HOPI events Thursday to Saturday 13-15 November

Don’t miss the events this coming week in Dublin:

Thursday 13th
1pm Trinity College, Room 403 Aras an Phiarsaigh
Moshe Machover, Israeli socialist & anti-Zionist & Yassamine Mather, Iranian political activist & founding member of HOPI debate the situation in the middle-east in the aftermath of the US election
7.30pm Teachers Club, 36 Parnell Square Square,
Joint meeting with Irish Palestine Solidarity Campaign: Middle-East – what is the answer to the crisis?
Raymond Deane, Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Moshe Machover and Yassamine Mather
Friday 14th
Meeting at UCD, details to be confirmed
Saturday 15th
12.30pm Teachers Club, 36 Parnell Square Dublin1
HOPI Ireland founding conference Join us in debate and decisions on the way forward for this vital campaign. We will be joined on the day by Yassamine Mather and Moshe Machover and hear messages from Iranian students and workers in struggle. Find out what is really going on behind the scenes. A proposed motion on the constitution has been circulated already. Please let me know if you need another copy and send amendments and motions to me as soon as possible so that I can circulate everything before Thursday.
Contact Anne on 0862343238 or Anne@hopoi.info for more details or if you want to help.

HOPI conference & Meetings 13-15 November

Hands off the People of Iran will be holding its first conference on 15th
November at the Teachers Club, 36 Parnell Square, Dublin. The event will
start at 1pm with registration from 12.30. Key items on the agenda are the
HOPI aims and constitution, setting up more formal structures and activities
over the coming year. The draft constitution will be circulated very soon
for amendments and proposals. Also we are inviting proposals for people to
go onto the steering committee.

Yassamine Mather, leading Iranian political activist and founding member of
HOPI in Britain will speak at our conference. We have also invited Moshe
Machover, an Israeli anti-zionist socialist. Moshe has written and spoken
extensively on the middle-east. Given the recent reports of Israel planned
attacks on Iran, both talks and the discussion will be very important.

We also plan to have a number of meetings from 13th-14th and we have been in
contact with university societies. If you are a member of a university group
please contact me on Annegmcshane@eircom.net and I can make arrangements for
Yassamine and Moshe to speak.

Also we are hoping to co-host a forum on the middle-east in Dublin on
Thursday 13th. Details to follow.

Please let me know if you can help or be involved in any of our forthcoming
activities.

Anne

Annegmcshane@eircom.net
0862343238

__._,_.___

Message from Trade Unionist in Iran - Haft Tapeh workers

Dear comrades in the Committee in Defense of Haft Tappeh Sugar Cane Workers of Iran

I am writing on behalf of the Federation of Workers Councils and Unions in Iraq, FWCUI.
We have received your statement about the struggles of the Haft Tappeh workers, which reveals the brutal policies of the Islamic Republic toward the workers.
The struggles of the Iranian workers reflect their heroic position in opposition to the policies of the authorities, such as lay off, privatization, reducing the salaries, delaying the payments, banning independent organizing, imposing the puppet organizations… etc.
At this time, we are stand side by side with the movement of the Haft Tappeh workers. We call for the workers unions and activists in the world to support the demands of the Sugar Cane factory "Haft Tappeh" workers.
We call on to the Iranian authorities to answer the workers' demands, and to stop pressuring the activists and chasing them, to stop jailing and arbitrary judgments of the workers' leaders.

In solidarity,
Falah Alwan
Federation of Workers' Councils and Unions in Iraq, FWCUI, President
August 17, 2008



Falah Alwan
Federation

20th Anniversary of 1988 Prison Massacre in Iran

Iran: The 20th anniversary of 1988 "prison massacre"

Amnesty International documents the 20th anniversary of the massacre of prisoners in Iran. It notes that no one has been held accountable for this atrocity. Full text at link.

Twenty years after the then Iranian authorities began a wave of largely secret, summary and mass executions in September 1988, Amnesty International renews its call for those responsible for the “prison massacre” to be held accountable. There should be no impunity for such gross human rights violations, regardless of when they were committed.

Amnesty is also calling on the present Iranian government not to prevent relatives of the dead from visiting Khavaran Cemetary in south Tehran, on or about 29 August to mark the anniversary and demand justice for their loved ones. Hundreds of those summarily executed are buried in unmarked mass graves.

In all between 4,500 and 5,000 prisoners are believed to have been killed, including women. Those responsible for the killings should be prosecuted and tried before a regularly and legally constituted court and with all necessary procedural guarantees, in accordance with international fair trial standards.

Article from Guardian - threat on Iran not gone away

Attacking Iran via South Ossetia

Could the conflict between Russia and Georgia be the excuse the Bush administration has been looking for to bomb Iran?

