmed demonstrators. The regime actions constitute a clear crime against humanity, and confronting them is the responsibility of the United Nations, the statement said. According to reliable reports obtained by the Iranian Resistance, at least 50 protesters have been shot and killed by the Revolutionary Guards during the first eight days of the uprising, and more than 3,000 have been arrested. Children as young as 12 or 13 years old are among those killed. The actual number of martyrs and detained is much more; a reality that the Iranian regime is trying hard to hide. The clerical regime has blocked social networks in Iran since the first days of the uprising, cutting off the internet completely in some areas and boosting severe restrictions on it in others. The IRGC commander Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari, Minister of Communications Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi, and many other officials in the clerical regime have officially acknowledged cutting off internet communications and boasted that they would continue it until the unrest ends.
In welcoming today’s meeting on Iran's uprising, the Iranian Resistance emphasizes the need for the following actions to be taken by the UN Security Council:
1.Recognizing the legitimate right of the people of Iran to overthrow the ruling religious fascism and establish their own freedom and sovereignty.
2.Strongly condemning and holding accountable the Iranian regime for the slaughter and mass arrests of defenseless and unarmed protesters.
3.Sanctioning the regime for systematic violations of human rights, including the 1988 massacre and the killings during the current uprising.
4.Condemning restrictions on the Internet and social networks, and ensuring the public’s free access to information.
5.Enforcing binding decisions for the release of thousands of arrested demonstrators and for the establishment of a monitoring system; and warning the Iranian regime that more serious actions will be taken should present trends continue.

Iran tries to censor coverage of protests by media based abroad
Al Arabiya/January 06/2018/In the background on the continuing protests across Iran, the Persian-language media based outside the country, have become the major source of alternative news and information for Iranians. Now, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has condemned the Iranian government’s attempt to silence coverage of the current wave of protests by Persian-language media overseas. Domestic media outlets which are under strict government control have ignored the anti-government protests in more than 100 cities throughout the country during the past eight days, in which scoes of people have been killed and around 17,000 have been reportedly arrested, including several citizen-journalists.
Letter to OFCOM
Yesterday, the Iranian embassy in London wrote to the United Kingdom’s Office of Communications (OFCOM), which regulates the broadcast media, asking it to censor Persian-language media based in the UK on the grounds that their coverage of the protests had been inciting people to “armed revolt.”The letter’s two main targets are Manoto, a privately-owned TV channel based in London, and BBC Persian, the state-owned BBC’s Persian-language TV channel, which many Iranian activists and intellectuals nonetheless criticize for not distancing itself sufficiently from the Iranian government line. “After disrupting Internet access and blocking social networks, the Islamic Republic of Iran is using the need to combat calls for violence and support for terrorism as a pretext for silencing the last sources of freely and independently reported news and information used by many Iranians,” said Reza Moini, the head of RSF’s Iran/Afghanistan desk. RSF has previously criticized the attempts by the Iranian judicial system and intelligence services to influence the Persian-language sections of international media outlets by putting pressure on Iranian journalists based abroad and on their families still in Iran. Iran is ranked 165th out of 180 countries in RSF's 2017 World Press Freedom Index.

Armed groups clash at key Libya border post
AFPS/January 06/2018/Armed groups clashed Friday in western Libya, forcing the closure of a key border crossing with Tunisia, an official and a military commander said. The clashes took place near the Ras Jedir border post, the main crossing between western Libya and southeastern Tunisia. The crossing has been controlled by militias from the western port city of Zuwara since the fall of longtime dictator Moamer Kadhafi in 2011 in a NATO-backed revolt. On Friday, a force set up by the country's United Nations-backed unity government to stabilize Libya's west attacked in a bid to seize the crossing, said an official from Zuwara who asked to remain anonymous. The unity government force's commander Osama Jouili, who served as Libya's defense minister after Kadhafi's fall, confirmed the offensive had taken place Friday. Speaking to Libya's 218TV, he argued his forces had a mandate from the unity government to secure the region, but did not specify whether the operation was coordinated with authorities in Tripoli or not. The border post was closed temporarily to "ensure the safety of travellers", he said. Libya has been wracked by violence since Kadhafi was toppled and killed in 2011. The unity government has struggled to impose its rule in a country where hundreds of militias hold sway. Successive transitional authorities have failed to create regular police and army forces capable of restoring order in Libya. The western border region is highly dependent on cross-border trade, both legal and illegal. The Zuwara forces who controlled the border post also nominally support the unity government. They have been accused of involvement in smuggling a vast network smuggling contraband and fuel to Tunisia and Malta.

Russia Says U.S. 'Interfering' in Iran over Demos
Agence France Presse/Naharnet/January 05/18/Russia accused the United States on Friday of interfering in Iranian affairs as the U.N. Security Council prepared to hold a meeting at Washington's request on deadly protests in Iran. "The United States continues to interfere both openly and covertly in the internal affairs of other countries. They do so shamelessly," Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov was quoted as saying by Interfax news agency. "This is how we view the American initiative to convene the U.N. Security Council over a situation that is of purely national concern in Iran." The council was due to hold a session at 2000 GMT Friday at Washington's request to discuss the wave of Iranian protests. U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley warned ahead of the meeting that the demonstrations could escalate into full-blown conflict, drawing a comparison with Syria. Ryabkov accused Washington of "directly attacking the sovereignty of other states under the pretext of being concerned about democracy and human rights." A total of 21 people have died and hundreds have been arrested since December 28 as protests over economic woes turned against the Iranian regime as a whole, with attacks on government buildings and police stations. In response, big pro-regime rallies have broken out. They were rumbling on for a third day on Friday. U.S. President Donald Trump has pledged to help Iranians "take back" their government. His administration has also cast doubt on the landmark 2015 deal on Iran's nuclear activities. "If the United States are seeking reasons which have nothing to do with this accord in order to raise pressure on Iran, which is what they seem to be doing, then that is an unacceptable method and unworthy of a great power," Ryabkov was quoted as saying by Russian news agency RIA Novosti.

