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IRI Mind Games with the Iranian Opposition

Ghazal Omid - 6/27/2008

For the past thirty years, the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) has cleverly come up with a series of layers of fake opposition created to ensure that when Iranians look for regime opposition, they will find a fake, designed to distract, right in front of their eyes. The fake opposition is well educated and equipped with money and knowledge of how to deal with American politicians. There are so skillful that even the most veteran Iranian journalists, researchers and former politicians have a hard time distinguishing between the real and the fake.

Fake opposition has secured a place among US politicians. They are able to lobby and interact with Congress and the Senate and have essentially become the source of information for many politicians. Much of the information the fake opposition passes out as intelligence has resulted in shutting down dissident movement of Iranians inside Iran and the arrest of many who tried to stand up to the IRI. No one seems able or willing to investigate who leaks the information. Unobstructed, they continue to obfuscate and distract Iranians outside Iran with never ending discussions and conferences.

Historically, the IRI founders were primarily educated in the US and Europe and many are still citizens of these countries. They know very well how to use the First Amendment to their advantage. A current example is the IRI lobby in Washington, DC.

The First Amendment, although a beautiful law that protects US citizen whistle blowers against government corruption and allows them to state their opinion without fear, also unintentionally protects the IRI and its members, enabling them to destroy active members of the opposition via false information.

Web logging has long been praised and employed by members of the IRI opposition, as well as by the US government and powerful NGOs working in the field of Human Rights. Most would be surprised and should be concerned that many web log contributors are paid members of the IRI; a silent army armed only with laptops dispatched to universities and cities around the world since mid-1990s. The fake opposition does not carry badges identifying them as such. Its main mission is to fabricate news for Iranians and foreign media, disseminate fake information about members of the opposition to their web bloggers, and, finally, to legitimize IRI moles posing as authentic opposition.

Unfortunately for Iranian opposition outside Iran, although highly educated, they rely heavily on Google and other search engines for information.

The internet is wonderful for research but it is also a deadly trap for the mind and a place to be easily misguided. The billions the IRI has invested in anonymous web pages, some registered in Canada and run from Europe, has not been adequately noticed by the Iranian opposition. They never seem to question how a web logger acquires unlimited free space a website to work internationally. How can someone in Iran register a website domain name in Canada? Everything is done through credit cards. How many Iranian activist students do you know who can afford hundreds of dollars per month in fees for a webhost service in France, Italy or Germany? It is not who ostensibly operates the site, but how it operates and who is behind it that Iranians must question.

IRI web loggers send exaggerated distress signals to PEN USA, PEN International, Amnesty US, Amnesty International and all the way to the UN. They make an IRI mole look like real opposition, even as the mole receives instructions and does interviews right from Evin Prison Section 209, where Ayatollah Broujerdi is now held. This man, the Son of Grand Ayatollah Broujerdi, the only Grand Ayatollah who refused to endorse the accelerated elevation of Khomeini to Ayatollah, doesn’t get television interviews; he doesn’t even get visitation rights with his family and is not allowed a cell phone. Gathering from the absence of opposition reaction to his plight, no one questions why he is not permitted to do interviews from his cell while other so-called “political prisoners” were able to be on any show from LA to VOA at any hour in Tehran!

The obvious conclusion is: those interviews require collaboration with authority and the Ayatollah is not collaborating. His revered father once corrected a man who complained to him about a mullah who had become a thief, saying, “No, a thief has become a mullah.” We have living examples of his statement among the current high ranking IRI leaders.

There are many shades of fake opposition. Examining them all is not possible in a short article. They are the hyenas of the internet; not the bravest or most skilled hunters individually but as a pack they contrive to bring down their opponents; differing from hyenas in that they target the most active opposition, whereas hyenas attack the weakest prey.

We live in a pivotal time in Western/Middle Eastern relationships. Technology makes a search of our lives easy and can quickly create celebrity or notoriety. Anyone with access to a computer can enter someone's cell phone number into a Reverse Cell Phone Directory and in minutes obtain an alarming amount of information about a person's life for a few dollars. However easy it that search, it is not recommended as a reliable information source. To genuinely know who is who, their mind set and what their actions are about, consider doing it the old fashioned way. Our fathers used to tell us, “Judge someone’s words by their actions, look into their eyes and shake their hand.”

The anonymous world of the internet allows one to portray an image completely contradictory to their true character or what they have in mind and heart for others. The statement about our fathers may be old fashioned but is based on scientific human psychology by which skilled observers tap into the subconscious of the person rather than remaining interactive on the net and falling for their inflated messages.

