Today's GoozNews

Today's GoozNews includes a selection of articles from Iran Focus, a very interesting news source:

The Supreme Commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps accused the Bush Administration and the Israeli security service Mossad of ordering the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington, DC.

“The events of September 11 were ordered by U.S. [officials] and Mossad so that they could carry out their strategy of pre-emption and warmongering and unipolarisation in order to dominate the Middle East”, Major General Yahya Rahim Safavi told military commanders on Tuesday. His comments were reported by the state-run news agency ISNA.

General Safavi said that Iran was the leading force of the “Islamic world”. “The geographic heart of the Islamic world is in Mecca and Medina. But, the political heart of the Islamic world is in the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Supreme Leader [Ayatollah Ali Khamenei] is the flag-bearer of the front of Islamic awakening and the fronts of the awakening of third world nations”, he said.

He accused Washington of plotting a “cultural” attack on Tehran by setting up new radio and television stations broadcasting into Iran, supporting dissident groups, and stepping up intelligence operations. “Therefore, the armed forces must be completely prepared in order to combat any forms of foreign and domestic threats”, he said.

The IRGC’s primary task is to export the Islamic revolution to Jerusalem via Baghdad.

Hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is one of many officials who stem from the IRGC.

Tehran, Iran, Sep. 05 – A man was hanged in public on Monday in one of Iran’s most volatile provinces.

The man, identified as Gholam-Reza Rigi, was publicly hanged at dawn in the town of Saravan, the official news agency IRNA reported.

He was accused of drug smuggling.

Iranian authorities routinely execute dissidents on the bogus charge of drug smuggling.

Tehran, Iran, Jul. 29 – Iran will soon launch new women’s only parks in the holy city of Qom, south of Tehran.

The City Islamic Council in Qom announced that it had put forward a plan to segregate four of the city’s parks.

In August, the National Women’s Council announced that a sex-segregated park was under development in the north-eastern city of Mashad.

The development of sex-segregated parks was given a big boost after hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a former Revolutionary Guards commander, became Iran’s president. Prior to his rise to the presidency, Ahmadinejad was the Mayor of Tehran. One of his first decisions in the city hall was to order gender segregation on elevators.

London, Jul. 27 – A young woman is at imminent risk of execution by stoning for adultery, according to the international human rights group Amnesty International.

Ashraf Kolhari, a 37-year-old mother of four has been held in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison for five years, Amnesty said in a statement on Thursday.

“On or around July 2006, she received the order for the implementation of her sentence, and is reportedly due to be executed by stoning by the end of July”, the rights group said.

Kolhari had an extra-marital affair after her divorce request was rejected by the court, reportedly on the basis that she had children, and therefore had to resume living with her husband, the statement said.

“She was sentenced on two charges; the first was for participating in the murder of her husband, for which she received a sentence of 15 years imprisonment; the second was for adultery as a married woman, for which she was sentenced to execution by stoning. Article 83 of the Iranian Penal Code stipulates that the penance for adultery by a married woman with an adult man is execution by stoning”, it said.

The woman wasn't executed in the end after human rights organizations made a stink, but the law is still on the books in Iran.

And apparently, adultery is a more serious crime than murder in Iran.