Bombshell-Filled Book Claims Trump Team Worried about His Fitness for Office

Agence France Presse/Naharnet/January 05/18/The release of a bombshell-filled book about Donald Trump's first year in the White House on Friday sparked fresh debate about the president's fitness for office, with the author claiming his closest aides "say he is like a child.""Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House" was rushed into bookstores and onto e-book platforms four days ahead of schedule due to what its publisher called "unprecedented demand" -- and after Trump's bid to block it failed. The book -- which has sent shockwaves across Washington -- quickly sold out in shops in the US capital, with some even lining up at midnight to get their hands on it. Trump has decried the instant best-seller as "phony" and "full of lies." Journalist Michael Wolff, no stranger to controversy, quotes several key Trump aides expressing serious doubt about his ability to lead the world's largest economy -- and despite fiery criticism from the Republican, he stood his ground. "Let me put a marker in the sand here. One hundred percent of the people around him" question Trump's fitness for office, Wolff said in an interview with NBC's "Today" show. "They all say he is like a child. And what they mean by that is he has a need for immediate gratification. It's all about him."The 71-year-old Republican president, who is approaching the first anniversary of his inauguration, has responded with fury to the claims in Wolff's book. "I authorized Zero access to White House (actually turned him down many times) for author of phony book! I never spoke to him for book. Full of lies, misrepresentations and sources that don't exist," Trump tweeted Thursday. But Wolff countered in Friday's interview: "I absolutely spoke to the president. Whether he realized it was an interview or not. I don't know, but it certainly was not off the record." The book -- which paints Trump as far out of his depth -- includes extensive quotes from Steve Bannon, his former chief strategist, and his publication sparked a very public break between the former allies. Bannon is quoted accusing Trump's eldest son Don Jr of "treasonous" contacts with a Kremlin-connected lawyer, and saying the president's daughter Ivanka, who imagines running for president one day, is "dumb as a brick."
Criticism from aides
But it is Trump himself who is cast in the most unfavorable light by a series of his top aides. The book claims that for "Steve Mnuchin and Reince Priebus, the president was an 'idiot.' For Gary Cohn, he was 'dumb as shit.' For H.R. McMaster, he was a 'dope.' The list went on." At least a dozen members of the U.S. Congress, most of them Democrats, were briefed by a Yale University professor of psychiatry on President Donald Trump's mental health, U.S. media reported Thursday. The briefing by Dr. Bandy Lee, the editor of "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President," took place in early December.
"Lawmakers were saying they have been very concerned about this, the president's dangerousness, the dangers that his mental instability poses on the nation," Lee told CNN. The White House issued a scorched-earth dismissal of "Fire and Fury", its author and his sources, with press secretary Sarah Sanders, calling the book "complete fantasy." Behind the scenes, though, Trump has been enraged by the betrayal by Bannon -- a man who engineered the New York real estate mogul's link to the nationalist far right and helped create a pro-Trump media ecosystem. Sanders suggested that Bannon's employer, Breitbart News, should consider firing him. He wasn't fired, but Bannon's main financial backer is formally cutting ties with him, The Washington Post reported. "I support President Trump and the platform upon which he was elected," the newspaper quoted billionaire conservative donor Rebekah Mercer as saying. Bannon, who left the White House in August, is also quoted in the book as saying that the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller into Russian interference in the 2016 election will focus on money laundering. The investigation by Mueller, a former FBI director, is looking into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to help get him elected -- a charge the president has repeatedly and vehemently denied.
Disbelief over victory
Wolff said his account was drawn from interviews with those in close contact with Trump and all described him in the same terms. "They say he's a moron, idiot," Wolff told NBC. "Actually, there's a competition to sort of get to the bottom line here of who this man is. Let's remember, this man does not read. Does not listen. So he's like a pinball. Just shooting off the sides." And the author confidently defended himself against attacks on his credibility, which have included threats from Trump's lawyers of a libel suit. "My credibility is being questioned by a man who has less credibility than, perhaps, anyone who has ever walked on earth at this point," Wolff said. "I spoke to people who spoke to the president on a daily, sometimes minute-by-minute basis," he added, saying he had notes and recordings of the interviews. "I am certainly absolutely in every way comfortable with everything I've reported in this book."

Saudi Intercepts Ballistic Missile near Yemen Border
Agence France Presse/Naharnet/January 05/18/Saudi Arabia on Friday intercepted a ballistic missile fired from Yemen into the kingdom's south, as Riyadh and its allies said the attack "proved" Iran's support for Yemen's Huthi rebels. The Riyadh-led military coalition fighting the rebels in Yemen in a statement said Saudi air defenses intercepted the missile at around 0500 GMT, but reported no casualties. The Huthis, who are locked in war with Yemen's Saudi-backed government, earlier said they had fired a missile at Saudi Arabia's southwestern province of Najran in a statement tweeted by their Al-Masirah television channel. Sunni-ruled Saudi Arabia has repeatedly accused its regional rival Iran of arming the Shiite Huthis, but Tehran denies the allegations. On Friday, coalition spokesman Turki al-Maliki said the foiled missile attack served as further proof that Iran armed the rebels. "This hostile act by the Iran-backed Huthis proves the Iranian regime remains implicated in supporting the armed Huthis," Maliki was quoted by Saudi state news agency SPA as saying. Maliki said the attack "deliberately targeted densely populated civilian areas" and had caused minor damage to the property of a Saudi citizen. The United States, a longtime ally of Saudi Arabia, has said Iran manufactured a missile fired by the Huthis towards Riyadh's international airport in November. In December, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley presented what she called "undeniable" evidence that the missile was Iranian-made. Tehran rejected the evidence as "fabricated."A confidential report to the U.N. Security Council the same month said U.N. officials had examined debris from missiles fired at Saudi Arabia that pointed to a "common origin" but could not conclude whether they came from an Iranian supplier. The Huthis have increased their rocket attacks on the kingdom since November. The Saudi-led coalition joined the Yemeni government in its fight against the Huthis in March 2015, after the rebels seized control of the capital Sanaa.  Despite the coalition's superior firepower, the rebels still control the capital and much of the north of the country. More than 8,750 people have been killed since the coalition's intervention in Yemen, according to the World Health Organization. The country is also now facing what the United Nations has described as the world's worst humanitarian crisis.

France Seeks Greater Role for West in Syrian Crisis

Agence France Presse/Naharnet/January 05/18/French President Emmanuel Macron has called for Western nations to play a greater role in ending the war in Syria, saying the crisis could not be resolved by just "a few" foreign powers. His comments came as Russia, Turkey and Iran are hoping to hold a "Congress of National Dialogue" on Syria in the Black Sea resort of Sochi this month, part of an effort that critics say is sidelining U.N.-backed talks in Geneva. Macron said the international community should "not give ground to certain powers which think that just a few, recognizing one part of the opposition from the outside, will be able to find a stable and lasting solution for the situation in Syria," he said. "In this context, the United Nations, regional powers, Europe and the United States have a great responsibility, and I will fully commit... to succeeding in building the peace in Syria," he told the diplomatic corps in Paris. Macron is due to meet Friday with Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who backs the rebels fighting Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, while Moscow and Teheran have thrown their support behind Damascus. The French leader also said that peace in Syria and neighboring Iraq is urgently required in order to avoid any resurgence in jihadist attacks once the Islamic State was defeated "militarily." France will focus its efforts on ensuring free and secure elections in Iraq this spring, and appeared to target Iran by calling for "vigilance" over "any destabilization linked to foreign powers," said Macron.
He added that France would pursue talks with Iran aimed at a "framework accord" on its influence in the Middle East, in order to safeguard its landmark nuclear deal with foreign powers, which U.S. President Donald Trump has threatened to drop. Referring to the street protests that have rocked Iran in recent days, Macron said "We will continue to watch that these rights (freedom of thought and demonstrations) be fully respected."But in a rebuke of Trump's Twitter posts calling for regime change, Macron insisted that any decision on the country's future must come from "the Iranians themselves."

