Iranian Foreign Minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, and NPR’s Ms. Malley after the U.S.-Iran Nuclear Agreement

Iranian officials occasionally have agreed to interviews with NPR, and Iran’s foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, spoke with us on Sept. 26. Less than two weeks later, we played portions of that interview to Malley, creating a rare exchange of views.

Criticism has only grown in recent weeks as Iran’s government has repressed citizens protesting the death of a woman in police custody. Morality police arrested Mahsa Amini on Sept. 13, alleging she had not dressed modestly enough. The U.S. still regards Iran as an adversary, and sanctioned Iranian officials on Thursday for their role in crushing the demonstrations. The US loosened its sanctions on tech companies that may help Iranians evade government controls of the internet.

In an interview with NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly, Iran’s Foreign Minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian — speaking through his interpreter — dismissed the impact of the protests, called the demonstrators “rioters,” and said that “nothing important had happened.”

“What the United States wants is a government that respects the rights of the people of Iran,” Robert Malley said. It isn’t a policy of regime change. It is a policy of support. people who are protesting peacefully, because they want to be able not to wear a headscarf or to live their lives in ordinary ways, and yet they face an oppressive system… And, you know, we hear Iranian officials blame the U.S.. It’s fine to blame Israel, as long as you blame others. They shouldn’t be looking too far. They should look closer at home.”

The US, Iran and European countries were close to a nuclear agreement, according to the Iranian government’s deputy foreign minister. “We’re at a stage where there are just a couple of issues remaining on the table, but which are very significant and important.”

On the demise of the 2015 agreement that gave Iran sanctions relief in return for limits on Iran’s nuclear program, the diplomat pointed to the U.S. pulling out of the deal. The deal was broken when the Trump administration reimposed sanctions. The agreement had limits on Iran’s nuclear activity.

The foreign minister also discussed the negotiations over the release of Siamak Namazi, an Iranian-American who was detained in 2015 and has been in Tehran’s Evin prison. At least three U.S. citizens have been held in Iran.

That Iranians are risking their lives and freedom to stand up to their government has sparked hope among many that change is coming. CNN has a new report.

ALINEJAD: Amini was just 22 years old. She came from Saqqez to take a break. Then she got arrested by the so-called morality police – because I call them the hijab police.

And for your audience, if they don’t know what morality police means, they’re a bunch of police walking in the streets, telling people whether their way of wearing hijab is proper or not.

The Iranian Women’s Protest Revolution What Matters: The Beginning of an End for a Nation in a Strongly Antiferromagnetic Background

WHAT MATTERS: The Iranian government has tried to crack down on this. We see video that gets out of Iran of these protests. Things have not been the same since the death of Mahsa.

Alinejad. This will not happen in a day or two. This is the beginning of an end. It takes time. It’s close to the revolution of 40 years ago. People were taking to the streets for like one month and were going back home and then coming back again. The national strike helped many people. This is just the beginning of the end for me and millions of other people.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/07/politics/iran-women-protest-revolution-what-matters/index.html

What happened when a woman was shot and killed in a protest against the government’s forced hijab and gender apartheid regime?

Now some reports say more than 130 people have been killed. But it’s strongly believed the number is much more than this. Only in Zahedan on only one day, they opened fire on those who were praying. Who was praying. There were more than 80 people killed in Zahedan.

(CNN has not verified all of these claims. Related CNN report: Iranian security forces beat, shot and detained students of elite Tehran university, witnesses say.

CNN can’t independently verify the death toll because it’s impossible for anyone outside of the Iranian government to confirm it, and different estimates have been given by opposition groups.

Alinejad: The Iranian regime cut off the internet in some cities to prevent the rest of the world from getting to know about the crackdown, to get to learn about the number of people killed.

The government killed hundreds of people and jailed many more in its response. In December, the government began executing people involved in the protests on charges ranging from assault to murder.

(CNN has reported that Najafi’s family said she was shot six times and never made it home from a protest. She was 23. There are reports of multiple young women killed. Here’s a CNN video report on Nika Shahkarami, whose family found her body at a morgue after not being able to find her for 10 days following an Instagram story of her burning her headscarf.)

AlinejaD: Don’t say for months. I don’t accept that. The building has been going on for a while. The anti-woman laws were pushed back for years by women.

For years and years, these women that you see in the streets, they have been fighting back compulsory hijabs alone. Like lonely soldiers. I myself have published videos of women being beaten by morality police under the hashtag #mycameraismyweapon. I really want you to go and check this hashtag. Brave women filming themselves and being harassed by morality police and saying that they don’t know what to wear.

This is being built up by women within the society practicing their civil disobedience in bravely saying no to forced hijab and the gender apartheid regime for years and years. That is my opinion. Mahsa’s name became a symbol of resistance for women to take to the streets in large numbers. That is the new thing.

As a group of 12 female foreign ministers declared in an October 26 statement, “we have a moral obligation” to support this women-led movement. But the people demanding their freedom in Iran need more than symbolic backing – even if symbols matter.

