Commentators In Iran Call On Officials To Reconcile With People
Commentators on both sides of Iran's factional divide continue to criticize the government and offer advice on what is needed to get out of the political impasse.
Commentators on both sides of Iran's factional divide continue to criticize the government and offer advice on what is needed to get out of the political impasse.
Referring to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's recent speech in which he said, "The enemy has started to prepare its artillery against the upcoming elections in Iran," conservative commentator Mohammad Mohajeri quipped in a column in the reformist Etemad newspaper: "What can the enemy do to harm the elections?" and explained that "downplaying the importance of voter turnout, manipulating the election process, rigging the elections, and helping unqualified people to win the elections are among the things the enemy can do to that end."
The commentator was referring to the interference of the Guardian Council, an undemocratic body inserted into the constitution, that rejected hundreds of candidates in the parliamentary election in 2020, and again rejected qualified contenders in the 2021 presidential vote.
Mohajeri pointed out that the enemy cannot interfere with the process of elections. Those who interfere are Islamic Republic officials. executives, supervisory bodies, and security organizations. The enemies will begin their attacks and propaganda only after state officials and institutions make big mistakes by intervening in the election process with the aim of changing the results, he said.
Mohajeri added: "The Guardian Council is where most of such mistakes are made. It is involved from the beginning to the end of the elections and its behavior has always been controversial. The council vets the candidates and appoints the inspectors and supervisors."
He further pointed out that many of those who have been disqualified by the Guardian Council in previous years are well-known political figures who would have been more useful than the current members of the parliament.
Meanwhile, reformist commentator Abbas Abdi accused current officials of making the government useless by bringing it into constant confrontation with the people and their demands. This approach, he said, “will tire everyone including yourselves and I can see the signs of this fatigue in your behavior.”
"The government's interventionist approach and its insistence on excessive and often unnecessary control and punishment, as well as its confrontational approach and its refusal to hold any dialogue have a destructive impact on many economic, political, social and cultural processes including the country's foreign policy," Abdi said.
"When we follow the news, we see many examples of that confrontational behavior for instance in trying to control prices through issuing orders. Everyone, except the government, knows that this does not work. Not only it does not work, it also leads to corruption. The government uses the same wrong methods to fix interest rates, foreign exchange rates and the price of eggs, utilities, fuel, rent and so on.
The government intervenes in everything, including dress code and childbirth, which are issues that cannot be regulated through confrontation, penalties and imprisonment," Abdi added.
The prominent commentator stressed that such methods can only widen the gap between the people and the government.
Meanwhile, shedding light on the bigger picture, former government spokesman and moderate politician Ali Rabiei wrote in article in Etemad that "All revolutions in the Middle East have given governments in the region a license to violate citizenship and human rights as well as democratic rules."
He suggested that governments that rule in the name of revolutions need to find a way to reconcile revolutionary values and citizens' rights by giving the people the right to complain to the judiciary system if government officials undermine their essential rights.
“The release of water in February of last year caused the wetland to become wet by six or seven percent, but because this water flow did not continue and we faced the hot season, it was ineffective,” Hossein Akbari, Deputy of Environmental Protection of Esfahan (Isfahan) Province told Thursday.
Akbari further pointed out that a total of about 15 million cubic meters of water and sewage reached the wetland last year (ending on March 21) which was ineffective for Gavkhouni's regeneration.
A salt marsh with a salinity of 31.5% and an average depth of about one meter, the wetland is home to a variety of migratory birds including flamingos, ducks, geese, gulls, pelicans, and grebes.
Since 1900, nearly 64% of the world's wetlands have disappeared, and 35% have vanished since 1970, according to the Global Wetland Outlook 2021.
Many of Iran's wetlands are already on the verge of extinction. The country is known to have 141 wetlands spread across three million hectares.
As a result of the fast-disappearing wetlands, the country has suffered a growing water crisis, which has fueled anger and discontent. The annual rainfall has plummeted to almost one-third of the global average, with the majority of provinces increasingly arid.
The device was showcased as “the first product of the quantum processing algorithm” on the sidelines of a meeting on "Quantum Processing" at the Navy’s Imam Khomeini Maritime University in Noshahr, in the northern province of Mazandaran last week.
Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari, the Coordinating Deputy of the Islamic Republic’s Army and the former Commander of the Navy, officially unveiled the device after he delivered a speech about the country’s advances in modern technologies.
Describing quantum and plasma technologies as the leading fields in future wars, he said, “In order to deal with future threats, it is necessary to pay attention to new and ground-breaking technologies.”
The controversy ensued after people started publishing photos of the exact processing board, which apparently is a low-cost development board by US-based hardware and software company Digilent, that has been in the market for about $600. The name of the brand and the model (ZedBoard Zynq-7000 ARM/FPGA SoC Development Board) is clearly seen on the board that was advertised as the achievement of the Army.
In the description of the device, state media said it is “a system to counter navigation deception in detecting surface vessels using the quantum algorithms.” There is in fact no quantum component, such as a quantum circuit or processor, in the device. Therefore, if the device does not have such a processor, it cannot use an esoteric quantum algorithm, a step-by-step procedure, where each step can be performed on a quantum computer.
A few days after the ceremony, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said, “In the era of artificial intelligence, quantum, and the Internet, it is not possible to work with the same tools as 40 years ago. The tools must be relevant to the times.”
Ali Akbar Salehi, the former head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI), repeatedly talked about developments in Iran’s quantum technology sphere and also inaugurated Iran’s first large laboratory dedicated to quantum physics in 2021. “The Atomic Energy Organization began work on quantum technology in 2016 and it is responsible for monitoring scientific developments throughout the world and prioritizing high tech technologies”, he said, but almost no tangible results were announced by the lab.
Using modern technology terminology has always been a propaganda tactic by the Islamic Republic’s officials, the latest of which was Iran’s so-called “hypersonic missile,” a descriptor that is convoluted with technical inaccuracies – to say the least.
Famously, in April 2020, soon after the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards claimed it had developed a "breakthrough" super-device that could detect people infected with coronavirus within 100 meters. IRGC Commander-in-chief Hossein Salami unveiled the device, which consisted of a handheld detector, an antenna, and a dish-like part that could detect the virus “with a reliability rate of around 80 percent” and promised its mass production.
Such claims are predominantly seen in military contexts in Iran but they have also become a laughing stock since President Ebrahim Raisi took office. He is known to have only elementary school education apart from Islamic seminary courses.
Earlier in the year, a university professor’s uninformed claim that the Python software program can 'predict the future' has caused new embarrassment for the government in Iran, in a scandal that was named ‘Python-Gate.’