Iran: “Our friend Mr. ElBaradei” in Egypt

Iranian bloggers from across the political spectrum continue to share their opinions on uprisings in the Arab world.

Masih, a very dynamic conservative Islamist blogger explains in a very long post why Iran's Hizbollah should not destroy Egyptian opposition figure Mohamed Mustafa ElBaradei or “how not to transform our clear victory into a defeat”. The blogger talks about the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood's support for ElBaradei and writes:

He [as director of International Atomic Agency] had good relations on the nuclear issue with Iran's regime and if he comes to power he will continue a friendly relation with the [Iranian] regime and Turkey's Erdogan. I should add that we do not need Egypt to be engaged in war with Israel. What we need is for Egypt to open Rafah‘s borders to make it possible for us [Iran] to send weapons to the Palestinian territories and shake Mahmoud Abbas's power pillars there.

At the end, the blogger says we should not pay attention to the recent activities of the Greens [the opposition] and argues that they are just taking advantage of the current situation in Egypt to alleviate the pain of their defeats.

Bahman Azizi has published several photos from Iran's Islamic Revolution in 1979 and compares them with some from the current uprising in Egypt – from street fighting to solidarity between protesters and soldiers.

(Egypt's photo is above, and Iran's below, both photos are from the Fars News site).

Azzarmehr says the Iranian protest movement in 2009 was larger than the Egyptian and Tunisian ones but that the repression is much harder. He says:

Watching the pictures from Tunisia and Egypt, it looks like the crowd sizes in Iran were much larger. None of the protests in Egypt or Tunisia came anywhere near the three million crowd who came to the streets in Tehran, six days after the fraudulent elections in June last year. The repression by the regime in Iran was many times more brutal and savage than that in Tunisia or Egypt however. People in Egypt and Tunisia were not attacked in their homes and pulled from their roof tops for simply chanting Allah Akbar at night. The injured protesters in Tunisia and Egypt were not attacked in hospitals and dragged from their hospital beds. Protesters were not arrested and bused into detention centres like Kahrizak and raped in Tunisia and Egypt like they were in Iran.

In his blog Negahe No, Shahini, an Islamic cleric, compares Hosni Mubarak to Nelson Mandela and writes that Mandela left power when he was very popular and that people pray for him, but that for Mubarak everything is about him. The blogger makes a mistake, thinking Mubarak was democratically elected until now and simply does not want to relinquish power.

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