Erdogan accuses US, Israel of 'meddling' in Iran, Pakistan

Fri 05 Jan 2018/NNA - Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused the United States and Israel on Friday of meddling in Iran after Turkey's neighbour was gripped by several days of deadly unrest. A total of 21 people died and hundreds were arrested in the week-long protests which were the biggest challenge to the Islamic regime since the 2009 mass demonstrations. "We cannot accept that some countries -- foremost the US, Israel -- to interfere in the internal affairs of Iran and Pakistan," Erdogan told reporters before heading on a trip to France. "It is turning the people against each other in these countries. It's a shame that we have seen this done in many nations... We saw this in Iraq." Erdogan did not expand on the nature of the alleged meddling in Pakistan but on Thursday the US announced a freeze in deliveries of military equipment and security funding until Pakistan cracks down on the militants. The Turkish president then referred to problems in "Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Libya and Tunisia" and in African countries including Sudan and Chad. He claimed a "game was being played" in certain countries, which he noted were all Muslim-majority nations.
"They are taking steps towards making the plentiful underground riches in all these countries their own resources," he said. "Sorry, these realities should be known by our people and all people," he said. Erdogan and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani spoke on Wednesday in a call in which the Turkish leader gave his support for the return of "peace and stability" to Iran. Erdogan on Friday praised Rouhani's statements that the street protests were the people's "democratic right", saying this had helped normalise the situation. Turkey's conservative media had previously accused the US and Israel of stoking the Iran protests as part of a purported plot to transform the Middle East. Erdogan has on occasion criticised Iran's "Persian imperialism" in the Middle East amid bouts of tension in the Turkey-Iran relationship. But relations between Ankara and Tehran have warmed since the two countries worked closely with Russia in the last few months to bring peace to Syria. -- AFP

Latest LCCC Bulletin analysis & editorials from miscellaneous sources published on January 05-06/18
Provinces Lead the Center in Iran's Protests
Brenda Shaffer/The Washington Institute/January 05/2018
http://eliasbejjaninews.com/?p=61624
As ethnic minorities and poverty-stricken provincial communities assume a greater role in nationwide unrest, the regime will likely try to pit them against each other.
The recent antiregime protests in Iran emerged in the country's peripheral provinces, which is also where the majority of reported deaths have taken place. The momentum of the demonstrations remains strongest in the border provinces rather than Tehran, especially in the northwest and southwest. The outbreak of protests in widespread locations—including rural areas and outside major cities—suggests that the regime will be much more challenged by this movement than the 2009 Green Revolution, which was centered in Tehran and had a clearly identified leadership that could be directly subdued.
Moreover, the current protests include an ethnic element that was absent from the 2009 uprising and could create extra problems for the regime. Although this factor is but one of many grievances galvanizing the demonstrators, the intensity of protests in the border provinces indicate that it might cause serious ethnic unrest. Minority grievances are amplifying economic grievances, which are worse in the provinces than in the Persian heartland. In social media footage reportedly drawn from many demonstrations, participants are using minority languages such as Kurdish and Azerbaijani to voice slogans of ethnic pride. Accordingly, foreign observers should pay more attention to the ethnic factor as they attempt to project future developments in Iran and gauge the regime's stability.
PROVINCIAL STRUCTURE AND ETHNIC COMPOSITION
Iran is composed of thirty-one provinces (ostan), each with a governor appointed by the central government. In many cases these officials are not natives of the regions they oversee and do not speak the local language. A third of the provinces border at least one foreign country, and most of their residents share ethnic and often family ties with these states. In some provinces, direct trade with neighboring countries competes with or even surpasses trade with Iran's center.
The majority population of most border provinces is non-Persian, while Iran's heartland is primarily Persian (though about half the population of Tehran itself consists of minorities). In all, ethnic minorities comprise more than half of the country's total population of 82 million, according to mainstream academic assessments. The largest group is Azerbaijanis (approximately 24 million), followed by Kurds (8 million), Lurs (3 million), Arabs (3 million), Turkmens (3 million), and Baluch (3 million).
ETHNIC AND PROVINCIAL GRIEVANCES
Ethnic identity can take on a wide range of roles in Iran. Many minority citizens identify completely as Iranian, and their ethnic identity has little political significance. In fact, some of the regime's most important pillars hail from minority communities, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei himself, who is Azerbaijani. For many others, however, ethnic identity is primary, and their feelings of separation may be fueled by a host of regime policies that affect their communities at home and abroad, and by state media outlets that regularly mock minorities.
Regarding the current unrest, several signs indicate that ethnicity has become an important driver. For one, the protests first emerged in the city of Mashhad, which has a large Turkmen population and is located two hours' drive from the border with Turkmenistan. From there, the protests spread to many small towns in the north and southwest, mostly in Kurdish and Arab areas. Only on the third day did significant protests begin in Tehran, and many demonstrations in the heartland erupted in communities populated by minorities (e.g., the Azerbaijani-dominated town of Karaj outside the capital).
In addition, dozens of social media posts have shown protestors in certain provinces blaring ethno-nationalist demands and music while chanting slogans in minority languages such as Azerbaijani, Kurdish, and Arabic. A number of foreign organizations that advocate for the rights of ethnic minorities have issued statements in support of the protests, but it is not clear how representative they are of people on the ground. Whatever the case, ethnic demands seem to be a powerful mobilizer for wide segments of the population who may not be politically active.
The provinces also face more economic hardship than the heartland. Income levels and social services in the periphery are lower, unemployment rates are higher, and many residents suffer from extensive health and livelihood challenges emanating from ecological damage. Whether justified or not, provincial communities often blame this damage on central government policies.
Furthermore, the regime does not allow ethnic minorities to use their native languages in official settings such as courts and schools, in violation of constitutional protections. Perhaps as a result of this, many minority citizens in large cities report that Persian is their stronger functional language.
The current protests are not the first sign of opposition in the border provinces. Ethnic minority operatives have carried out a number of domestic terrorist operations in recent months, including the Kurdish attacks on the parliament building and Khomeini Mausoleum in Tehran last June, as well as frequent attacks against border guards in the northwest.
Meanwhile, the number of judicial executions carried out in Kurdish and Baluch areas is far above the average seen in Iran's center. While the regime claims that these executions are for crimes such as drug smuggling, their disproportionate frequency suggests that authorities may be using them to quash opposition activity. In addition, the head of a major diaspora organization that advocates for the rights of Arabs in Iran was assassinated last November as he was leaving his home in the Netherlands. Tehran has not claimed responsibility, and there is no hard evidence of its involvement, but no other likely suspects exist.
Iran's foreign policy toward its neighbors also has domestic implications. For example, the regime's efforts to punish the Kurdish independence movement in Iraq last fall created indignation among Iranian Kurds. In addition, larger numbers of Iranian Azerbaijanis have taken chartered tourism trips to the neighboring Republic of Azerbaijan over the past year, and some may have been influenced by the experience of enjoying their native language and culture free of the restrictions imposed in Iran.
HOW WILL THE REGIME RESPOND?
The regime's usual playbook for dealing with ethnic and provincial opposition is to blame foreigners for its emergence while attempting to pit domestic groups against each other. Khamenei has already blamed the current protests on foreign enemies. In reality, however, the unrest in Iran's provinces is clearly homegrown.
Fomenting conflict between domestic communities has worked very well for the regime in the past, so Tehran may now try to exacerbate Kurdish-Azerbaijani tensions—especially in West Azerbaijan province, where these two groups cohabitate and have grievances against each other. The regime can also appeal to Iranian nationalist sentiments among the economic and political elite. This includes opposition elites—when faced with potential ethnic conflict in the past, many such figures have been unwilling to risk their control over the provinces or the dominance of the Persian language for the sake of addressing minority issues or achieving democratic reform.
As for the prospect of international action, the West has often supported peoples' right to protest peacefully in various countries—the challenge is how to make such support effective. On January 2, U.S. ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley made clear that Washington is pushing the Security Council to discuss potential responses to the Iran situation. Another way to support the people is through international broadcasting that gives them reliable information about what is happening in their country, counterbalancing the censorship and misinformation seen in regime news outlets. Thus far, Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty have not been very effective on that front, especially in broadcasting aimed at Iran in languages other than Persian. Given the seemingly strong ethnic drivers in the latest unrest, both outlets should consider boosting their programming in minority languages.
**Prof. Brenda Shaffer is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Global Energy Center, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University's Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies, and author of the book Borders and Brethren: Iran and the Challenge of Azerbaijani Identity (MIT Press, 2002).

