Was anyone really fooled by this sham election? From AP, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:
The leader of a hard-line Islamic group, however, praised the outcome.
“I’m glad and happy to know Iran’s result,” said Irfan Awwas, a leader of Majelis Mujahiddin Indonesia.
The group’s founder, Abu Bakar Bashir, is jailed for his role in the 2002 Bali bombings that killed 202 people.
He said Iranians apparently believe Rafsanjani is “more fit to manage international relations, especially with Western countries, but not to lead the country.”
Clerics led by supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei have true power in Iran and are able to overrule elected officials. But reformers, who lost parliament in elections last year, had been hoping to retain some hand in government.
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw also criticized the election.
“For the Iranian people to have a fully free choice about their country’s future, they should be able to vote for candidates who hold the full range of political views, not just candidates selected for them,” Straw said.
But it’s all America’s fault, of course:
Pakistani Muslim scholar Komaruddin Hidayat attributed the hard-liner’s victory to anger over U.S. foreign policy.
“America has put Islam in a corner,” Hidayat said. “America attacked Iraq based on false reasoning just as it did in Afghanistan. This has given conservatives the chance to gain power in some Islamic countries.”
How then did they gain power in Iran, decades before America entered Iraq or Afghanistan?