All comments (213)

• 
• • Stephen Kinzer
  • guardian.co.uk

An editor I once worked for told me that when his parents and grandparents discussed the day's news over dinner, they would inevitably finish by asking each other: "Is it good for the Jews?"

"Whether it was a war or an earthquake or men landing on the moon, it would always come down to that," he recalled. "They saw everything through that lens."

This year, I've developed a comparable pathology. I am terrified that the Bush administration is going to attack Iran sometime before it leaves office on January 20. Whenever there is a new tremor in Washington or the wider world, I ask myself: Does this make an American strike against Iran more or less likely?

So it is with the recent dustup in Georgia. I fear it has increased the chances that the United States will bomb Iran.

If there is a single principle that underlies the Bush-Cheney view of the world, it is that all countries must accommodate American interests and none may be allowed to emerge as what the 2006 Quadrennial Defence Review called a "near-peer power". This is a recipe for conflict, since many countries will naturally try to increase their power whether or not the US wants them to.

"Let Hercules himself do what he may," that insightful geo-strategist William Shakespeare observed, "the cat will mew, and dog will have his day."

Russia's day is once again dawning. That is not necessarily bad. A multi-polar world shaped by balances and equilibrium is, in the end, safer and more secure for everyone.

This view, though, is abhorrent to the Bush administration. It remains caught in the post-cold war fantasy that America's brief "uni-polar moment" can last indefinitely.

In recent years, the Bush administration has sought at every turn to challenge Russian interests. It has worked to cut Russia out of energy pipelines, expand Nato up to Russia's borders, build missile defence bases near those borders, promote the independence of Kosovo and encourage former Soviet states like Georgia to spit in Russia's strategic eye.

This approach worked while Russia was prostrate. It was inevitable, though, that Russia would eventually begin to re-emerge as an influential power. Now it has.

Washington protested Russia's crushing of Georgia with howls of outrage. President Bush declared with a straight face that "bullying and intimidation are not acceptable ways to conduct foreign policy in the 21st century."

Mouthing such pious hypocrisy is about all the US can do to reverse Russia's recent gain. The US and Russia need to cooperate on a host of strategic issues, and Georgia is not a vital interest to the US. The logical thing for the US to do now would be to take this hit and move on.

President Bush and vice-president Cheney, however, may have another idea. I'm reading their minds, and this is what I fear they are thinking:

"We're on our way out of office. The way things look now, the last confrontation between us and the bad guys will have been one that they won. We can't let our term end that way. This can't be the last word. We have to go out in a blaze of glory. Where should we set off that blaze? Iran, of course. No country has taunted us more relentlessly. By bombing Iran, we will send the world a defiant farewell message: Forget Russia - We Still Rule!"

For years before the September 11 terror raids, a clique of millenarian ideologues in Washington had been urging a US attack on Iraq. The raids gave them their excuse. Now I fear the same may be happening with Iran. Georgia could be the excuse.

American policy toward Iran has for decades been shaped by emotion, not rationality. Emotions are now running hot in Washington. Iranians have nothing to do with the Russian invasion of Georgia. I hope they do not soon have to pay a bloody price for it.

Israel to attack Iran

ISRAEL will almost surely attack Iran's nuclear sites in the next four to seven months — and the leaders in Washington and even Tehran should hope that the attack will be successful enough to cause at least a significant delay in the Iranian production schedule, if not complete destruction, of that country's nuclear program. Because if the attack fails, the Middle East will almost certainly face a nuclear war — either through a subsequent pre-emptive Israeli nuclear strike or a nuclear exchange shortly after Iran gets the bomb.

It is in the interest of neither Iran nor the United States (nor, for that matter, the rest of the world) that Iran be savaged by a nuclear strike, or that both Israel and Iran suffer such a fate. We know what would ensue: a traumatic destabilization of the Middle East with resounding political and military consequences around the globe, serious injury to the West's oil supply and radioactive pollution of the earth's atmosphere and water.

But should Israel's conventional assault fail to significantly harm or stall the Iranian program, a ratcheting up of the Iranian-Israeli conflict to a nuclear level will most likely follow. Every intelligence agency in the world believes the Iranian program is geared toward making weapons, not to the peaceful applications of nuclear power. And, despite the current talk of additional economic sanctions, everyone knows that such measures have so far led nowhere and are unlikely to be applied with sufficient scope to cause Iran real pain, given Russia's and China's continued recalcitrance and Western Europe's (and America's) ambivalence in behavior, if not in rhetoric. Western intelligence agencies agree that Iran will reach the "point of no return" in acquiring the capacity to produce nuclear weapons in one to four years.

