What are we to make of this? Iran's ayatollahs have issued both fatwas for and against nuclear weapons in recent months, while the country's National Orchestra performs a Nuclear Energy Symphony. Is Ahmadinejad saying what he really thinks here? Or is this just intended for consumption by his useful idiots, no more real than his recent transparently bogus disavowal of anti-Semitism? From BBC Monitoring (not online), Sept. 21:

From our correspondent Jennifer Fasulo:

Chavez’s Shameful Embrace of Iranian President Ahmadinejad:
Show Solidarity with the Women and People of Iran, not their Oppressors!

Hugo Chavez, one of the key important figures in the left populist movements spreading throughout Latin America, has publicly lauded and embraced Iranian president Ahmadinejad. (See “Two anti-US nations heap praise upon each other,” AP, Sept. 17) It is moments like this, when feminists and any activists who care about women's liberation, are reminded of just how little women’s lives matter in the world of patriarchal nationalist politics.

This blurb appeared in the New York Times Aug. 8:

The authorities have banned a rights group founded in 2002 by a group of lawyers and led by Shirin Ebadi, the only Iranian to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. The Interior Ministry said the group, the Center for Protecting Human Rights, had failed to obtain a valid operating permit. “Its activities are illegal and the violators of this decision will be prosecuted,’’ the ministry said. The group has defended dissidents and journalists and has repeatedly criticized Iran’s hard-line judiciary. Ms. Ebadi, who won the Nobel in 2003 and headed the Tehran City Court from 1975 until the revolution in 1979, after which women were banned from such posts, said her center needed no special permit under the Constitution. Last month, another of the center’s founders, Abdolfattah Soltani, was sentenced to five years in prison.

Our correspondent Mahmood Ketabchi writes for his Hammer & Broom blog:

Thousands of women and male supporters came together on June 12 in Haft Tir Square in Tehran, Iran to protest against anti-women Islamic laws and gender apartheid. A similar rally was held last year on June 12, where participants declared their determination to follow up their just struggle for equality and women's liberation.

Pretty bad times to be part of an ethnic or religious minority in Iran, it seems. From the New York Times, June 1:

Members of the Bahai religious minority in Iran said this week that the government had recently intensified a campaign of arrests, raids and propaganda that was aimed at eradicating their religion in Iran, the country of its birth.

This one is really funny. The ultra-conservative hyper-interventionist Islamophobes at the oddly named Human Events managed to score an interview with Reza Pahlavi, son of the late Shah of Iran and pretender to the throne. But this self-promoting monarchist restorationist, it turns out, is insufficiently bellicose and reactionary for the likes of his interviewers! They keep trying to goad him into supporting military action, and he (to his credit!) won't take the bait. Who'd have thought it would come to this—the scion of the Shah is more progressive (at least in word) than either the ruling mullahs or the beltway neocons who seek to overthrow them!

Dubious reports circulate that a bill pending in Iran would force Jews and other religious minorties to wear identifying insignia—in an obvious echo of Nazi Germany. Predictably, the Iranian regime is calling the allegations a Jewish conspiracy. From the Financial Times:

Iranian officials and politicians have strongly condemned a Canadian newspaper report alleging that Iran had passed a law requiring Jews to wear yellow badges on their clothes.

The BBC reports today that price of oil is back up to over $70 a barrel following a drop of more than $1.50 following news yesterday that Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had written Bush a personal letter. This was initially considered a remarkable overture, unprecedented since the US cut off relations with Iran in 1979, and was thought to signal a thaw in the nuclear crisis. No such luck. The contents of the letter were leaked today, and poured cold water on any hopes for de-escalation. Instead, Ahmadinejad lambasts the Iraq occupation, questions the Holocaust, loans credence to 9-11 conspiracy theory and attacks the legtimacy of the Israeli state. The letter may be addressed to the White House, but it is clearly playing to a very different audience, trying to win global sympathy in what is obviously regarded by both Tehran and Washington as the prelude to an invetiable war. And showing greater strategic savvy than the White House, Ahmadinejad makes clear he is not only playing to the Islamic world, but also Latin America and Africa.