The Washington Post uses statistics to show human meddling with Iranian vote counts:
The numbers look suspicious. We find too many 7s and not enough 5s in the last digit. We expect each digit (0, 1, 2, and so on) to appear at the end of 10 percent of the vote counts. But in Iran’s provincial results, the digit 7 appears 17 percent of the time, and only 4 percent of the results end in the number 5. Two such departures from the average — a spike of 17 percent or more in one digit and a drop to 4 percent or less in another — are extremely unlikely. Fewer than four in a hundred non-fraudulent elections would produce such numbers.
As a point of comparison, we can analyze the state-by-state vote counts for John McCain and Barack Obama in last year’s U.S. presidential election. The frequencies of last digits in these election returns never rise above 14 percent or fall below 6 percent, a pattern we would expect to see in seventy out of a hundred fair elections. [WaPo]
That’s on top of observations that intuitively point to something being wrong:
Others have pointed to the surprisingly poor performance of Mehdi Karroubi, another reform candidate, and particularly in his home province of Lorestan, where conservative candidates fared poorly in 2005, but where Ahmadinejad allegedly captured 71 percent of the vote. Eyebrows have been raised further by the relative consistency in Ahmadinejad’s vote share across Iran’s provinces, in spite of wide provincial variation in past elections. [WaPo]
I’m happy to see that Harper is taking an approach to the issue that speaks to Canadian’s desire to live-and-let-live — up to the point when doing so interferes with human rights.
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In the current riot videos on this site and available on the web it is clear that some elements of protesters in Iran are acting violently. For example in the death of Iranians by the Basij office it is clear that one person sets the building on fire,another screams “they ran out of bullets attack the building” and someone else in the background throws a gasoline bomb at the Basij office. The Baisj and the military are Iranians also. This is not how Iran won the last regime change under the Shah. Iranians for the most part are peaceful protesters from what I have seen. In every video that folks are throwing rocks it is also clear a number of folks that stand in between the rock throwers and the police to stop the violence.
see more at http://theageofnepotism.com/
Traveling to Iran may seem to you as a bad idea, considering all the messages brought to us by the media and the political leaders, but the reality is that most of the world does not have the insight to what this country is really about. If you want to learn about the people in Iran and their rich culture, the changes that took place in Iranian history and lead to one global propaganda promoting only the negatives, you should read The Age of Nepotism by Vahid Razavi and try and see things from one liberating and positive angle. If we agree that truth is somewhere in the middle, then we should at least give ourselves a chance of not being biased and learn about what we fear, since fear itself is mostly caused by ignorance…You can also visit the site thegeofnepotism.com
If you ask your self if visiting Iran now-days is even possible, or what the reasons of such visit should be, than the answer is simple. Rich culture, great food, warm people, and the scent of spices filling the air around Iranian open markets, the stories about the great Persian nation reaching back to the glorious kings and their quests, the poetry, turbulent history that brought changes to the contemporary Iranian society by replacing the Shah with the theocratic governance and so much more is there for you to experience firsthand and enrich your life with knowledge that can only keep you open-minded and lead to the next destination you excluded from your list of “places to see”. I warmly recommend you to read The Age of Nepotism, the book by Vahid Razavi, Iranian American entrepreneur who gained priceless experiences by traveling the world and trying to find similarities with people. He is explaining the current situation in places like IRAN, USA, Serbia etc. Worth a read.
“If we agree that truth is somewhere in the middle..”–Jana
WE Don’t. Truth IS. It ‘may’ be in the middle on occasion or it may not, but when the middle consists of agreeing even in part, with some medieval-minded Ayatollah and his semi-literate thugs, it surely is not.
“The Baisj and the military are Iranians also.”–Jana
And the ‘nuanced’ hits just keep on coming. Would it be also true that the SA and the SS were Germans also, and that therefore their outlook was as valid as their opponents ( victims)? The sooner the vile Baisj join their unlamented predecessors of the SAVAK in the dustbin of history, the better for everyone. Iranians AND us.
As to anyone in his/her right mind visiting Iran while the Ayatollahs remain in charge—– Thanks but no thanks. That represents implied collusion with a Regime that simply needs to perish from the World. Besides, there is always the chance of being labeled an agent of one or another of the ‘Satans’. And then what happens apart from seeing how ‘human’ the Basij are in a very up close and personal manner ?
Persia may have been a great culture back in the day. But that was then and this is now. Darius ain’t coming back anytime soon, and if he did, the Ayatollahs would execute him for activities against the Islamic Republic.