Videos: Demonstrators Shot in Tehran Streets

Two videos of the same event, a woman shot (probably dead), in the streets of Tehran:

And another shooting:

Here is a student shot after he threw rocks:

A shooting victim is evacuated:

51 thoughts on “Videos: Demonstrators Shot in Tehran Streets”

    1. The US has already intervened. Aren’t we spending in excess of $400,000,000 to overthrow the Iranian government? The last I heard our tax dollars have gone for selected assassinations and other terrorists activities in an attempt to bring down their government.

      The one thing we can all count on in situations like these is that Amerikan tax dollars are being used to stir up the sh*t.

      Having said that, I feel sorry for the Iranian people. They will get stuck with their currnet oppressive, tyrannical government or a US sponsored one that will be no better and possibly worse.

      But hasn’t that always been their lot for the last 60+ years?

  1. This is not specific to the poster above, but a general comment. I for one am getting a bit tired of almost everything posted about Iran on this site having to be followed by some chorus of “it’s none of our business.” Yes, we get it, already. Are parochial “patriots” so determined to preach US nonintervention they must also ostentatiously not pay attention to what happens to other human beings elsewhere in the globe, and constantly demand no one else does for that matter?

    If Iran is not official US government business, and of course it’s not, then I suppose you can stop talking about Iranians as though the most important question about them is what US policy will do. Oblige those of us who do actually care about what’s happening to these people by not obsessing about US policy towards Iran as though nothing else is important. This is just the counterpart of Washington DC’s general opinion that it’s the focus of the entire world; stop playing into it please.

    Many people feel this is their personal business because they’re humanists. While libertarians are correct to suggest that military and political non-intervention is the best course, libertarians only caring about people within US borders comes across as chauvinist and cold. So much for individualism over nationalism.

    1. America NEEDS to be reminded its none of our business BECAUSE AMERICA has a long, sad and tragic history of sticking its nose IN OTHER COUNTRIES business, almost always with tragic results. If you agree that interventionism is not an option (that is how I interpret your post) then what can you propose?

      1. It’s not the government’s business to intervene militarily, or to compromise the position of reformers by making them appear to be foreign puppets, but it is “our” business to care about other people who are seeking more freedom and less repression in Iran, if we are human beings with identities besides the collective “we” which confuses self with national government. I’m saying, don’t let the habits of a fight against the overweening US government affect your outlook at the expense of humanism. If a person knows a way to help the situation independently, they ought to consider it, and circulate the idea to others.

        1. I would argue that antiwar.com is helping, for one example, by circulating information. I would suppose that anyone who makes it easier for sources of information to get out, and to be circulated, is helping. Influencing public opinion around the world is not worthless or pointless just because it doesn’t agitate for imperialist intervention. For instance, the Iranian government is dependent on foreign trade, especially for refining and gasoline. (Which leads me to wonder just how Russians are reacting to this situation, actually.)

          Also, given that the internet is the major means of communication for the dissidents, anyone in a position to assist with this, or protect it might consider doing so. I’m not an expert in IT tracking or anything of the sort, so I don’t know what the best ideas are specifically out of all the ones I’ve heard people have been pursuing.

          Also, if dissidents need to escape Iran, need a safe place to go or financial assistance, that might become an option. Financial assistance for Red Crescent might also become important depending on where the situation goes.

          These are just examples of what individuals might potentially be able to do who aren’t on the scene in Iran. No doubt with a little thought, smart people in the know can suggest others.

        2. Sanctions don’t work. They make people FEEL GOOD about themselves. They make people think they are doing something. But they don’t work. Dissidents simply become burdensome ‘refugees’ for whatever country gets stuck taking them in. I see no viable alternative to doing nothing.

        3. How do you read what I wrote and see “sanctions”?

          Dissidents never do anything worthwhile either, huh? The Soviet communists, no doubt, would have preferred this point of view to be universal.

