Depraved Deception

Iran's dissidents are tortured and meet their untimely deaths in the country's prisons and torture chambers. The numbers of dissidents have been steadily increasing in the past several days, post-election; almost a week of unruly dissent. Its primarily the university students, a hard core of young people struggling against the repressive totalitarian government they want no part of, who are targeted by the Revolutionary Guard.

That segment of the Iranian population under 30 years of age represents a full 70% of the population, and that's staggering in and of itself. A young population ruled by a brutally repressive theocratic dictatorship. And since 48% of the voting-age population is female, and it is women who have increasingly borne the brunt of bitter cultural and social backwardness their vote too has been irremediably compromised.

Phalanxes of baton-wielding police have been deployed to beat protesters. Mostly silent protesters, joining their peers in a determined offence against their religiously-fanatic government. Raids on university campuses and dormitories have emptied those halls of academia of students, their professors calling for a halt to the atrocities and their students' incarcerations.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's 62.63% of the popular vote make him a popular and much-valued president in that country indeed. But a foreign reporter, still in Iran, reports having met with someone from the Interior Ministry who claims that the votes never actually were counted; instead numbers were allocated to each candidate as those who oversaw the election process saw fit. And they saw fit to acclaim President Ahmadinejad.

How might Ayatollah Ali Khamenei have imagined that such clumsy machinations would have gone unnoticed and not have provoked a backlash? Is his contempt for the people of Iran so utterly complete? Or is his blase self-assurance so out of proportion to the 'love' of Iranians for their Supreme Leader?