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03/04/2006:

"Bomb blast hits Iranian oil city"

A bomb exploded in the southern Iranian city of Ahwaz, hours after two men were hung for an attack last year, according to Iranian reports.
The percussion bomb shattered the windows of a building in the Kianpars area of the city on Thursday evening, but no casualties were reported.

The attack is the latest in a series to hit the restive Khuzestan Province, at the heart of Iran's oil industry.

Eight people died in bomb attacks on a government office and bank a month ago.

Iran has accused British forces stationed just across the Iran-Iraq border of co-operating with ethnic Arab separatist groups who said they were behind the blasts. The UK has denied any involvement.
bbc.co.uk


The Monolith Crumbles: Reality and Revisionism in Iran
It is a well-known fact – except among the American media, the American government, and about 98.7 percent of the American people – that Iran is not a monolithic state where sheep-like masses bray with a single voice in chorus with their demented leaders, but is, on the contrary, a complex society where many conflicting opinions on matters political, religious, social, historical, etc., contend with each other in open debate. True, it does have a government dominated by repressive clerics, who exercise the kind of veto power over secular law that George W. Bush's vaunted "base" dreams of seeing established in the United States; but Iran is far more open than, say, Saudi Arabia or China, just to name two countries where the Bush Family and friends have long engorged their bellies through insider connections with the ruling cliques.

Therefore it must have come as a great shock to the system for Americans this week to hear Iran's former president, Mohammad Khatami, rail against the ignorant Holocaust revisionism mouthed by his successor, the hardline flibbertigibbet Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. (Excerpts after the jump below.) Or rather, it would have come as a shock to the American system to hear Khatami's words – if Americans had actually been told about them. But it serves no interests among America's own ruling cliques to dilute the current line of the day: that Iran is a hellhole of unremitting evil, a new Nazi Germany led by a new Hitler. So Khatami's remarks, reported widely elsewhere in the world, were not allowed to disturb the lie-drugged slumber of the American consciousness.