Iran's Coercive Apparatus: Capacity and Desire
آلة القمع الإيرانية: رغبات وإمكانيات

http://eliasbejjaninews.com/?p=61627
Saeid Golkar/The Washinton Institute/January 05/2018
A closer look at the structure and tactics of the many-headed internal security network that the Islamic Republic has deployed to crack down on protestors nationwide.
The suppression of Iran's latest uprising has followed a familiar pattern, intensifying immediately after protests expanded in multiple cities and towns. This cycle of revolt and suppression has been repeated serval times under the ayatollahs, with the regime's crackdowns succeeding each time. The fate of the current protests will correlate directly with the capacity and desire of Iran's coercive apparatus; understanding the structure and inner workings of this apparatus is therefore essential.
NATIONAL AND LOCAL HIERARCHY
The main security, military, and judicial branches of Iran's coercive apparatus are the police (Nirou-ye Entezami-ye Jomhouri-ye Eslami-ye Iran, or NAJA), the Basij, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The police are under the control of the Interior Ministry, which the constitution has placed under the president's purview. Yet the head of the NAJA is appointed by the Supreme Leader and serves as commander-in-chief of Iran's armed forces, effectively limiting the interior minister's authority to logistical, equipment, and support issues.
The NAJA's vertical structure begins with the national police commandership. Beneath that, each province has a single command headquarters that controls all police stations. Each city in turn has one disciplinary district (nahieh-e entezami) that manages local police stations, usually called kalantari in urban areas and pasgah-e entezami in rural areas, as other scholars have described. Despite certain local differences, a typical Iranian police station will have a deputy of prevention, a deputy of intelligence, a deputy of inspection, a deputy of operation, and a judiciary police official, among other personnel.
Currently, police personnel consist of cadres (officers) and conscripts (i.e., people who spend two years of their mandatory military service in the NAJA). According to former NAJA commander Gen. Ahmadi Moqaddam, 45 percent of them are conscripts. Although no official statistics on force size are available, various estimates place the total number of police between 100,000 and 200,000. In addition, more than 100,000 people work in NAJA-affiliated organizations such as the Police Electronic Services Office (aka "police +10"). These include 41,000 employees of protection and surveillance companies that provide security for more than 4,600 neighborhoods.
As for the Basij, it has become the largest civil militia organization in the world, with around five million members spread among twenty-four branches and divided into four main rankings: regular, active, cadre, and special. They form a cluster network consisting of Basij bases, districts, and regions. Although the bases are the lowest organizational level, their high visibility (50,000 locations throughout Iran) makes them the Basij's true grassroots backbone. Each Basij resistance district controls ten to fifteen bases and is home to local security and military forces. These districts are in turn controlled by IRGC regional branches. Depending on size, some cities have more than one IRGC region (e.g., Tehran).
To be sure, not all Basij members are involved in political suppression. Yet the organization has several security and military units composed of active or volunteer members, including the Imam Ali Security Battalions. These personnel undergo training in special tactics such as the use of bespoke weapons and motorcycles to suppress unrest. Some active Basij members are organized into rapid-reaction battalions called the Beit al-Muqaddas, with responsibility for defending vital installations in their neighborhoods.
The IRGC itself is a somewhat decentralized system, with ten regional headquarters that each command a handful of provincial corps (sepah-e astani). They were restructured in this manner years ago so that they could operate autonomously, defending the regime against both high-intensity warfare and low-intensity internal challenges such as insurgency. All members of the IRGC Ground Forces and Basij report to their local IRGC provincial corps. The missions for each corps include defending their provincial boundaries and suppressing unrest, which is accomplished by a security brigade (yegan-e amniat) consisting of IRGC Ground Forces and Basij units.
Indeed, the Ground Forces have mainly been geared toward quelling internal disorder since the early 2000s, leaving the regular army to defend Iran's external borders. Some Ground Force units are similar to conventional army units, while others are trained for covert missions and asymmetric warfare, but most of them consist of light infantry trained and equipped for internal security tasks.
THE IRANIAN "POLICE STATE"
Iran has more than seventeen different security organizations, with three main bodies involved in internal intelligence: the Ministry of Intelligence, the IRGC Intelligence Organization (IRGC-IO), and the Intelligence and Public Security Police (PAVA), a branch of the NAJA. All of them are directly or indirectly overseen by the Supreme Leader. Despite ongoing power conflicts between these bodies, they typically work hand-in-hand in to protect the regime.
These organizations have penetrated Iranian society through two main networks, the Herasat and IRGC-IO. The Intelligence Ministry has established Herasat branches in every civilian organization and university in the country, tasking them with identifying potential security threats. Herasat officials reportedly surveil employees (e.g., by monitoring their communications), act as informants, and influence hiring and firing practices.
The IRGC-IO also has its own broad social network, the Basij intelligence staff (stead-e khaberi-e Basij), whose members are present throughout Iran's estimated 4,000 Basij districts. Much like the Herasat, Basij intelligence officers act as the regime's eyes and ears by monitoring citizen activities and keeping files on local activists.
PAVA is responsible for gathering intelligence in neighborhoods and penetrating Iran's guilds, arresting any workers who are deemed too subversive. To do so, it runs a network of local informers (mokhber mahali) to collect news and rumors. PAVA has also been tasked with conducting religious activities and ferreting out homes used for Christian worship.
The judiciary is another key part of Iran's coercive apparatus. In addition to general courts, the regime has two main extraconstitutional courts, the Special Court of the Clergy (responsible for intimidating and silencing dissident clerics) and the Islamic Revolutionary Courts (which try offenses such as propagating dissent against the regime). The latter courts have long been used to suppress uprisings, including the 1992 riots in Mashhad and Shiraz (where some demonstrators were sentenced to death in summary trials) and the 2009 Green Movement (where activists were sentenced to long-term imprisonment).
DIFFERENT TACTICS FOR EACH SECURITY CONDITION
Although these coercive bodies work together to guarantee the regime's survival, their missions differ depending on Iran's prevailing security condition, which is assigned one of four categories at any given time: white, gray, yellow, and red. Condition white is normal public order. Condition gray goes into effect when unorganized opposition elements peacefully undermine public order, with no sign of destructive operations. In that case, the police are mainly responsible for controlling the situation and maintaining order. Basij offices help the police quash any strikes, while Herasat personnel help gather intelligence and identify protestors. For example, in 2005-2006, the regime broke a bus drivers strike by using Basij members from other state institutions to transport passengers and maintain the traffic flow. If such strikes ever became more heated, the NAJA's Counterterrorism Special Force (Nirou-ye Vizhe-ye Pad-e Vesht, or NOPO) would be primarily responsible for anti-riot actions.
If the police cannot control a given situation and the crisis intensifies, the regime invokes condition yellow, in which an organized opposition has begun more violent forms of protest such as disrupting order, blocking public spaces, and attacking public buildings. In response, the Basij are required to work more closely with the police by intensifying their intelligence activities and increasing their patrols and checkpoint stops. Plainclothes Basij officers are responsible for penetrating demonstrations, identifying activists, and misleading protestors. Other Basij members deploy near police personnel, recording videos and occasionally attacking people. In some cases, they use motorcycles to take control of the streets, contain unrest, and intimidate protesters, using force as needed to scatter people.
Tellingly, the NAJA requested help from some Basij districts after the latest protests expanded. Although the police were not completely ready for crowd control operations in 2009, they are more prepared today, with some eyewitnesses noting their increased efficiency. This is especially true in large cities, where they have practiced anti-riot missions for years. In smaller towns, however, inexperienced or minimally trained personnel are often involved in such missions, resulting in greater casualties due to fear and unprofessionalism.
Finally, if the above measures fail to reestablish control, the security level increases to condition red, defined as a crisis in which revolts have expanded throughout the country and the opposition is using weapons. In this case, the IRGC takes full control of internal operations, and all other forces must work with the Guards to restore control. During the current protests, IRGC forces have reportedly been deployed in three provinces to smash demonstrations.
EXPLOITING CLASS RESENTMENT
Members of Iran's coercive apparatus have long been noted for their zeal in suppressing dissidents. In recruiting personnel for the NAJA and similar organs, the regime has historically drawn from the Basij, who mostly hail from traditional lower- and lower-middle-class families and tend to be less educated. Since 2000, all IRGC members have been recruited from established Basij and IRGC families, and the police are trending in the same direction. According to the NAJA chief, more than 80 percent of new police personnel hired in 2007 were selected from the Basij, and in 2011 he pledged to increase that figure to 100 percent. The security apparatus, including the Intelligence Ministry and IRGC-IO, mainly recruit from seminary schools, though they too draw from the Basij at times (and many seminary students are Basij members).
In light of this background, many police and Basij personnel had no qualms about brutally suppressing the Green Movement, acting on the hatred and anger they felt toward opposition activists whom they perceived as members of the upper and upper-middle class. It is unclear how much these sentiments are in play during the current unrest, since analysts indicate that many protestors in outlying provinces hail from the lower classes themselves, unlike in 2009. Yet the regime has made sure to complement the homogeneous socioeconomic background of its security personnel with massive levels of indoctrination in order to ensure their loyalty, reaffirm their conservative beliefs, and make them more inclined to support the clerical leadership over any opposition movement, regardless of class.
In the end, the latest protests are unlikely to succeed as long as Iran's security organs retain the capacity and desire for suppression. Yet both elements could be undermined by several variables, including internal division among regime elites, extended protests, and international pressure over human rights violations.
**Saeid Golkar is a visiting assistant professor of political science at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and a nonresident senior fellow on Iran policy at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.


