Community | December 21, 2009 | 3 comments

Iranian spirital leader Montazeri dies; Opposition protests at his funeral

source: http://blogs.current.com/news/2009/12/21/iranian-spirital-leader-montazeri-dies-opposition-p...

afitzgerald
The passing of an Iranian cleric has led to a new surge of opposition protesting in the Iranian city of Qom. Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri was one of the top clerics of Shia Islam and has been a key voice criticizing the regime in Tehran. He died in his sleep Saturday. Tehran Bureau has a fantastic obituary tracing his involvement in the movement that brought down the Shah through his opposition to Khamenei's role as Supreme Leader.

Montazeri's burial in Qom has attracted mourners from around the country and as more and more people have gathered, the event has turned more and more into an opposition protest against the regime.

The New York Times Lede Blog has been collecting mourning videos coming out of Qom and elsewhere in the country:
'Thanks to the reader who wrote to explain that the chant heard in this clip — “aza, azast emrooz, rooze azast emrooz, rahbar sabz iran pish khodast emrooz” — means, “mourning, there’s mourning, there’s mourning today; today is the day of mourning, the leader of Green Iran is with God today.” The reader explains, “While Montazeri was not considered the leader of the Green Movement, this points to him as the spiritual head of the Greens.”'

Despite the best efforts of the Iranian regime to defuse opposition protests, they seem to be unstoppable. Perhaps not in the same sizes as the demonstrations in June and July, but the fact that the opposition continues to use big events like this as a platform for protest shows its stubborn tenacity in the face of violence and media clampdowns.

FROM THE CURRENT NEWS BLOG: http://blogs.current.com/news/2009/12/21/iranian-spirital-leader-montazeri-dies-...

TEHRAN BUREAU OBIT: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tehranbureau/2009/12/grand-ayatollah-hos...
LEDE BLOG POST: http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/21/updates-on-dissident-clerics-funeral...
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3 comments // Iranian spirital leader Montazeri dies; Opposition protests at his funeral // Video

  • WhiteNoise
    • 0
      WhiteNoise  
    • Image

    • Obscurantism (from the Latin obscurans, "darkening") is the practice of deliberately preventing the facts or full details of something from becoming known.

      Enlightenment philosophers used the term "obscurantism" for conservative, especially religious enemies of progressive Enlightenment and its concept of the liberal spread of knowledge.

      "The essential element in the black art of obscurantism is not that it wants to darken individual understanding but that it wants to blacken our picture of the world, and darken our idea of existence." - Friedrich Nietzsche

      Obscurantism is certainly a factor in the horrible way women are being abused in Iran in particular... http://www.iranhumanrights.org/category/womens/
      ...but in all monotheist religions in general. One doesn't have to be an atheist to arrive at this conclusion...

      "The three monotheisms, animated by the same genealogical death instinct, share a series of identical contempt: hatred of reason and intelligence; hatred of freedom; hatred of all books in the name the one & only; hatred of life; hatred of sexuality, of women and pleasure; hatred of feminity; hatred of the body, of desires & impulses. Instead of all that, Judaism, Christianity and Islam defend: faith and belief, obedience and submission, a taste for death and a passion for the beyond, asexual angel and chastity, virginity and monogamic fidelity, the wife and the mother, the soul and spirit. In other words, life crucified and celebrated nothingness" – Michel Onfray

      Therefore the image chosen...

      "Remember there's a big difference between kneeling down and bending over." -Frank Zappa

    • 2 years ago
  • WhiteNoise
    • 0
      WhiteNoise  

    • NEDA IS ALIVE
      MAHMOUD, CLERICS & REVOLUTIONARY GUARDS ARE DEAD

      FREE IRAN FROM OBSCURANTISM

      OBSCURANTISM : HUMANITY'S COMMON PLAGUE
      An eye opener from a top Islam scholar

      Obscurantism in Christianity, Hinduism & Islam
      There is nothing in the teachings of Islam that contends against learning, against science, and against technology. Today one can find that Muslims have become increasingly marginalized.

      The literacy among Muslims is about thirty to thirty five percent on the average and among rural women it is only about two to four per cent. The status of Muslims in the present world is at the bottom. Economically Muslims are poor, in education they are backwards and in science and technology they are marginal.

      There must be a deep examination of what has gone wrong. Why non-Muslims particularly in the West have achieved supremacy in every field of human endeavor. What is the reason that the Muslims have fallen from a position of top of the civilization to the bottom of civilization?

      One of the reasons or a major reason is OBSCURANTISM. What is obscurantism? Obscurantism is the act of obscuring, or striving to prevent enlightenment, scientific advancement, modernity or to hinder the progress of knowledge and wisdom.
      http://www.irfi.org/articles/articles_51_100/obscurantism.htm

    • 2 years ago
  • WhiteNoise
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