For the record, this is not to condemn the internet, Google or web blogging but to emphasize that technology has both an upside and downside. It is a tool that can be used for peaceful purposes or for war.
All servers in Iran belong to the IRI. While the loyal opposition supports the hundreds of thousands of brave web loggers in Iran who are standing up to the IRI, the key to their effectiveness and survival is to know who is who to avoid arrest of the genuine opposition. We don’t want our youth, the future of our country, exhausted by going in circles with eyes shut. That is what is happening to the discouraged opposition outside Iran because they see no end to their journey. We can provide a compass and a road map. You may or may not trust us but you can at least test our theories and practices. If you find they work, we are able to provide the Iranian opposition with insight that working together we can help put End to the IRI.

Most of you reading this article have heard of Wikipedia. It is a useful, if frequently erroneous, online directory that many people presume is free of control. And, incidentally, is the number one site from which Israeli children receive information. It is important to be aware of how technology enables the IRI to brainwash our children’s minds in the virtual world right from our living room.

To understand how the IRI works, try this experiment: Type IRI into the Wikipedia search screen. You will find pages and pages on Iran and the technology IRI possesses. This is done purposefully to create a paper tiger out of IRI. After reading the main article, look at the discussion page, then go to the history page. Wikipedia says anyone can edit anything. That is simply not true. The history pages of IRI are constantly edited by a few people. That tells me they are hired to do so. Wikipedia is a company to create virtual offices for those who contribute to it. You may doubt my statement, so please look up any names of the opposition, other than the royal family of Iran.

For every article you visit, you should look at the history page. Then search Ghazal Omid. There are 500 edits on my article history page. I have been trying for the past three months to remove two slanderous comments from the discussion page. One falsely labels me “anti-Islam” and the other inexplicably calls me “a war advocate.” On other sites, my character and veracity are arbitrarily challenged without grounds by fanatics who know nothing of me yet used inadvertent typos, which can be found in any book, cited as evidence that my entire book “living in Hell” is spurious.

Those who read my work know I am an authentic practicing Muslim and Iranian patriot who has never advocated for war and, indeed, continually speaks and writes against it. Still, Wikipedia refuses to remove these two inaccurate comments, affording radicals an excuse to place a fatwa over my head because I am wrongly accused of being anti-Islam.

As educated people, we live in the era of technology but that doesn’t mean the radicals believe in your actions. Too often, they form a judgment against you and condemn you for unfounded imaginary crimes, even before they question your motives.

What should we do with the regime when we return to Iran? I say when we return because I am confident their end is near if we work systematically. The more optimistic members of the opposition see the vulnerability of the IRI. Knowing the mindset of the IRI, how it uses the internet, how it formulates policy and reacts to US foreign policy gives the opposition an opening to disassemble the IRI.

In planning the disassembly of Iran, we must remember the well being of Iranians should be first priority. The rule of law must prevail; otherwise our country will experience civil chaos similar to Iraq. We Persians must not engage in activities that hurt our culture.

As for those purported members of the Iranian opposition rooting for an Israel/USA war with Iran, I am aware they are aching to go back to Iran for their own reasons, that, unfortunately, they place ahead of the welfare of all Iranians. My sincere advice, as an Iranian who survived the revolution and eight years of war on the ground, is for them to re-consider their selfish logic. Thirty years seems a long time in one lifetime but it is a very small number compared to thousands of years of Persian history.

Many of those wishing for war were not collateral targets of bombs falling from the sky as were millions of Iranians during the Iraq/Iran war. The accuracy of the smartest guided missiles is not adequate to selectively spare thousands of years of Iran’s historical buildings in a full fledged war. There is no such thing as a kind bomb or kind war. When war is unleashed, the pilot can’t cry over the killing of innocent children, even though he didn’t mean to kill them.

In order for Iranians outside Iran to unite, we don’t need to love each other. We don’t even have to like one another but to bring down the IRI we must respect each other’s differences.

Persian history teaches us that all those who successfully fought for Persia respected their enemy. When that respect disappears, we become over-inflated with confidence and miscalculate the capability of our enemy. Our enemy, the IRI, is smart and has proven it by staying in power for thirty years. For the sake of the country we love and the history we cherish, we must not let anger provoke us to start a war with Iran because, by the time this war is ended, there won’t be anything left of Iran to return to.

Instead of putting a bullet into Khameni’s head, make him suffer as Iranians have for thirty years. Let him shovel dung and clean stables all day in 100 degree Fahrenheit heat in the summer humidity of southern Iran. Torturing him in Evin prison and lashing him to death may appeal to some but that is not the answer. Today’s brutal rulers will become the darling of Amnesty and the United Nations. Killing them will make them eternal martyrs for ignorant people to worship as they do Khomeini. Keeping them alive and subjecting them to the same indignities they imposed on common people would put an end to the legacy of the Islamic Republic and exact retribution to be noted in the pages of history.

Unfettered rage and revenge are primitive. You either choose to emulate your enemy, the callous IRI, or you choose the higher road worthy of a proud and cultured Persia.

My advice as a human being and, most of all, as an Iranian is: in the struggle against our enemy, we must not become like them. Their blood and souls are as dirty as a pig’s gut. Don’t let it tempt you.