        4. I saw sanctions when you wrote, “the Iranian government is dependent on foreign trade”.

        5. It’s possible to choose not to trade. Markets aren’t composed of collectivized robots, but people. Do you buy into the fallacy that nothing can ever happen without national governments deciding to force it on people, or what? It was, to a significant degree, popular market action refusing to patronize state monopolies that brought down the British in India, for instance.

          In this case, state-owned or corporately-owned petro businesses that deal in Iranian oil could come under popular pressure not to prop up the Iranian regime’s gasoline bribery (subsidy) by refining its oil. If Iran ran out of gas, its tyrants would almost certainly fall, because if nothing else their socialist mismanagement would become unbearable. So again, public opinion can matter.

    2. Please! Where the hell are all these “humanists” when preterm babies are butchered routinely right here in this country? Many of them celebrate an assasin like Tiller as though he were a kind of saint. Spare us if you will the phony morality of a self-serving elitist liberalism that sees a greater sanctity in the easy projects of social activism when close-at-hand opportunities within families and local communities make demands.

      The people being shot in Iran today were warned by their government about demonstrations and chose to demonstrate. Most of them are tools of a compliant American media doing the bidding of foreign policy and arms lobbies in this country anyway. While I hate to see anyone killed, sympathy gets a haircut when the dead have asked for it.

      1. So… What you’re saying is basically that by protesting (relatively peacefully in most cases) against what they view to be a rigged election leading to more despotism by the leader and government, they were asking to be shot? How is that the logical conclusion; are you genuinely O.K. with the statement “We told you to stop protesting against what you view as an injustice, so your protesting merits being shot.”?

        Your abortion comment is entirely out of context in this situation. It typically degenerates into a religious issue and the debate of when life begins is the heart of that issue, as is what term of a pregnancy. These people demonstrating in Tehran were undeniably ALIVE and protesting against they’re government. Regardless of your religious inklings, few people would declare that exercising your ability to espouse your views and demonstrate for them warrants being killed or maimed despite what your government would say. If in the US the government told you that you weren’t allow protest, say, outside an abortion clinic and warned you about it would you then deserve to be shot?

        I would say that you’re the tool. And your attitude suggesting that we should ignore these violations of what should be basic freedoms because they’re outside of our own country is disgustingly ethnocentric.

        1. I know. Some one told you that this was the Gallup Poll and that I was taking a survey on who approved of my point of view on the situation in Iran. I need you for something, honey?

      2. Barganier,

        You’re needed for something as well? Try stepping out into oncoming traffic.

    3. I am suffering to see how the leaders of Iran kill so easily their people.They have so much hate for their people, so why they are government if they hate the Iranians? The Iranians should have the rights to chose their president but the president doesn’t want to leave, and them said his message stealing the votes: “I hate you, you are going to hate even more and there is nothing you can do about. ”
      We all got the message. He is evil and in name of confess his love for Ala, I can say. Your God is Satan. You are instrument of Satan.
      Pray for Iranians!Love Iranians and pray for them.

  2. For those chomping at the bit for America to “do something”, (but what exactly?) I ask you to please consider the following:

    1) What if Iran had undermined the democratically elected Eisenhower administration in 1953?

    2) What if Iran had installed an American stooge in the USA to loot, pillage and oppress Americans for a quarter-century?

    3) What if Mexico with Iran’s blessing had invaded America in 1980 resulting in an eight-year war killing vast numbers of people, with Iran providing logistical support to Mexico?

    4) What if an Iranian naval vessel in the gulf of Mexico had shot down an American civilian airliner in 1988 killing 290 people, including 66 American children?

    5) What if Iranian armies had invaded and occupied America’s two neighbouring countries, Canada and Mexico in 2001 and 2003?

    If this really is a populist uprising (I doubt It) for it to have any chance to succeed America must do nothing and not taint it with its bad name.

  3. I get all of the academic noodling going on here and note enthusiastically that it is not the business of the United States to interfere, but… Jesus, that poor woman.

  4. This country needs a CONSTANT reminder that its up to other countries to determine their destiny. Iranians had a popular revolt once and they can do it again if they want.

    Meanwhile in many unreported parts of the world there was murder, rape and butchery that apparently is not as important to many as what goes on in Iran.

