Despite an outcry from the international community and several human rights organizations against the use of capital punishment in Iran, the world still sees an increasing amount of images of hangings being carried out, ones that are justified by the Iranian regime as being a righteous duty for them.
Hamid Yazdan Panah is an attorney focused on asylum and immigration in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is also a human rights activist focused on the Middle East and Iran.
Last Tuesday, President Obama claimed that “our diplomacy is at work with respect to Iran”. Yet I can’t help but think that it is Iran who has put Obama’s diplomacy “to work”, namely using it to obtain its strategic goals. Democratic Senator, Robert Menendez referred to Obama’s remarks on Iran in the State of the Union, saying: “The more I hear from the administration and its quotes, the more it sounds like talking points that come straight out of Tehran. And it feeds to the Iranian narrative of victimization, when they are the ones with the original sin.”
With the progression of time, concerns previously voiced by the Iranian opposition over the presence of Iranian regime forces in Iraq are now being acknowledged and shared by other organisations.
King Abdullah of Saudia Arabia has died, aged around 90. His 79-year-old half-brother Salman, who was crown prince, will succeed to the throne, the royal court in the kingdom said in a statement carried by state television.
The ‘future of Europe’ depended on defending freedom of expression within the boundaries of the law, Paulo Casaca who currently directs two international politics associations in Brussels says.
An Argentinian prosecutor, Alberto Nisman, who accused his country’s president of covering up the investigation of the bombing of a Jewish Community Centre, has been found, hours before he was supposed to testify.
A leading U.S. senator, despite resistance, is still pushing for new sanctions against the Iranian regime over its nuclear program, but claimed that he would be willing to set aside his efforts, if Obama would succumb to any agreement with Tehran, and let the Congress lawmakers accordingly reject or approve it.
On Wednesday, January 7, 2015, Paris became victim to a terrorist attack, where militants opened fire with shotguns in the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, killing 12 people and wounding several others. In another terror attack, on Friday, four Jewish hostages were killed at a kosher supermarket in the eastern part of Paris. The world showed solidarity with France a few days’ later where prominent leaders from all around the world, including Muslim leaders, walked arm in arm on the streets of Paris, to pay tribute to the victims that lost their lives. Despite this grand gesture of unity, one which condemned the acts as being a violation of freedom of speech, Iran seems to be the odd one out. Other than the current regime staying silent while others proactively condemned the acts, a senior Iranian cleric has actually expressed his pleasure at the terrorist attacks that left 17 dead, labeling the participants in the mass rally as ‘murderers’.
France saw one of the worst security crises in decades after three days of attacks by gunmen brought bloodshed to the capital Paris and its surrounding areas. It began with a massacre at the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo,publishing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.on Wednesday 7 January ,and ended with a huge police operation and two sieges two days later. With a series of protests, claiming solidarity with the victims of the attack and their families, some also questioned whether the magazine that was attacked crossed the limit of freedom of speech.
Iran has become the center of inquiry, where it was reported this week that it had officially announced plans to build two new nuclear facilities in the Bushehr province, which officials claim will dramatically increase the region’s nuclear energy capacity. This has fuelled the fire that it has already created, one where the current Iranian regime has refused to accept nuclear sanctions that the US has tried to forward.
