Cal Poly Students for Justice & Peace in the Middle East

I was bored and stumbled upon www.wordle.net which is a toy for generating “word clouds” from any text. So, I picked one of our article “Who won Iran’s Election” to generate its word cloud. As you can see below, Ahmadinejad and election were used more frequently than any other word.  Mousavi was the second most frequently used word and if you add his first name Mir-Hossein it tallies up to Ahmadinejad’s total.

The words used in the article "Who won Iran's election?"

Iran’s Interior Ministry announced Saturday that incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had won 63.29% of the vote in the country’s presidential election — a landslide. But Iran’s opposition leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi says he won and that the result had been rigged; Mousavi supporters have taken to the streets in Tehran and other cities to protest the official outcome.

Ahmadinejad, for his part, insists that he won fairly, while Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatullah Ali Khamenei, initially congratulated Iranians for proving their “great worth.” The result, Khamenei said, was a “divine assessment.” On Monday, though, Khamenei ordered the powerful Guardian Council to investigate the fraud allegations.

What really happened in last Friday’s Iranian presidential election, whose reported results have set off the deepest political crisis in Iran in 30 years, may never be known. But these results have raised many eyebrows.

This Wednesday, the online edition of McClatchy Newspapers had a detailed article on why the official Iranian election results are suspect. According to Warren P. Strobel, the foreign affairs correspondent of McClatchy Newspapers, the election results compared to American politics, would be as if President George W. Bush won re-election over Sen. John Kerry in 2004 by taking Kerry’s home state of Massachusetts, doing surprisingly well in liberal New York City and besting his 2000 vote totals by 40 percent.

At the same time, Time magazine issued 5 reasons to suspect the Iranian Election Results. They compiled implausible results such as Ahmadinejad handily beating Mousavi in Mousavi’s hometown of Tabriz — a shocking result, given the candidate’s popularity in his own region. Another suspicious result was the official figures put support for the other main reformist candidate, Mehdi Karoubi, at below 1%. Karoubi’s party has more than 400,000 members which is well over 1% of the electorate.

Even the Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri have joined this skepticism.  ”No one in their right mind can believe” the official results from Friday’s contest, he said of the landslide victory claimed by Ahmadinejad. Montazeri accused the regime of handling Mousavi’s charges of fraud and the massive protests of his backers “in the worst way possible.” “A government not respecting people’s vote has no religious or political legitimacy,” he declared in comments on his official Web site. (Full letter here)

According to Reza Aslan, “it is implausible that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won in a landslide re-election. It is doubtful that he not only took the capital city, Tehran — the heart of the reformist movement — by a staggering 50% but also managed to win in Azerbaijan, the birthplace of his chief rival, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, by a 4-to-1 margin. This would be akin to Senator John McCain winning the African-American vote against Barack Obama.”

But, others disagree with the above assesments by “Iranian experts” as “media-driven self-generated analysis, based on preferred assumptions and wishful thinking.” An article on Politico this week is bluntly titled Ahmadinejad won. Get over it. They compare Ahmadinejad’s 62.6 percent of the vote in this year’s election which is essentially the same as the 61.69 percent he received in the final count of the 2005 presidential election.

They cite a poll conducted by a Washington based organization 3 weeks before the election which found Ahmadinejad leading by more than 2 to1 margin over Mousavi. This survey also indicated that Azeris favored Ahmadinejad by 2 to 1 over Mousavi. Some have questioned the validity of this poll since it was taken during the early stages of the campaign and as a result doesn’t include the aftermaths of the televised debates.

The most important voice belongs to Ayatullah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader, who joined the latter group which is a major boost to  Ahmadinejad. He insisted that there’s been no fraud in the disputed presidential election and ahmadinejad’s reelection was “definitive.” He added that the “Islamic establishment would never manipulate votes and commit treason. The legal structure in this country does not allow vote-rigging. If the difference was 100,000 or 500,000 or 1 million, well, one may say fraud could have happened. But how can one rig 11 million votes?”

Exactly a week ago, reformist candidate Mir-Hossein Moussavi had a lead over incumbent President Ahmadinejad and at worst can go to a run-off election.  Fast forward to last friday and Ahmadinejad won a landslide 2-1 margin victory. Many in Iran and abroad  believe that the election was rigged.  This  has led to a number of intense protests, the largest ever since the 1979 revolution.

Iranian supporters of presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi attend a protest near the Iranian embassy in Ankara, Turkey

Official news outlets have been hampered by crackdowns on covering the unrest. However, interested parties can get a glimpse of what it’s like on the streets of Tehran via raw video. This clip from the AP shows what looks like an endless stream of protesters marching against the election. Photostreams from sites like Flickr are garnering huge clicks and Twitter feeds on the protests are gaining followers by the minute.

Below, you’ll find a collection of recent events in Iranian streets. Stay tuned for more up-to-the-minute live updates on the political upheaval, from the guardian blog.

As the Iranian regime shuts down other forms of communication, Twitter survived. With some remarkable results, including by reformist candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi who is under house arrest according to one of his tweets . Answering his call to his latest tweet, Mousavi’s followers are on rooftops shouting ALAHO AKBAR (God is great) as can be seen in this youtube clip below.

The dailybeast.com reports that Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators formed a five-mile-long crowd today in central Iran as they defied a ban on protests and supported reformist leader Mir Hossein Mousavi. An Associated Press photographer saw one person shot and killed, and several others wounded outside a compound for volunteer militia.

An Iranian protester allegedly shot by pro-government during a rally supporting leading opposition presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi

Iran’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Khamenei, has directed Iran’s Guardian Council to investigate claims of election fraud. The Guardian Council must certify election results and has the right to nullify elections, though it has never used that power.