Iran on Fire

One problem the Mad Mullahs of Iran didn’t count on is that, if you stage some sham elections for the benefit of the gullible international press, you have to make sure that the Iranian people get the memo. Some of them seem to be operating under the delusion that the elections actually meant something.

I’ve seen Twitter reports of people chanting from the rooftops, videos of massive protests, and this:

The government is now cutting off electricity to Tehran. For grid repair. At 5am.

You can follow those tweets here. Michael Totten has a continuously updated page here. Jpod sums it up.

For more than a decade, we’ve been hearing about the real Iran—the one whose youth is Westernized, desirous of connection with the United States, and tired of living in a theocracy. It’s too soon to know whether the protests today in Iran represent the fruition of the ideas about popular sentiment and the possibility of an uprising. But it is clear that this is a time of testing for the idea that the mullahcracy can be shaken to its foundations by an aggrieved populace. If it can’t, then the regime will prove itself stronger than some of its most heated critics say it is, and the world will have to adjust accordingly. If this is Tienanmen II, and the regime crushes it, there will be no easy approach to regime change. And there will be no pretending any longer that Iran’s regime isn’t a unified, hardline, irridentist, and enormously dangerous one.

I don’t hold out a lot of hope, really. A huge percentage of Iranians are still anti-Semites who believe in the Twelfth Imam. That kind of hatred and superstition is hard to combat. Note what the protestors are shouting:

“My next door neighbor is an Iranian immigrant who came here in 1977. He just received a SAT phone call from his brother in Tehran who reports that the rooftops of nighttime Tehran are filled with people shouting ‘Allah O Akbar‘ in protest of the government and election results. The last time he remembers this happening is in 1979 during the Revolution. Says the sound of tens of thousands on the rooftops is deafening right now.” It’s almost four in the morning in Iran. (emphasis added)

Update:

Another Twitter feed: ChangeforIran