Sexual Harassment East and West
Denis MacEoin/Gatestone Institute/January 05/2018
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/11673/sexual-harassment-east-west
"I say that when a girl walks about like that, it is a patriotic duty to sexually harass her and a national duty to rape her." — Nabih Wahsh, Islamist lawyer, on Egypt's al-Assema TV, October 19, 2017.
The Iranian Revolution of 1979 sparked off increasingly revolutionary movements across the Islamic world, and in the process saw women in many countries denied the freedoms they had started to acquire under earlier regimes. The veil returned widely, notably in Turkey, following the growing power of authoritarian and fundamentalist President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with women's rights being increasingly denied.
We urgently need to drop our unwillingness to contrast Western and Islamic values -- whether regarding violence, treatment of religious minorities, anti-Semitism, or treatment of women. There are also growing numbers of Muslims, as we are seeing today in Iran, who find wider Islamic attitudes abhorrent and work hard, mostly against the odds, to bring their faith closer to modern values.
For a time, one could not open a newspaper or visit an online news site without finding yet another scandal about sexual harassment. Lawyers are presumably going to have a field day for years to come. In the UK, a further wave of accusations has shaken an already shaky parliament and the Government, whose Cabinet is increasingly in disarray. In the US Congress, Hollywood and elsewhere, similar claims are still being made, with #MeToo stories being shared by women, while there is an unknown number of accusations in US statehouses.
Sex scandals in the West are far from new.[1] The irony is that this brings us face to face with attitudes to the same problem in the Islamic world.
For many years in the West, it was common practice for sexual harassment and rape among celebrities and public figures to be hushed up. To secure silence, abusers often used bribes or threats. Young women feared the loss of their careers or reputations; in many instances, the police would reject claims of abuse. This happened more than once in the UK, when young victims of "Asian" grooming gangs were not believed by social workers and police; in Europe authorities tried -- and still try (see here, here and here) -- to cover up harassment and rape committed by Muslim migrants. There will be a lot of work to do to protect women and children from the excesses of so many men.
Just watch and marvel at this short clip from a debate on Egypt's al-Assema TV, aired on October 19, 2017, or read an English transcript. The Director-General of al-Assema is Brigadier-General Muhammad Samir, a former spokesman for the Egyptian armed forces. His appointment has been criticized on the grounds that it is "a miserable attempt by the military regime authorities to nationalize the media, unify its message, and block any opposing voices against the government". In that sense, al-Assema represents a semi-official voice.
The debate on Egypt's al-Assema TV included a lawyer, Nabih [el] Wahsh, an Islamist who has filed countless hesba [2] cases against intellectuals, artists, religious leaders and government ministers for acts he deems immoral or blasphemous. With Wahsh on air were three women: Shadia Thabet, a member of the Egyptian parliament, Abeer Soleiman, a women's rights activist, and Ashgaan Nabil, a life coach.
Wahsh began by stressing that, regardless of Egypt being a civil state, it had to conform to Islamic religious rules and norms. On that basis, he engages in an argument which leads him to the following confrontation with Soleiman, whom he effectively silences by bullying her:
Nabih Wahsh: "Are you happy when you see a girl walking down the street with half of her behind showing?"
Abeer Suleiman: "Do you think that we don't care about our girls?"
Nabih Wahsh: "I say that when a girl walks about like that, it is a patriotic duty to sexually harass her and a national duty to rape her."
Abeer Suleiman: "No, no, no, no! I totally oppose this kind of talk. This is sexual harassment live on air..."
Nabih Wahsh: "It is a national duty to rape such a girl! What she allows herself to do constitutes depravity."
Egyptian lawyer Nabih Wahsh recently advocated on television for sexual harassment and rape in retaliation for the temptation caused by uncovered women. (Image source: MEMRI)
This open espousal by a lawyer of sexual harassment and rape in retaliation for the temptation caused by uncovered women was backed by a heavily-covered member of parliament and followed by a "life coach" urging ten-year prison terms for homosexuals -- all during a television broadcast -- would, of course, finish their careers anywhere in the Western world within minutes. Men behave badly in Europe and the United States, and some very badly indeed; but to boast publicly about wishing to do so would be unthinkable.[3]
In the West, however, women have been fighting back for generations. The rise of sane feminism (as distinct from its shrill and politically-correct cousin)[4] has elevated the status of women in all the democracies and given courage to the many women who now find themselves empowered to call out powerful men who have sexually abused, groped and raped them.
There are feminists in the Islamic world. Countless books have been written about them and the growth of feminism in countries from Egypt and Iran to Indonesia. During the twentieth century, progress in establishing women's rights was made in several places: the veil was abandoned, more women moved into professional life and even into politics -- notably, the assassinated Benazir Bhutto, the first Muslim woman democratically elected (twice) as Prime Minister of Pakistan.
Real advances, nevertheless, have been slow. Even as things were starting to improve for women, religious minorities, and others in some countries, such as Turkey, the Salafi style of fundamentalist Islam, based on a demand to return to the practices of the Islamic prophet Muhammad and the first three generations of his followers (salaf means "predecessors"), was already underway from the early years of the twentieth century, notably through the work of the Egyptian writer Rashid Rida. For Rida, and later for Salafis down to the Islamic State enterprise, reform meant turning away from the Western models that had inspired new legislation, and back to the earliest days of Islam as embodied in the Qur'an, the ahadith (sayings and acts of the prophet), and the biographies of Muhammad. In 1928, another Egyptian, the schoolteacher Hasan al-Banna, established the Muslim Brotherhood, the leading revivalist movement in Islam since the 1920s, which remains to this day a major international force for reviving fundamentalist Islam.
Ironically, one prominent individual to have been caught up in the current wave of harassment revelations is Tariq Ramadan, Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford University. Ramadan's grandfather was none other than Hasan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. Masquerading as the respectable voice of modern Islamic thought and practice, Ramadan has been exposed by several writers as a front for the Brotherhood and its anti-Western values. French journalist Caroline Fourest published an exposé, Brother Tariq: The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan, in which she shows how he says one thing to his Western audience and quite another to Muslims in France and abroad.
The American author Paul Berman wrote clearly of this in a long article about Tariq Ramadan in New Republic:
Ramadan's harsher critics would argue that in speaking... the way he did on these abstract and historical questions, not to mention on his grandfather's ideals, he was cagily deploying a "double discourse" — a language intended to deceive Western liberals about the grain of his own thought. An accusation of "double discourse" has dogged Ramadan for many years in France. It is a chief complaint against him, and a big source of anxiety among his critics. Fourest, in Brother Tariq, documents what appears to be rather a lot of "double discourse," instances in which Ramadan appears to have said one thing to the general public and something else to his Muslim audiences.
In his many books and lectures, Ramadan has promoted the worldview of the hardline Brotherhood while posing as a Western-style philosopher in tune with modern liberal values. That is the basis for his duplicity: the Islam he promulgates in carefully phrased and disingenuous terms has nothing in common with Western values at all. It is this ability to pull the wool over the eyes of thinkers and politicians, a deception that has given him a professorship at Oxford University, that makes him a truly dangerous individual.
In addition to Caroline Fourest's series of articles in the French journal Marianne, detailing Ramadan's use of sexual harassment, rape, and general misogynist practices, he has also been accused by the American academic Phyllis Chesler "of having violently raped, battered, humiliated, confined, and death threatened them [his victims] if they talked".
In response to these claims, Oxford University acted promptly, placing him on leave while his predations are investigated and, as seems likely, subjected to criminal charges. Not surprisingly, as the journalist Abigail Esman has pointed out:
Tariq Ramadan's many fans – more than 600,000 people follow him on Twitter and he has more than 2 million Facebook followers – have had plenty to say. He is innocent, they are certain. In their comments on both social media sites, they assure him that Allah will protect him. The women are liars, or part of a conspiracy: against Muslims, against the Muslim leader himself, against Islam – all the insidious, but entirely predictable, work of the world's Jews.
The Iranian Revolution of 1979 sparked off increasingly more revolutionary movements across the Islamic world, and in the process saw women in many countries, across the Islamic world, denied the freedoms they had started to acquire under earlier regimes. The veil returned widely, notably in Turkey, following the growing power of authoritarian and fundamentalist President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with women's rights being increasingly denied. Erdogan recently condemned Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad ibn Salman's vow to engender a "moderate Islam," calling it a fake Islam supposedly imposed by the West.
Men in Western democracies certainly have much to be ashamed of; the women who call out predators are right to do so. If identifying powerful figures who manipulate vulnerable women will help create a more level playing field for both sexes in countries that have worked hard to put all citizens on a basis of equality, it cannot but be a boon for democracy. Whatever we have done wrong, we have also done much to rectify distortions in our societies. The very fact that in the West, such men are considered shameful and contrary to our better values is itself a sign of how far things have changed.
The Islamic world in general remains enmeshed in ancient attitudes, going backwards rather than forwards, despite sterling efforts by various reformers to confront patriarchy in several Muslim countries, efforts backed by many Muslim women.[5] Those attitudes are rooted in a wide range of assaults on women and their lives: female genital mutilation (FGM) sanctioned by religious tradition; honor killings even for girls who have been raped; legally-enforced marriage to a woman's rapist; floggings and stonings for women suspected of marital or pre-marital adultery, or even who have been raped; veiling; marital rape; and denial of independence (a woman must always be subject to a male guardian – father, brother, uncle, male cousin -- whose permission is needed for most things). Beyond this, it has always been permissible for Muslim men to capture or buy non-Muslim women as sex slaves, as we have seen recently with Boko Haram and Islamic State, and in Saudi Arabia, Mauritania, Singapore, Sudan, Mauritius, Libya, the United States and Europe.
Muslim men, however, have enormous freedoms. They may marry four women; they can divorce a wife by merely pronouncing "I divorce you"; if they are Shi'is, they can take temporary wives through nikah mut'a,[6] ("pleasure marriage"), that can be contracted for hours or months or years, and as easily terminated. If they are Sunnis, they can take temporary wives through nikah misyar, ("traveller's marriage"), used in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf to allow men to keep wives in towns they visit from time to time or, more widely, by married men who seek legal mistresses.
Polygamy continues to be popular, even for Muslim men living in the West. A website set up by British businessman Azad Chaiwala, "Secondwife.com", which enables men to find further wives in the way non-Muslims use dating sites, has over 100,000 members, including 25,000 in the UK. Although polygamy in Britain carries a seven-year prison term for men, the Muslim version is seemingly exempt as it is considered a religious arrangement. Muslim men in Britain and on the Continent are never prosecuted as polygamists, even though Islamic marriage laws place women in jeopardy in respect of divorce and child custody. The government has even encouraged polygamous marriages to be contracted abroad, and at one point offered £10,000 in benefits for families with four wives.
We urgently need to drop our unwillingness to contrast Western and Islamic values -- whether regarding violence, treatment of religious minorities, anti-Semitism, or treatment of women. It is not only non-Muslim Westerners who are entitled to make such comparisons -- there are also growing numbers of Muslims, as we are seeing today in Iran, who find wider Islamic attitudes abhorrent and work hard, mostly against the odds, to bring their faith closer to modern values.
Many Western politicians, churchmen and sundry do-gooders choose to find no fault in Islam and describe any form of criticism as "Islamophobia" -- even punishing honest critics of the religion or the actions of some of its followers for daring to breach the code of silence and multicultural acquiescence. These would-be moralists do no favours to us, to Muslim women and children, or to Muslim reformers. Ours is not a perfect civilization. But crying mea culpa, while passing over the problems of a civilization that also has faults, does not seem the way to assuage a communal guilt.
**Dr. Denis MacEoin taught Islamic Studies at a UK university, has published books and articles on Islamic themes, and contributed to academic encyclopedias dealing with the subject, such as the second edition of the massive Encyclopedia of Islam. He is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute.
[1] The harm they do has been dissected by Northwestern University professor Laura Kipniss, in her study How to Become a Scandal: Adventures in Bad Behavior, New York, 2010, and in her recent exposure of witch hunts in US colleges, Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus, New York, 2017.
[2] Hesba or hisba is the duty to identify and prevent or punish contraventions of Islamic law in Muslim states.
[3] To give credit to the Egyptian government, Wahsh was arrested for these remarks and is currently serving a three-year prison term. See here.
[4] For an intelligent discussion of the differences, see Christina Hoff Sommers, Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women, New York, 1995.
[5] Note, in particular, Ida Lichter, Muslim Women Reformers: Inspiring Voices against Oppression, Amherst, NY, 2009. See here.
[6] For a full academic account, see Shahla Haeri, Law of Desire: Temporary Marriage in Shi'i Iran, rev. ed., Syracuse University Press, 2014; and see Sachiko Murata, Temporary Marriage in Islamic Law, privately published, 2017.
© 2018 Gatestone Institute. All rights reserved. The articles printed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors or of Gatestone Institute. No part of the Gatestone website or any of its contents may be reproduced, copied or modified, without the prior written consent of Gatestone Institute.'

