In this section, Crescent International will highlight news and events that do not attract much media Attention. We will provide our brief analysis. Hyperlinked references will be provided for confirmation, corroboration and crediting purposes.
As COVID-19 pandemic has caused many countries to go into lockdown, activists condemning human rights violations in Palestine did not cancel their activities for this year. Instead, a well-coordinated and widely supported campaign went online.
As reported by the Canada files website, the UK’s Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC) organized an online campaign where participants put up a Palestinian flag on their cars and home windows worldwide and sent the picture to IHRC which distributed the photos online.
Other organizations organized online discussion forums featuring people from different faiths and ethnic backgrounds highlighting the oppression of Palestinians under Zionist occupation.
After the victory of the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Imam Khomeini proclaimed Al Quds Day for the last Friday of Ramadan to create awareness about the continued occupation of Islam’s first Qibla.
Courtesy: The Canadian Files, IHRC.
Washington based al-monitor.com reported that “an Iranian judge has ordered capital punishment for a man and his wife over multiple corruption charges.
The main charge was disrupting the country’s auto market that is huge.
According to judiciary spokesman Gholam-Hossein Esmaili, the couple were found guilty of money laundering, sabotaging Iran’s forex, and hoarding 6,700 vehicles purchased from Saipa, one of the giant but crisis-hit domestic carmakers.
Iranian authorities also confiscated more than 24,000 gold coins worth nearly $43 million and over 100 kilograms of gold at the residence of Vahid Behzadi and his wife Najva Lashidaee in the capital Tehran.
“Under the law, the couple still have the right to appeal the death sentences.”
Iran is one of the few countries in the Muslim world where ministers regularly get impeached and the super wealthy class can’t escape the rule of law if found guilty, as was the case with the notorious profiteer Babek Zanjani.
Courtesy: www.al-monitor, BBC.
Hardly a month goes by without some sort of unrest in Central Asia since Turkey and Azerbaijan formally marked the completion of the Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline (TANAP) in November 2019 that will bring natural gas from the Caspian Sea to Western Europe bypassing Russia.
Eurasianet.org reported that based on the news report by Tajik Prague-based Akhbor website “a crowd of Chinese nationals working at a metals plant in the north of the country staged an impromptu demonstration on May 20 in a demand to be allowed to travel home. Riot police dispatched to the scene, in the town of Taboshar, about 90 kilometers from the city of Khujand, dispersed the crowd of around 100 people by firing gunshots into the air.”
In February 2020, Crescent International had concluded that due to the recently completed Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline (TANAP) Central Asia will witness far greater acts of instability in the coming months and years.
Since then Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan have all witnessed spikes in political tensions.
Courtesy: Eurasianet.org
Gareth Porter, a renowned American historian and investigative journalist, writing for The Grayzone, an independent news website, wrote that a “careful study of the enormous cache of internal al-Qaeda documents released by the US government in 2017 further discredited the tall tale of Iranian facilitation of al-Qaeda terrorism.
“Nelly Lahoud, a senior fellow at the New American Foundation and former senior research associate at the West Point Combating Terrorism Center, translated and analyzed 303 of the newly available documents and found nothing indicating Iranian cooperation with, or even knowledge about the whereabouts of Zarqawi or other al-Qaeda military leaders prior to their detentions of April 2003.
“Lahoud explained in a September 2018 lecture that all actions by al-Qaeda operatives in Iran had been ‘conducted in a clandestine manner’.
“She even discovered from one of the documents that al-Qaeda had considered the clandestine presence of those officials and fighters so dangerous that they had been instructed on how to commit suicide if they were caught by the Iranians.”
Porter’s article is unlikely to be highlighted or discussed by the corporate media of NATO member states as it undermines their propaganda narrative.
Courtesy: the Grayzone
