UPDATE: links added; also see Cyberwar Guide To Helping The Iranian Protesters. There are now reports that the army is moving against the protesters in many cities. You can follow breaking news on Twitter here, with the caveat that not everything you read may be gospel-truth.
Five days of protests and still no signs of abating. (Full-time coverage of the highest rate found here). I visited my Farsi Friend the other day. He fled the Khomeini Revolution and has been living in the U.S. ever since, quite successfully. He has a very different take on a lot of accepted history about the Revolution. Some of it is things I have heard elsewhere (Khomeini imported Palestinian Arabs to do his dirty work --a pattern which seems to be repeating itself ). Some of it is downright scary (the American oil companies put Khomeini in charge because he would be far tougher on the Communists than the Shah --which proved to be correct in the end).
He said it was funny that I called him just at that moment, since he had just gotten off of an online chat with his nieces living in Teheran. They were all kinds of upset about just how badly the elections were rigged. My Friend consoled them by saying that they ought to have known that the elections were going to be rigged, and besides, how much of a moderate is Mousavi really, anyway? (All candidates are vetted by the ayatollahs and the Revolutionary Guards, it should be noted.) But what really got me was his response to my question, "Well, are these protests going to do anything?"
He said:
"No, because Iranian people don't have guns, Mojo. They don't have a Second Amendment, never did. Only the government had guns. When the students go into the streets, Basij militia beat them and Revolutionary Guards shoot them. They don't have a chance. That's why I get nervous every time the government here in U.S. talks about limiting guns. They thought in Iran, too, that nothing bad could ever happen."
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