[A-List] Congress Hears Testimony on Serious Situations of the Baha'is in Iran and Egypt

[Louis Proyect]

nestorgoro at fibertel.com.ar wrote:
> It´s so easy, isn´t it, to get upset on the Web...

It is also easy to get information on the Web. For those who were so 
ready to finger the Baha'i as willing to do the CIA's dirty work, it 
might be useful to google "CIA" and "Baha'i". This is one of the first 
items that came up:

In 1945, my father was born in Gonbad-e Kavus, Iran. After the second 
World War drew to a close, Iran's democratically-elected Prime Minister 
Mohammed Mossadegh was overthrown in 1953 by the CIA. The CIA then 
installed a monarchist regime because the previously secular Iranian 
government was nationalizing the oil industry (thus cutting off a key 
profit opportunity for Western oil corporations). After the 
American-supported Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and his new prime 
minister, Fazlollah Zahedi (who had previously been exiled due to his 
Nazi sympathies), took power with the support of the White House, they 
scrapped nationalization plans and began to again do business with 
American and European oil corporations. In order to distract the Iranian 
public from what they were doing economically and politically, the 
supposedly secular Shah worked to heighten religious consciousness among 
ordinary people and turn public sentiment against a small peace-oriented 
religious minority called Baha'i's.

My father, being Baha'i, suffered firsthand the results of the 
propagandistic clerical broadcasts on state radio, which encouraged 
discrimination and even violence against Baha'i's. The US-supported 
regime imprisoned and executed dozens of Iranian Baha'i's during this 
period, while mobs killed others independently. For his part, my father 
was only beaten by his classmates and teacher, but state-encouraged 
activities such as this were occurring all over the country. At one 
point, my father's family and other local Baha'i's gathered sticks and 
baseball bats and began patrolling the neighborhood to guard against the 
mobs - and the Iranian police themselves.

full: http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/65/23017