The greatest threat to the Islamic Republic are the people who are facing guns and bullets, because they want to break this weakest pillar of the Islamic Republic.

What matters. In Iran and Russia, social media helps spread the word and is important to organizing protests. In the US, it is seen as a threat to our democracy because it is where misinformation is spread. I wonder if you had any thoughts on that dichotomy.

ALINEJAD: Let me be very clear with you. Tech companies are helping the Islamic Republic. Iranians are not allowed to use social media. The leaders like Khamenei and other officials who ban 80 million people from using social media, they all have verified accounts. They have multiple accounts on social media. The Iranian regime has a history of cutting off the Internet for its own people, but they still use it to spread misinformation on social media.

(Accounts that appear to be associated with Khamenei are on Twitter and Instagram and have large followings. They’re not verified by the two popular social networks. Twitter did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for Meta said this in an email: “Iranians use apps like Instagram to stay close to their loved ones, find information and shed light on important events – and we hope the Iranian authorities restore their access soon. Our teams are following the situation closely, and are focused on removing any content that is not in line with the rules, as quickly as possible.

The thing is, at the same time, the US government, we’re pleased that they’re providing internet access for Iranians. This is good. We appreciate that.

They condemn the Iranian government for killings, but they still give money to the same murderers. And I don’t understand this contradiction.

If the US re-joins an agreement whereby Iran can sell oil in exchange for abandoning nuclear weapons capability, the US could give Iran billions of dollars of frozen Iranian funds. Recent talks did not go well. Read more.)

Money goes to the benefit of people, that’s what people believe. It isn’t sent to the people. The money goes to Syria, Lebanon, to Hamas, Hezbollah, to terrorist organizations.

(CNN isn’t able to confirm that all the money goes to terrorist organizations or that none of it goes to Iranian people. The US government says that Iran funds terror groups outside of its borders, and that its own Islamic Revolutionary Guard is a terror group.

The fate of the nuclear deal: what is the fate of Iran? What do we need to do about it? A challenge for the United Nations and the world

What matters is that I want to talk about one of the dichotomy points you have made. You wrote about how feminists all over the world need to pay attention and take to the streets.

The moral tests for the rest of the world will come from the relentless bravery of the Iranian women. More than they have been given, they deserve.

It seems that my body choice is not as important as it is in the West when it comes to Iran and Afghanistan.

WHAT MATTERS: You took part this week in an Oslo Freedom Forum event in New York with other dissidents from Russia and Venezuela. Those are two places that are repressive, and they’re also funded largely by oil. The US wants to buy more oil. I just wondered if you had any larger comments to make on this question?

Let me show you what you can do. Just two months ago, (Vladimir) Putin went to Iran. (Nicolás) Maduro from Venezuela went to Iran … from China to Russia to Venezuela to Nicaragua, everywhere. The leaders of autocracies and dictatorships agree on a lot of things. They’re helping each other. They support each other in their opposition to the protests happening in each country. But we the freedom fighters, we the opposition to these dictators must be united as well, because when we fight against autocracy or dictatorship on our own, we’re not going to be successful.

Alinejad argued that the United Nations is useless. The United Nations makes it priority to include most countries over action. Russia is on the Security Council while Iran is on the UN Commission on Women’s Rights.

Global isolation may be damaging to the regime, but global integration would be dangerous, as Mr. Sadjadpour wrote. The regime might be able to keep its repressive rule and just the right amount of isolation. Ayatollah Khamenei wants to be “neither North Korea nor Dubai. He wants to be able to sell Iran’s oil on the global market without sanctions, but he doesn’t want Iran to be fully integrated in the global system.”

The Biden administration wants to revive the nuclear deal. The future of the deal is in the balance, with the U.S. officials expressing low confidence that Iran will revive the agreement.

Whatever the future of the nuclear deal, its fate should not preclude the United States and its allies from vigorously supporting the desire of Iranian protesters for global integration, through better access to the essential tools of communication, organizing and protest.

The moral case is not solely the outrageous behavior of the clerical regime. It is also the fact that so much of the economic suffering of the Iranian people — rents that have multiplied, goods that have become prohibitively expensive, a currency that has plummeted so low that Iranians need stacks of bills to do everyday shopping — is the result of waves of American sanctions.

Editor’s Note: This story was adapted from the September 18 edition of CNN’s Meanwhile in America, the email about US politics for global readers. Click here to read past editions and subscribe.

Former President Barack Obama has reflected upon his response to previous Iranian uprisings as historic protests and a bloody authoritarian backlash convulse Iran.

During the 2009 Green Movement protests in Iran, the then-President trod cautiously – to the ire of critics in the Republican Party and abroad – ostensibly because he wanted to avoid giving Iranian authorities an excuse for a brutal crackdown.

Obama later toughened his position, but was accused of pulling his punches to avoid complicating the path to a nuclear deal with Tehran (that he eventually achieved in 2015).

Obama now feels that his initial stance on Iran was wrong, as he explained on Crooked Media’s “Pod Save America” podcast, run by a group of his former White House aides.

