Ahmadinejad Is Declared Winner – Arrests Rival Mousavi; UPDATE: Protests Still Ongoing in Iran (50-100 People Dead)
No surprise at all – Ahmadinejad (Immajihad) has been declared the winner of this year’s election in Iran. ACORN and the black panthers made their way to Iran to extend polling hours so dead people, non-citizens, Disney characters, and others could vote more than once. As much as Iran likes to tout the fact that it has a democratic election, it is more like North Korea’s election process where Kim Jong Il receives 150% of the vote.
The most alarming aspect of this win however, is today’s report that Mousavi, Ahmadinejad’s opponent, has been arrested. Obama and Ahmadinejad seems to have something in common; they both don’t like dissent.
Iranian presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi was reportedly arrested Saturday following the reformist’s defeat at the polls by hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Supporters of Mousavi, the main challenger to Ahmadinejad, responded to the election with the most serious unrest in Tehran in a decade and charged that the result was the work of a dictatorship.
Mousavi’s arrest was reported by an unofficial source, according to whom the presidential hopeful was arrested en route to the home of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Nevertheless, there were a number of contradictory reports from Iran on Saturday, in large part due to the heavy restrictions imposed on the media in the Islamic Republic, in particular on foreign reporters.
This is one of the reasons Iran must be watched closely. We cannot continue to pander to volatile regimes or their dictators. Nobody knows if Mousavi would have been a better choice, and Obama cannot claim victory with his Cairo speech either. I hope that this pseudo election curtails some of the naivete of the current administration, but I fear that would just be wishful thinking.
UPDATE:
The protests are still continuing after the arrest of Mousavi and it has been estimated that somewhere between 50-100 people are dead so far.