    I would hope that in Iran, the guys that shot that woman someday face justice. But it will be up to Iranians to do it.

  5. Once again, John Lowell advocates violence, in this case advocating stepping into traffic, on an anti-war site.

  6. Congress could liberate Iraq and Afghanistan of US troops rather easily. That would help ordinary people there a lot.

    Lester Ness
    Kunming
    China

    1. The best thing that America could do for peace in the Mid East is to tell the Israeli Lobby to start treating the Palestinians like human beings or risk total alienation from us. I guess I don’t remember Colin Barth coming on this website to comment upon the slaughter in Gaza or Lebanon. Did you, Sir?

      1. If I don’t vent my spleen here about every such outrage you can be sure I do elsewhere, because things like Gaza literally affect my sleep. Gaza and Lebanon are a bit different with regard to Americans who pay taxes however, as they are matters of US government complicity, with funds, arms and encouragement coming from DC.

        1. OK Colin, I appreciate your answer, and can take seriously your comments. As you say, what Israel does is very much our business.
          Wish I could say the same about some other “concerned voices” raising the amplitude on Iranian affairs. I actually saw Paul Wolfowitz on CNN early this morning putting in his two cents on the Iran situation. Paul F–king Wolfowitz! Founding father of our horrendous invasion of Iraq. A man with the blood of millions on his claw-like hands. Shamelessly pimping for more slaughter in the Mid East. A total reptile.

        2. If Wolfie isn’t pimping for war he’s at least working the banking angle to screw people one way or the other.

  7. Colin Barth is right. While many warmongers suddenly find themselves fanatic humanists: anti-torture activists in 2002-2003 Iraq but errh.. not so much in Uzbekistan, certain parts in Cuba or Israel or before or after this commendable interlude; anti-interventionist in Georgia but no so much in Ethiopia, or (when being a famous movie-star) fighting genocide in Sudan, but errh.. not so much in Somalia or Iraq; pro-Fatah secularists in Gaza post Hamas election, because you can’t negotiate with terrorists, but errh.. now again reborn pro-democrats in Iran where supporting and financing terrorism is a really good idea and this doesn’t make you any less of a theocrat in Tibet and feminists in Afghanistan, well.. now and then. They wear their humanity like a coat and change them like they do underpants if politics demand it. Don’t emulate them.

    It is really beyond sad that anybody should die or for that matter even suffer a mild bruise for pigs like either “conservative” Ahmadinejad or “reformist” Mousavi. It is a complete farce, but apparently it’s one many Iranians believe in. Well Iran doesn’t really differ all that much from the modus operandum in many countries in that respect, but it does very much so in others. You can despise that stuff without actually advocating blowing it up.

  8. Just one quick example: 1967 Newark riots, six days of rioting, 26 dead and hundreds injured.

    In no civilized country it’s allowed to riot, burn and loot buildings, cars etc, in a unrestrained manner. There was plenty of room and time to protest peacefully. By going further than that it’s getting close to terrorism and attempts to force a coup.

    So while I’m sure innocents got caught up in the cross-fire between Western sponsored and trained MeK-terrorists, hot-headed youths and law enforcements, in general one could say the responsibilities of the dead belongs to the organizers of these protests. No decent democracy challenges elections using violence and attacking the state of law.

    Best thing to happen here is for the feverish hot-heads to calm down, invest in legal procedures and try to distinguish between fact and fiction. And mourn the dead and wounded.

    1. The thing is, in this case Iran is certainly not a decent democracy, is it? Unless the clerics who nominate the “Supreme Leader,” who cannot be recalled popularly, decide to remove him, he can prevent anything a reformist President tries to do. Khatami found this out in his two terms, and he was the real deal as far as internal reformers (even tried to create a free trade prototype in the Gulf). All the force of the militias and thus the actual power resides with the conservative hardliners, who also oversee vote counting for the President, anyway.