Which leaves the world with only one option if it wishes to halt Iran's march toward nuclear weaponry: the military option, meaning an aerial assault by either the United States or Israel. Clearly, America has the conventional military capacity to do the job, which would involve a protracted air assault against Iran's air defenses followed by strikes on the nuclear sites themselves. But, as a result of the Iraq imbroglio, and what is rapidly turning into the Afghan imbroglio, the American public has little enthusiasm for wars in the Islamic lands. This curtails the White House's ability to begin yet another major military campaign in pursuit of a goal that is not seen as a vital national interest by many Americans.

Which leaves only Israel — the country threatened almost daily with destruction by Iran's leaders. Thus the recent reports about Israeli plans and preparations to attack Iran (the period from Nov. 5 to Jan. 19 seems the best bet, as it gives the West half a year to try the diplomatic route but ensures that Israel will have support from a lame-duck White House).

The problem is that Israel's military capacities are far smaller than America's and, given the distances involved, the fact that the Iranian sites are widely dispersed and underground, and Israel's inadequate intelligence, it is unlikely that the Israeli conventional forces, even if allowed the use of Jordanian and Iraqi airspace (and perhaps, pending American approval, even Iraqi air strips) can destroy or perhaps significantly delay the Iranian nuclear project.

Nonetheless, Israel, believing that its very existence is at stake — and this is a feeling shared by most Israelis across the political spectrum — will certainly make the effort. Israel's leaders, from Prime Minister Ehud Olmert down, have all explicitly stated that an Iranian bomb means Israel's destruction; Iran will not be allowed to get the bomb.

The best outcome will be that an Israeli conventional strike, whether failed or not — and, given the Tehran regime's totalitarian grip, it may not be immediately clear how much damage the Israeli assault has caused — would persuade the Iranians to halt their nuclear program, or at least persuade the Western powers to significantly increase the diplomatic and economic pressure on Iran.

But the more likely result is that the international community will continue to do nothing effective and that Iran will speed up its efforts to produce the bomb that can destroy Israel. The Iranians will also likely retaliate by attacking Israel's cities with ballistic missiles (possibly topped with chemical or biological warheads); by prodding its local clients, Hezbollah and Hamas, to unleash their own armories against Israel; and by activating international Muslim terrorist networks against Israeli and Jewish — and possibly American — targets worldwide (though the Iranians may at the last moment be wary of provoking American military involvement).

Such a situation would confront Israeli leaders with two agonizing, dismal choices. One is to allow the Iranians to acquire the bomb and hope for the best — meaning a nuclear standoff, with the prospect of mutual assured destruction preventing the Iranians from actually using the weapon. The other would be to use the Iranian counterstrikes as an excuse to escalate and use the only means available that will actually destroy the Iranian nuclear project: Israel's own nuclear arsenal.

Given the fundamentalist, self-sacrificial mindset of the mullahs who run Iran, Israel knows that deterrence may not work as well as it did with the comparatively rational men who ran the Kremlin and White House during the cold war. They are likely to use any bomb they build, both because of ideology and because of fear of Israeli nuclear pre-emption. Thus an Israeli nuclear strike to prevent the Iranians from taking the final steps toward getting the bomb is probable. The alternative is letting Tehran have its bomb. In either case, a Middle Eastern nuclear holocaust would be in the cards.

Iran's leaders would do well to rethink their gamble and suspend their nuclear program. Bar this, the best they could hope for is that Israel's conventional air assault will destroy their nuclear facilities. To be sure, this would mean thousands of Iranian casualties and international humiliation. But the alternative is an Iran turned into a nuclear wasteland. Some Iranians may believe that this is a worthwhile gamble if the prospect is Israel's demise. But most Iranians probably don't.

Benny Morris, a professor of Middle Eastern history at Ben-Gurion University, is the author, most recently, of "1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War."

No Friends of Women

In her latest article on political islam, Yassamine Mathers looks at how the womens movement has fared in Iran. She also addresses how imperialism offers no answers for women. Full text at link.

The women’s movement in Iran has become the subject of many claims and counter-claims over the last few years. Bush and the pro-war lobby tell us that Iranian women deserve a better regime and, of course, by that they mean the kind of ‘regime change’ we have seen in Iraq or Afghanistan...

It is ironic that political correctness has discouraged many western feminists from challenging ‘islamist feminism’. Iranian women, who are amongst the worst victims of fundamentalism, have no intention of following this trend and indeed over the last few years many of them have written extensively against the defenders of ‘islamist feminism’.

If women’s liberation means freedom from economic, social, political and cultural constraints, then the women’s movement in Iran cannot find any solution in islamic discourse - any more than they can find it in the kind of bourgeois secularism proposed by defenders of regime change.

http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/727/nofriends.html