The world must act — and act now — to stop the crackdown in Tehranعلى العالم التدخل فوراً لوقف القمع في إيران
Dr. Majid Rafizadeh/Arab News/January 05/2018
http://eliasbejjaninews.com/?p=61631
On Tuesday, with Iran’s nationwide unrest entering its seventh day, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei weighed in for the first time. Predictably, he blamed “enemies” of the Islamic Republic for instigating and directing activities in upward of 60 cities. Khamenei is correct in the sense that the vast majority of Iranians are hostile to his theocratic regime. Unlike the Green Movement in 2009, the past week’s demonstrations started with disenfranchized peoples outside Tehran, including those in rural towns traditionally considered to be conservative strongholds. This confirms that regime change is the popular demand of the Iranian people as a whole, not just of the intellectual elites who enjoy the most contact with social networks. As such, in the words of US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, Khamenei’s claim of foreign manipulation is “complete nonsense.” She characterized the spontaneous and geographically expansive demonstrations as “the precise picture of a long-oppressed people rising up against their dictators.” Haley’s remarks initiated the push for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council (UNSC). By that time, Khamenei had stepped forward with his predictable effort to discredit the popular slogans that included bold calls for his resignation. The regime’s response had already resulted in more than 20 deaths and hundreds of arrests.
The Trump administration is rightly concerned about the probable escalation of the crackdown, especially after the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) announced its deployment to three provinces that had been particular hotbeds of activity. The IRGC was instrumental in the violent suppression of the Green Movement. Its domestic power has grown since, and its influence over Iran’s judiciary has allowed the IRGC to predetermine the outcomes of cases it initiates against political activists. Tehran’s Revolutionary Court has already declared that death penalties could await those arrested. The head of the IRGC, Maj. Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari, has termed the uprising “the new sedition,” thus connecting it to the “sedition” of 2009 and, by extension, to its violent fate, with dozens killed and some participants still in prison nearly a decade later.
The US has a responsibility to outline a policy that will actually support the autonomous calls for freedom and democracy, including providing protesters with access to the Internet and other means of communication.
But it is important to note that the Green Movement suffered that fate against a backdrop of international silence. Fortunately, the Trump administration has made several statements supporting the Iranian people, without lending credence to the ridiculous claims about the demonstrations’ foreign origins. Indeed, far from intervening directly, the White House has so far offered little to the protesters other than expressions of moral support. This is certainly important as it helps keep global attention focused on Tehran’s response, potentially forestalling severe crackdowns that might otherwise be condemned only after the fact. But the US also has a responsibility to outline a policy that will actually support the autonomous calls for freedom and democracy, including providing protesters with access to the Internet and other means of communication. And it must do so quickly. A UNSC meeting would represent an opportunity to showcase such a policy, which should include at a minimum serious, multinational efforts to deny Tehran the tools to halt the flow of information within the country or out of it. Western governments must do everything in their power to counter Tehran’s attempts to control the narrative, such the IRGC’s claim that only 15,000 people have participated nationwide. If foreign broadcasts do not vigorously address such fabrications, this is the only narrative that the people will hear. In the past week, the Iranian people and opposition have demonstrated that information is a powerful weapon, using smartphones to organize protests that nobody had seen coming. The US and its allies could provide tremendous support to the Iranian people simply by helping to ensure that these resources remain available to them.
• Dr. Majid Rafizadeh is a Harvard-educated Iranian-American political scientist. He is a leading expert on Iran and US foreign policy, a businessman and president of the International American Council. He serves on the boards of the Harvard International Review, the Harvard International Relations Council and the US-Middle East Chamber for Commerce and Business.

