Why didn’t I vote in the latest elections for the president of the country of my birth, Iran? Because no matter who is the president of Iran, they would stone me!

As an Iranian woman, I require big changes in order to convince myself that a change in president would mean an improvement of my basic rights as human being inside Iran.

I was among many Iranians who decided not to vote in the recent [s]election. We boycotted the sham election in my motherland and have not been surprised by the results publicized by the mainstream media, both in Iran and elsewhere. This puppet regime has never considered the people’s wishes and has always acted in the interests of the few who are in charge of the prison called Iran. Cheating, lying and hypocrisy are the specialties of the religious demagogues that maintain the farce that Iran is a democratic state.

A quick look at Mousavi’s political biography reveals him to be a fanatic Khomeini supporter and a fanatic hard-liner similar to Ahmadinejad and others in control of the Islamic regime. His reign as Prime Minister was one of the darkest times in the history of Iran’s Islamic regime in terms of censorship and human rights violations. He is also backed up by the Rafsanjani mafia family, who have stolen oil money for their own family interests while 70% of the population lives in poverty. So ingrained as he is in a system of corruption and exploitation, that how could anyone believe that Mousavi genuinely wants reform?

Please click over and read the full article. Lila makes a compelling argument that Iran will remain unchanged no matter who prevails in the elections.

Lila Ghobady is an exiled Iranian writer-journalist and filmmaker living in Canada since 2002. She has been involved with human rights since working as a journalis in Iran and has continued her work in Canada when she arrived as a refugee. She has worked as a Producer and associate Director of internationally-praised underground films along fellow exiled filmmaker Moslem Mansouri before leaving Iran. Her recent film Forbidden Sun Dance has been well-received in several countries. As a journalist, she received the title of BlogHer of the Week for her Review piece on Slumdog Millionaire in March 2009. Lila has received her Master’s degree in Canadian/women studies from Carleton University in Ottawa.

“… this is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media. I’ve been thinking a lot about the Chicago demonstrations of 1968 where they chanted “the whole world is watching.” Really, that wasn’t true then. But this time it’s true … and people throughout the world are not only listening but responding. They’re engaging with individual participants, they’re passing on their messages to their friends, and they’re even providing detailed instructions to enable web proxies allowing Internet access that the authorities can’t immediately censor. That kind of participation is really extraordinary.” (Source-Anthropology.net)

Extraordinary, you bet. Unprecedented, no doubt. A positive development and one that produces the tangible results of greater freedom for all Iranians? Too early to tell, but the initial signs aren’t good.

That the disagreement over the election results is so profound and involves such powerful figures in Iranian society is frightening. This is not a situation I see calming down any time soon. Thankfully we don’t (yet) endure a theocratic government, so it’s hard for some Americans to appreciate what it means to have the Ayatollah oppose the election results. Here we know Pat Robertson hates the president, so what? But there, it’s a serious situation.

So far Iran has shut down access to many websites and blogs, thrown out the Western press and, according to something I read on Friendfeed today (failed to get the link), the government is actually creating phony “anti-Ahmadinejad” sites so they can harvest the names of Iranians who register or leave comments there.

Let’s hope whatever happens in the near future there it stays within their borders and doesn’t spill over to the rest of the world. There’s no way in hell we can afford (literally and figuratively) to be involved in international conflicts on three fronts. We may have to establish priorities; Afghanistan may have to wait if Korea or Iran become a larger and more immediate threat.