New York protests against Ahmadinejad

international | anti-capitalism | news report Friday October 02, 2009 11:28 by John Cornford - World People's Resistance Movement wprm_ireland at yahoo dot com

Taking advantage of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's appearance at the UN in New York, thousands of Iranians from all across North America and beyond held two days of spirited protests against this icon of hate for many millions of their countrymen. They included a wide range of people, including many veterans of the 1979 revolution driven into exile, and U.S. and Canadian-born youth of Iranian descent awakening – and sometimes reawakening their elders – to political life. They also represented a broad range of political opinion, with a strong showing of forces identifying with the pro-Islamic Republic "Green" reformist opposition of presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, as well as revolutionaries, communists and many others against both the Islamic regime and U.S. imperialism.

On 23 September, as Ahmadinejad spoke to the opening of the UN General Assembly, demonstrators gathered in front of the Iranian mission to the UN and marched to Dag Hammarskjold Plaza in front of the UN headquarters in mid-town Manhattan. Some had started to protest the night before in front of Ahmadinejad's hotel. On 24 September, a huge crowd marched across the Brooklyn Bridge and into Manhattan carrying a banner saying "Ahmadinejad is not my president" stitched together from cloth signed by Iranians across the globe.

When Ahmadinejad's UN speech was first announced, various Iranian groups started to mobilise people to receive him with the biggest Iranian demonstration abroad since the Shah of Iran visited the U.S. not long before his overthrow. The Islamic regime that stole the fruits of the anti-Shah revolution has brought decades of political and economic suffering to the people. The fraud in the June presidential election detonated a crisis in Iranian society and Iran became the scene of protests and struggle against the regime. Thousands have been arrested, and many have been tortured and raped. Hundreds have been murdered in the streets or in prison.

What has been going on in Iran over the last three months has also angered revolutionary organisations and individuals who care about the people, all over the world. Many revolutionaries and progressives in the U.S. not only joined the Iranians to protest against Ahmadinejad and the regime he represents, but also actively helped to organise the demonstrations. Among them were human rights and other organisations and the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA. A large quantity of communist literature in Farsi from the RCP and the Communist Party of Iran (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist) was sold.

Given the presence of many different groups, there were also different slogans representing their political lines, such as "Down with the dictator!", "Ahmadinejad where is your 63 percent?" (the percentage of the vote he claimed to have won in the elections), "Independence, freedom, republic of Iran" and "Torture and rape can't stop us anymore".

Some people marched behind red banners, including a group of ex-political prisoners and families of those killed by the regime's executioners and torturers, chanting slogans targeting both the imperialist system and the whole Islamic political system, and not just one representative or just one faction of the regime. A main slogan was: "From Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib to Evin and Kahrizak: Down with Systems of Torture and Execution", along with "Down with the Islamic regime of Iran".

They also carried pictures of comrades tortured and murdered in the above two mentioned Iranian prisons and others in the 1980s when the communists and other revolutionary organisation were the regime's main targets, and pictures of youth recently murdered by the regime.

Two protests

It can be said that 23 October saw two protests against Ahmadinejad. One, outside the UN building in New York, was aimed at his regime's brutality against the people. The other, in the UN General Assembly and in press conferences by the imperialists and big powers, sought to put pressure on the Islamic regime, focusing on the nuclear issue. But these two protests were posed from two different directions. One was meant to expose the regime's brutality and the crimes it is committing against the Iranian people, while this was not an issue for the imperialists. They do not care about it and even did not want to refer to it in the speeches their representatives gave on this occasion. In fact, objectively their attacks on Ahmadinejad served to divert public attention from the Islamic Republic's brutality against the people and instead sought to turn it towards the nuclear issue and Ahmadinejad's comments on Israel.

Over the last few years Ahmadinejad has been trying to give himself a militant image, coupling provocative remarks about Israel and the Western powers with an outrageous and ridiculous denial of the the Nazi genocide against the Jews. Actually, by putting forward an implicit anti-Semitism and failing to expose Zionism's role in the service of U.S. imperialism, his approach also lets the U.S. off the hook. Perhaps he didn't mind the accusations from the imperialists too. He has previously benefited from them at home and elsewhere in the Middle East, especially when he has been attacked by the Israeli authorities. While the contradiction between his regime and the U.S..-led imperialist countries is real, they both agree that the people have to chose between these two reactionary alternatives, and in that sense their mutual attacks also have an element of mutual support.

In his speech this year, as in previous years, Ahmadinejad also declared the death of Marxism, not only to please the Western powers but also to promote his rotten ideology that is embodied in the last 30 years of terror, torture, murder, rape and imprisonment of the people, and economic misery for the majority. On the contrary, the protest outside the UN building was the real problem for the Ahmadinejad. It helped expose his real nature as a liar, torturer and murderer. He will face the same anywhere else he might visit where there is an Iranian population.