Is the Arab spring coming to Iran?هل الربيع العربي حل في إيران
Dr. Azeem Ibrahim/Al Arabiya/January 05/18
http://eliasbejjaninews.com/?p=61631
This is not how things were supposed to go in Iran. Iranians went to the polls in 2013 and elected Hassan Rouhani to serve as President of the Islamic Republic filled with hope after the harsh and belligerent tenure of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Rouhani was billed as a moderate who would relax the excesses of the religious hardliners, and would mend his country’s relations to the rest of the world – especially the West. Doing so would be followed by sanction relief and economic boom, which would lift the country out of its long economic stagnation. And it was not all just empty rhetoric. Just two years later, the Iran nuclear deal with the US, Russia, China, the UK, France and Germany came into force, and economic sanctions have been subsequently eased, as Iran has stuck to its side of the bargain. But one thing of what was supposed to happen did not. The Iranian people did not see the economic boom they were expecting. In fact, the very opposite has happened: over the past 10 years, average Iranians have become 15 percent poorer, as a consequence of rising inflation and stagnating wages. Rather than delivering the proceeds of peace to the people, Iran’s political leaders have instead decided to reinvest them in their regional wars to expand their sphere of influence.
The windfall
And the trend has in fact accelerated over the past year – exactly when Iranians would have expected that things would start to turn around. So what happened to the windfall they were expecting? Iran did in fact reap the reward of sanctions relief. And to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. It’s just that the windfall was not put back into the local economy by the Iranian leadership. Rather than delivering the proceeds of peace to the people, Iran’s political leaders have instead decided to reinvest them in their regional wars to expand their sphere of influence. Iran pays the salaries of hundreds of thousands of fighters on the side of Bashar al-Assad in Syria alone, but has paid militant proxies also in Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Palestinian territories, at the very least. In Syria alone, it is estimated that Iran is spending as much as $15-20 billion a year, including covering a substantial share of Hezbollah’s costs. The amount it spends on all the other proxies and the conflicts they sustain is harder to quantify, but it would not be an insignificant amount extra. To put this into context, the final yearly expense probably comes to somewhere in the region of 4-5 percent of the country’s $438 billion GDP. In other words, every year, the country’s leaders take 4-5 percent out of the country’s economy and spend it on sustaining or escalating conflicts throughout the Middle East.
Expenditure abroad
This is why Iranians are protesting in the streets. And at this point, whether Hassan Rouhani supports Iran’s military expenditure abroad, or whether these expenses are imposed on him by the all-powerful clerics and Revolutionary Guards after he has done all the hard work of mending relations with the West is a moot point. One of two things is true: either Rouhani supports Iran’s proxy wars, and in having done so he has betrayed the hopes of the Iranian people who have swept him to power on a wave of optimism; or he does not support these efforts but is powerless to redefine his country’s economic and security priorities. Whichever is true, it is clear that the Iranian people have lost patience with their leaders. Once, Hassan Rouhani was seen as the champion of a different future for Iran, and their faith in him continued served to mollify rebellion against the Islamic Republic. But that faith has been squandered, and now the people are rising up against the entire political edifice built by the clerics. It remains to be seen whether the leadership can impose order like they did during the protests in 2009, or whether something like the Arab spring is coming to Iran. But either way, it is doubtful that the clerics and their regime will ever again be able to regain the trust of their people.