      Now obviously, if Americans suffered under such a system with a “Supreme Leader” and theocracy they would immediately think it’s their right to overthrow it. They would say it’s time for a revolution. But for some reason, Iranians are supposed to go through channels, and pretend they actually have peaceful recourse through the system. Unless it’s a peaceful resistance strategy like Gandhi, I don’t see how they do.

      1. There is no rational reason to assume that a democratic Iran will be friendly to the USA. Indeed it may be openly hostile to America. Just because younger Iranians wear bluejeans or use the internet or have cellphones doesn’t mean they “love” America. A lot of Americans have this delusional (supremacist?) belief that people all around the world want to be just like us. It is just not so. To some extent this mentality helped create the rationale for invading Iraq.

        1. “No rational reason”? That is simply an uninformed comment. How about the fact that Ahmadinejad’s reckless, belligerent foreign policy was a major point of debate during the Iranian election? Or that Khatami, Iran’s most popular elected reformer, tried to make a fair peace with the Bush administration according to his platform but was rebuffed, thus empowering the conservatives (while the reformers boycotted the elections). It’s fairly clear that most Iranians would like to have friendly relations, but the US foreign policy generally hasn’t let the reformers get anywhere with this issue. More useful in their opinion to have an Iranian bogeyman to play Israel’s demonic opponent in the Mideast.

          Many Iranians have a lot in common with Europeans and Americans. Quite a bit more, I would say, than some of those Middle Easterners held in much higher esteem in America due to “alliances.” Available information including polls suggests the vast majority of Iranians are unhappy with their system, and want major reforms for more freedom, and more of a say in their government. If anything, Iranians are far more interested in freedom these days than Americans. Modern Iranians seem to be very thoughtful and informed about social issues. Khatami was twice elected in landslides. Western culture is actually extremely popular there, also, and has been for some time. It’s not US propaganda to say that the numerous young generation largely rejects the theocratic patriarchy, it actually appears to be true. And why shouldn’t they? They aren’t idiots. Anyone who isn’t distracted by an invasion would tend to see, the system is awful.

          Granted, Iranians may not be well disposed towards the US government, as opposed to American people, but then neither am I, and that’s because the US government doesn’t represent freedom well. As long as Americans respect self-determination I don’t see a lot of potential for friction, to be honest, and there are many reasons to think Iranians and Americans can personally get along very well and have a great deal in common. Iran is one of the world’s great and most learned civilizations. It has no historical preference for backward tyrannies (like, say, the Taliban in Afghanistan) compared to what was going on in the rest of the world at the time, and the current regime is something of an anomaly.

        2. You’re barking up the wrong tree there. I’m not crazy about majority rule at all, and I don’t think it magically solves problems. I happen to think wanting more peace and freedom is always the admirable point of view, even if it’s the minority one.

          But I’m also interested in Iran enough to learn a bit about it, which has led me to think there’s a great deal more promise for peace and freedom among the populace there than you do.

        3. The comments by some Americans here show their true imperial nature.

          At base, they are supporting the so-called Iranian reformists because they want a more Pro-American regime in Iran.

          But a Pro-American regime in Iran of course is designed to benefit America–not Iran.

          What the American Empire (and many of its citizens) wants from Iran is what it wants from the world: political subservience.

          Thus, American “concerns” about the Iranian nuclear program are a pretext for advancing America’s imperial geopolitial agenda: control over a strategically important country in the Middle East.

          The fact that Americans act as if the USA’s rhetoric about Iran’s nuclear program has any legitimacy to begin with reveals how truly disingenous and dishonest they are.

          All they have to do is recall all of America’s SIMILAR LIES about Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, which they have apparently forgotten down the Memory Hole.

          The Weapons of Mass Destruction issue is a merely cynical weapon that America manipulates to put geopolitical pressure on a targeted “enemy” nation.

          Similarly, Americans’ support for “democracy in Iran” doesn’t even pass the laugh test.

          Where were these Americans during the 2000 and 2004 stolen US elections?

          None dare call it stolen: Ohio, the election, and America’s servile press
          http://www.harpers.org/archive/2005/08/0080696

          In fact, many of the same cheerleaders for “demcoracy in Iran” deny that the 2000 and 2004 US elections were even stolen.

