My comment on Tehran: Split Between Liberal, Hard-Line

SALLY BUZBEE from Associated Press posted this article about Tehran capital of Islamic republic of Iran. I comment on each section of her article.

SALLY BUZBEE wrote:

This is affluent north Tehran, where clerics are rare, lifestyles are relatively liberal and Iran's growing isolation from the world is a source of deep anxiety.

No mam, they are not rare in north Tehran. They live in north section of Tehran in huge mansions but mostly they don't appear with their special clothes around their living place! because they don't want to recognize by their neighbourhood.

Not far to the south, though, in a dilapidated bureaucratic building near the city's government center, and farther to the south in Tehran's sprawling poorer neighborhoods, things are different.

It's very very different in the middle and farther to the south.

It is the paradox of Tehran today — a city and people surprisingly cosmopolitan and far different from Western stereotypes, paired with an ultraconservative government working to consolidate its power and at sharp odds with the West.

Mam, The fascist dictator Islamic Republic of Iran's regime is not going to consolidate with west just they want to make sure their dictatorship regime will stay in power!

Yet, whether modern or strictly traditional, many Iranians share one thing: A strong national pride and desire for respect from the outside world, sharpened by their sense of being under siege.

Islamic regime has disgraced Iranians.

"The world does not understand us," said Shahryar Eivazzadeh, in his early 30s, who works at a software
company in north Tehran. Many young people may dislike the current government but they shudder at the thought of attack by the West, he said.

I have heard from lots of people in Iran that they would prefer to change the regime on any price. They believe they are not living but struggling with life so it's much better to end this torment.

"Not everything is so bad here," he said of the criticism Iran faces. "It's not that simple."

Mam, did you ask what's good there? Has regime done anything good? supporter of regime, like Shahryar will reply, "This regime brought back Islam to us"!

During key times, such as the recent anniversary of the war's start, hard-liners may deliberately use such images to shore up their influence. But even educated middle-class Iranians say their country sits in a rough neighborhood, surrounded by Arab countries that are not friendly, and that Iran needs ways to defend itself.

Such shared national sentiment aside, much of Tehran feels split.

Mam! These days you can find more people who would say they will fight to free their country from mullahs at any price. you can call this one, our national sentiment.

Hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won many votes in the conservative, poorer southern neighborhoods of Tehran, where people responded to his populist call for sharing the country's oil wealth.

Little of that sharing has happened, however, and even former Ahmadinejad supporters in parliament and the media have raised complaints about his economic performance.

Well, nothing good has happened since 1979, mam. People are terribly poorer than before. They struggling with high inflation rate in their daily life and oppression form government.

In the city's more upscale and modern north, the criticism is much sharper: Some shake their heads in disgust when the president's name comes up.

In one office building the morning after Ahmadinejad's recent speech at Columbia University, a middle-aged employee laughed ruefully and told a friend, "It's better not to know" what Ahmadinejad had said. "We don't deserve such a guy," he said, asking that his name not be used. The hardest-line newspapers, however, were full of praise.

The same divisions play out on the streets.

Many people in Iran have got this knowledge that they have to get rid of this regime and build a new democratic regime based on civil values, not religious thoughts!

Even before the 1979 Islamic revolution and during the period immediately after, Tehran's northern
neighborhoods, especially the affluent suburbs stretching up into the foothills that ring the city, were a more Westernized bastion, where women often dressed in Western clothes, supporters of the shah's regime lived in villas and even some fast-food restaurants flourished.

The south was home to the poorer and more conservative, many of them economic migrants from Iran's provinces who
came to find work and crowded into small apartments, sometimes in neighborhoods with no working sewage systems.

The bulk of protests and street fighting surrounding the revolution occurred in the city's center, especially around Tehran University and the long boulevard now called Vali Asr, but supporters of revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini recruited many of their "foot
soldiers" from Tehran's southern neighborhoods. And Khomeini, on his return to the country from exile, based his headquarters there.

If You go south, you will see more poor thus more religious.

Over the years, and particularly after reformist President Mohammad Khatami came to power in the late 1990s, personal freedoms again exploded in the city's north as women began dressing more liberally and modern shops sprang up.

President Mohammad Khatami wasn't reformist in any way. During his presidency, students get killed, tortured and poisoned but he didn't even react. He lied like all of them. By the way, what do you expect from an Islamic state but lies?!

Even after the reform movement stalled and Ahmadinejad was elected in late 2005, the northern neighborhoods have remained something of a haven for the more liberal and
well-off — with modern freeways, new and often graceful high-rise apartment buildings and green parks.

Reform movement stopped because President Mohammad Khatami was against reform.

Nevertheless, the Ahmadinejad era has brought changes: Officials have cracked down on private freedoms in recent months, including stopping women on the streets for not properly covering their heads.

They push people hard to be real Muslim like Taliban government in Afghanistan.

Yet in northern neighborhoods, young men still throng to hip hair salons at indoor shopping centers, the stylists and their customers on full display to passing young women, through plate-glass windows. Underground rock bands draw
fans, and pre-Revolutionary music plays from car stereos.

Yes and if you would research more, you would know that most shopping centers and high-rise buildings are belong to these mullahs and their dynasties.

In Tehran's sprawling metropolitan area of 9 million, an estimated 60 percent of the population is younger than 25, and thus born sometime after the 1979 Islamic revolution.

At outdoor cafes in the northern foothills, families talk
about the hassles of heavy traffic and gasoline rationing and their fears of being priced out of the city's inflationary housing market. They swap sarcastic quips about the president, apparently unconcerned if someone overhears.

They also express some gloom about the future: Tips for obtaining a bank account in nearby Dubai are traded intently, at a time when U.S. government pressure on European and Asian banks to stop transactions with Iran has dried up access to the outside world economy.

People who has access to petrol money, they already transferred their dollars and offices to Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Only miles to the south, however, many women still wear the long, enveloping black chador as they go out to shop or take children to school. Pictures of Khomeini and the current supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, stare down from murals on many streets.

Can you tell me what percent of Iranians are poor? I tell you, at least 50 percent.

And hard-line figures like Hossein Shariatmadari, close to Khamenei, cast Iran's differences with the United States as an unending ideological struggle between their Islamic theocracy and a plundering, arrogant America.

Speaking in his office near the city's government center, the map of Syria and Israel on a wall nearby, Shariatmadari said Iran is strong enough to resist whatever the United States might throw its way.

Even if Iran curbed its nuclear program, the United States would merely come after Iran for something else, he said. The point is moot anyway, he said, because Iran will never give up the nuclear program.

"We simply want to control our own resources, run our own affairs," he said. "The mistake that the U.S. administration makes is to threaten Iran ... They don't understand the Iranian nation."

Shariatmadari, you should know, most people are no more fool of Islamic regime. Mullahs and their supporter, like you and even Islam is nothing for them anymore. You won't stand any chance to survive if people have the world support.

Mam, you didn’t mention anything about students and political prisoners, torturing them, censorship and violence by regime towards people! You didn’t write anything about drugs, poverty, prostitution and HIV.

At the end, you should do better job.