Hopes, Hopes and Mistakes for President Biden and the Iranian Regime in the Light of the Iranian Reaction to Mahsa Amini

Every time we see a flash, a glimpse of hope, I think we have to point it out. It needs a spotlight to shine on it. We have to express some solidarity about it,” he said.

A former president often criticizes himself in the public eye. But they also show the advantage of perspective that sitting presidents don’t enjoy, since they must make tough decisions on the fly in the heart of crises.

President Joe Biden, with his experience in the previous Democratic administration, has more forcefully supported the protests in Iran. It may also help that his hopes of reviving the Iran nuclear deal are getting more distant by the week.

On Friday, for instance, Biden told reporters that he was “stunned” by the reaction in Iran to the death of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old whose death after detention by Tehran’s morality police sparked the latest uprising.

But while foreign policy partisans in Washington often seem to believe the weight of US words alone – backed up with sanctions – will topple the Iranian regime, things are a lot more complicated.

The International Journal of Women’s Rights and Freedoms in Iran (with an Appropriate Introduction by Frida Ghitis)

Editor’s Note: Frida Ghitis, (@fridaghitis) a former CNN producer and correspondent, is a world affairs columnist. She writes a weekly opinion column for CNN, a column for The Washington Post and a column for World Politics Review. The views expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN.

There were police who fired live bullets and tear gas to stop thousands of people from gathering in Saqqez where the 22-year- old is now buried to honor him on an important day.

In Isfahan the women waved scarves in the air chanting “Azadi, Azadi!” (“Freedom, freedom!”) in Farsi. Young women wearing veils walking on the city sidewalks were in violation of Iranian law. In Amol, where authorities have already shot and killed protesters, unarmed men and women marched directly toward armed security forces, kneeled, put their hands up, and declared themselves ready to die for their cause.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/29/opinions/iran-protests-mahsa-amini-support-ghitis/index.html

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps is a threat to the future. Demonstration of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United Nations

But the protests are persisting. The uprising lasted for seven weeks, which is longer than any uprising since 1979 when the Pahlavi regime was overthrown. The protests are completely different than their predecessors. The Green Movement supported a candidate. In 2019, demonstrators called out harsh economic conditions.

Let’s be honest. From the first day of protests, this has been inspiring, but also terrifying to watch. The Islamic Republic is capable of many things. It can seem irresponsible to encourage people who are brave, because we fear for their safety. The odds, after all, are stacked against them. And yet, they have made the choice to continue the fight. They deserve our solidarity.

That is a good start. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps should be banned from entering the US because of their involvement in crushing the protests. Other countries should follow suit.

Germany this week announced that, given the situation, there can be no “business as usual,” with Iran, launching a wide-ranging diplomatic response that includes a review of bilateral trade and financial relations, support for nongovernmental organizations monitoring crimes against protestors and expanded protections for “particularly vulnerable Iranians,” among other efforts.

NPR heard those grievances in conversation with people on the streets of Tehran, who said life in Iran sometimes felt impossible. They described an economy in which basic necessities are expensive, unemployment is high, and a restricted internet has left the people disconnected from the world.

Iran’s protests against nuclear prisoners, or “mahsa’s death”: a challenge to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights

Four people have been put to death so far and at least 14 more have received death sentences. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said last month that the executions violated due process and amounted to “state-sanctioned killings.”

The government had not arbitrarily imprisoned tens of thousands of people, denied Amir-Abdollahian. He said that everyone who had been detained in the protests “played a role in the riots on the streets” and said hundreds, not thousands, had been detained.

He brushed aside photographic evidence of protester injuries compiled by human rights activists. He said that they had seen the same pictures. “But the question is, who has, in fact, fired those shots: the police or the rioters?”

The people in Iran have the ability to speak their minds, the foreign minister said. Asked about Iranians who declined to speak to NPR, citing fear of authorities and pointing to CCTV cameras, he joked, “You could have interviewed them in a blind spot.” He said that there are not as many cameras on the streets in Iran as they think.

Some of the journalists named on the list worked for well-known outlets in Iran. Niloofar Hamedi of the Shargh Daily newspaper is one of the journalists who helped break the story of Amini’s death.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/09/1155490117/iran-protests-nuclear-prisoners-tehran-mahsa-amini

Iran has enough uranium to make nuclear weapons, a remark on the Tehran-Abdollahian point of view

The head of the I Atomic Energy Agency, Mr. Grossi, said that it has enough highly enriched uranium to make several nuclear weapons. But Amir-Abdollahian said that did not mean Iran was trying to build a nuclear bomb.

“In order to respond to wrong American behavior and within the framework of reciprocity, we leveled up our nuclear activities at home,” he said. “However, when it comes to our beliefs and values, we do not pursue the making of a nuclear bomb.”

The U.S. has mixed messages and there is confusion within the White House, says Tehran-Abdollahian. “If you want to return to the deal, why do you say one thing to the media and the other through our diplomatic exchanges?”

“We’re ready to exchange prisoners,” Amir-Abollahian said, adding that negotiations had been ongoing but that there were “technical steps that need to be taken by Americans.” He didn’t say what those steps were.