          All the Western media hype, political condemnations, and hysterics about the “Green Revolution” are thus not about democracy and freedom.

          Ultimately, it’s about Empire–American Empire.

          The fact that so-called antiwar activists like some people on this website have uncritically jumped aboard the “Green Revolution” bandwagon reveals a lot about the fraudulent nature of their supposed anti-interventionist politics.

        4. The so called concern for democracy in Iran,or any where in the middle east, is nothing but a smokescreen!The west has never cared about the wishes of the people there at all.

          http://www.wrmea.com/backissues/0699/9906034.html

          “For the West, and the United States in particular, the Algerian election should be a reminder of how much American ideals of democratization in the Middle East diverge from actual American policy of sticking with authoritarian strongmen at the expense of democracy.

          The Bush administration loved Bouteflika. “These elections,” the administration said in a tone-deaf congratulatory message following Bouteflika’s reelection in 2004, “represent another step on the road toward democracy in Algeria. The President also congratulates the Algerian people for their dedication to building a democratic political system.” The Obama administration hasn’t signaled a different direction.

          Both administrations may prefer the relative stability of the Bouteflika regime to the alternative: a return to Islamist influence and potential rule: It was the Islamists’ near-victory in the 1992 parliamentary elections, which were free and fair, which precipitated the military’s intervention and, as a consequence, the bloody civil war.

          So goes the Middle East’s most favored deal-making, so far as the West is concerned. When it’s a choice between repression and western-leaning stability on one hand and democracy and potential Islamization on the other, repression wins every time. The irony: repression is the Islamists’ fertilizer. Unlike old strongmen like Bouteflika, ironies don’t come with an expiration date.”

          http://middleeast.about.com/b/2009/02/21/the-imperial-presidency-of-algerias-bouteflika.htm

      2. Colin Barth: “But for some reason, Iranians are supposed to go through channels, and pretend they actually have peaceful recourse through the system. Unless it’s a peaceful resistance strategy like Gandhi, I don’t see how they do.”

        All assumed we’re talking about a large majority’s will. Which is exactly what is under dispute. So one cannot just introduce it here as underlying ‘hidden’ assumption.

  9. Writing in Asia Times, http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KF16Ak02.html Pepe Escobar argues convincingly that the conservatives did indeed steal a landslide win from Mousavi. Widespread public support for regime change is unsurprising considering Iran’s moribund economy just as Obama’s landslide win on economic issues is unsurprising.

    That the US government is meddling in the internal affairs of Iran doesn’t change the fact that the Iranian people are deeply dissatisfied with the current regime. If anything, American belligerence toward Iran has weakened opposition to the status quo as many Iranians who would otherwise be in the opposition now stand behind the conservatives out of spite for the Great Satan.

    If the election was rigged and the conservatives employ theft and oppression to stay in power, then what option is left to the opposition other than to take to the streets? All legal appeals will prove fruitless.

    Yes, the American government must stay out of this conflict. However the same does not apply to private American involvement if welcomed by private Iranians.

  10. The west record when it comes to what it calls democracy,human rights,freedom in the middle east is very bleak,incocnsistant,and full of hypocracy!

  11. If you want to help the Iranian dissidents reach the outside world, there are two options:

    You could set up a Tor exit node. Follow the instructions here:
    http://p10.hostingprod.com/@spyblog.org.uk/blog/2009/06/tor-relays-and-exit-nodes-for-iran-and-for-the-rest-of-us.html

    Bear in mind what the author says about the bandwidth necessary. I’m guessing most readers here are in the U.S. so you have much better infrastructure than us Brits so it shouldn’t be as much of a strain. If you have less than a 2mbit connection though, you might want to consider an alternative:

    http://blog.austinheap.com/2009/06/15/how-to-setup-a-proxy-for-iran-citizens-for-windows/

    Straightforward instructions above for both Windows and Linux. Get in touch on the email address shown for the latest list of proxies. Some useful info in the comments also.

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