Game of chess and storm in a teacup
Tariq A. Al-Maeena/Al Arabiya/January 05/18
Saudi Arabia recently organized the King Salman World Blitz and Rapid Chess Championships in Riyadh. Saudi Arabia hosted the world chess tournament for the first time. Chess masters from across the globe were invited to play each other for a grand prize. More than 200 grandmasters, including the world champion Magnus Carlsen of Norway, took part in the tournament. Other major players who participated included the incumbent World Rapid and Blitz Champions Sergey Karjakin of Russia, Vassily Ivanchuk of Ukraine, world No. 2 Levon Aronian of Armenia, No. 3 Shakhriyar Mamedyarov of Azerbaijan and former World Champion Viswanathan Anand of India. The championship offered a record total prize fund of $2,000,000 with the open events having individual prize funds of $750,000 each. There were 30 prizes for each event, with the first prize of $250,000 in the open section and $80,000 in the women’s section, all new records.
Prior to the games, officials of the World Chess Federation (FIDE) expressed their optimism on the games. “The Kingdom is changing very fast and we are happy to be part of this change. It will help the development of chess in Saudi Arabia,” said Geoffrey Borg, Chief Executive Officer, FIDE.
“This country can lead the development of chess in the region and in Asia. We hope they participate in global sport and make a global impact on the sport scene. This event serves as an advert of what Saudis are capable of doing.”
Georgios Makropoulos, FIDE deputy president, expressed hope that Saudi Arabia would host more such sport events. “We are going to enjoy the great hospitality and the highest standard of Saudi Arabia. I hope our sports promote peace among the people around the world. As our motto says, we are one family and we believe in this. We would like to see the world rugby tournament being held here where all will be invited. I think Saudi Arabia can send a strong message of peace and solidarity to the world. This is the beginning of a great effort.”
The Kingdom has no diplomatic relations with Israel and has no such intentions of forging relations until the Israelis agree to a fair and just peace process with the Palestinians
The visa denial
It was indeed a great effort and went along without a hitch except for the storm raised by the non-inclusion of Israeli chess players who were denied visas to enter the country and rightly so. The Kingdom has no diplomatic relations with Israel and has no such intentions of forging relations until the Israelis agree to a fair and just peace process with the Palestinians. While Israeli expectations before the games were on a high assuming that we in the Kingdom were on their side, they were in for a disappointment. Their illegal occupation of Palestinian lands, their state-sponsored murders at the hands of Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and illegal settlers of unarmed and helpless Palestinian civilians has not escaped the attention of the Saudis over the years. It is also a well-known fact that quite a few Israeli athletes had been members of the IDF, a band of thugs who shoot to kill, their recent targets being primarily women and children. The Israelis who show no intention of deviating from their macabre role in the region are not welcome. And they can boohoo all they want with cries of “foul” at their non-inclusion in the games. But for a country that has continuously flaunted all international laws regarding their activities in occupied Palestine, the Israelis should be ashamed for even tabling the matter of non-inclusion. Their own Palestinian citizens are booted out of their homes, their farms and lands razed to make room for more illegal settlements, their children unlawfully imprisoned, all this in our presence, and they dare complain that they are unwelcome. Shame on you Israel for crying out loud for not being invited. You do not deserve an audience in this land. Look into your activities and then you can understand why we don’t want you.

Iran between domestic and foreign threats
Abdulrahman al-Rashed/Al Arabiya/January 05/18
Following a week of protests in Iran, Hassan Nasrallah voiced his fear as well the fear of terrorist organizations, like his party, which Iran established in the region. He blamed the US and Saudi Arabia for the ongoing protests. The Iranian protestors’ messages regarding the guardian jurist has reached Arab militia leaders and others who have been living at their expense. It must have reached Iranian-backed armed groups whose members continue to die in Syria on behalf of the supreme guide’s regime. Iran’s protests are purely Iranian. Neither Saudi Arabia nor the US has anything to do with them. No one outside Iran has anything to do with them. This does not mean that the world will not act in the future to rescue protestors and support them if the regime continues to threaten the region’s countries by sponsoring their enemies and firing missiles towards their cities. Iran today is no longer a fortress but an open land to whoever wants to support those angry. What happened in Iran is very significant. Protests erupted in around 50 cities. Persians, Azeris, Kurds, Baloch, Arabs, Shiites, Sunnis and even clerics from Qom participated in the protests. The regime no longer has any popular bases, and this is one of the most dangerous aspects.
The Iranian people’s uprising terrified Nasrallah and leaders of Shiite militias in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen and leaders of extremist Shiite opposition in Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Pakistan and other countries. This uprising threatens secret networks across Europe, South America and Southeast Asia. Just like the international community collectively worked to fight ISIS and al-Qaeda, many countries now understand that Iran’s threat does not only target the Middle East and that it’s become an international problem
Extreme ideology
The guardian jurist’s regime represents the extremist Shiite ideology. It inspires the Sunni ISIS organization’s ambition to build the extremist caliphate state. Ayatollah’s regime manages a state that consists of preachers, militias, suicide bombers, intelligence apparatuses and secret cells. It launders money and smuggles drugs to fund its operations. Its love for domination knows no limits as it continues to expand in the entire region. Just like the international community collectively worked to fight ISIS and al-Qaeda, many countries now understand that Iran’s threat does not only target the Middle East and that it’s become an international problem. Protests are a significant development that weakened the regime that’s now besieged by the Iranian people from inside and by international and regional powers from outside. Both parties will force it to change or it will collapse.
Iran’s first task is to put an end to terrorist networks outside its borders and that threaten the world’s stability and drain the Iranian people’s money such as: Iraq’s Hezbollah Brigades, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Ansar Allah in Yemen, Liwa Fatemiyoun in Afghanistan, Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba, the League of Righteous People, the Islamic Front for the Liberation of Bahrain, Hezbollah Al-Hejaz in Saudi Arabia, the Islamic Movement in Nigeria, Jaish-e-Mohammed in Pakistan and others. These are all huge terrorist networks managed by Ayatollah’s regime in Tehran through the Revolutionary Guards. Iran after last Thursday’s protests is different than the Iran we’ve known. It’s now subject to local unrest that’s more dangerous than America’s threats.
 

المحافظات تقود الوسط في احتجاجات إيران
بريندا شيفر/معهد واشنطن/4 كانون الثاني/يناير 2018
http://eliasbejjaninews.com/?p=61624

Provinces Lead the Center in Iran's Protests
Brenda Shaffer/The Washington Institute/January 05/2018
http://eliasbejjaninews.com/?p=61624

The world must act — and act now — to stop the crackdown in Tehranعلى العالم التدخل فوراً لوقف القمع في إيران
Dr. Majid Rafizadeh/Arab News/January 05/2018
http://eliasbejjaninews.com/?p=61631

Is the Arab spring coming to Iran?هل الربيع العربي حل في إيران
Dr. Azeem Ibrahim/Al Arabiya/January 05/18
http://eliasbejjaninews.com/?p=61631


Iran's Coercive Apparatus: Capacity and Desire
آلة القمع الإيرانية: رغبات وإمكانيات

http://eliasbejjaninews.com/?p=61627
Saeid Golkar/The Washinton Institute/January 05/2018