“[Daphne – Because I am a NIMBY sort of person. I can barely work up interest in the Japan earthquake. But really, if you live in Malta you obviously have a strong interest in Gaddafi. And Gaddafi poses the sort of danger that Iran does not.]”
March 19, 2011 – Ebrahim Mehtari, a young political activist who was arrested and physically abused in prison during the post-election events of 2009, sustained several knife wounds last night in Paris when he was attacked by two men, one of whom was Iranian. An hour ago, Mehtari told the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran that as his assailants put a rope around his neck they used a knife to attack him. He could have faced a much more serious fate had the sound of a police car siren not suddenly scared them away.
Last year, Ebrahim Mehtari told the bitter tale of his detention and torture along with other detainees and the clear violations of human rights inside Iranian prisons at the Human Rights Council. Exactly a year later and as the UN Human Rights Council is in progress in Geneva, he was attacked in Paris. Yesterday, 49 UN member states supported a resolution, objecting to the deteriorating situation of human rights in Iran. The resolution will be put to vote next week. As it did last year, this year’s presence of several victims of violence and violations of human rights in Iran at the Geneva meeting thwarted the Iranian delegation’s efforts to cover up grave violations of human rights in Iran. A few months after the 2009 elections, Ebrahim Mehtari left Iran due to psychological pressure and the feeling that his life was in danger; he is currently a resident of Paris. (More at Persian2English)
“It’s Assad’s turn” – from Heute in Israel:
Der umtriebige Zwerg könnte seine nächste Spielwiese in Syrien bekommen, denn in Frankreich, und Eurabien allgemein, ist alles in Ordnung und nichts mehr zu tun. Die Lage für den syrischen Diktator Assad wird nämlich immer prekärer. Vorgestern wurden bei den Zusammenstössen zwischen einer Beerdigungsprozession und den syrischen Sicherheitskräften in der Stadt Daraa im Süden des Landes fünf Menschen erschossen, dutzende wurden verletzt. Daraufhin haben die örtlichen Stammesfürsten “den sofortigen Abzug aller Vertreter und Soldaten des Regimes” aus der Stadt gefordert, meldet u. a. ynet. Andernfalls würden “alle Polizeistationen und Armeekasernen in der Stadt niedergebrannt”.