Happy Valentine's Day to the Iranian People!

We speak from the heart today!

Happy Day of Love to our people in Iran! We love you, brothers and sisters, and we salute your renewed spirit of defiance, loss of fear, and your renewed sense of what is possible!

Long live your positive will! Long live your perseverance! We can only cheer from shores afar. But long live your collective love, your energy and your resistance!

* * *

There is a qualitative difference in a majority of the slogans. Previously, during the demonstrations right after the electoral coup in June 2009, slogans targeting Khamenei [the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic, the Pope as it were, to the whole Iranian society, as Pope would be to the Vatican city-state] were not as frequent as slogans such as, "Death to the dictator!" which is ambiguous. Who is the actual dictator; Ahmadinejad, the president, or Khamenei, the supreme leader?

This has a political significance. Ahmadinejad, the president, is a clown (according to the kindest interpretations available among the opposition literature), occupying a post that in the Iranian constitution has limited powers, whereas Khamenei the supreme leader is omnipotent in all matters this-or-other-worldly; and all this according to the current Iranian "constitution" [we should really require quotation marks, as in, this is a mockery of a constitution, because all major rights 'guaranteed' therein have been embedded with a clause stating, "unless this impedes/interferes with Islamic principles/interests." But who decides what those interpretations -- for that's all they can be of a text that dates 1400-some years! -- should be?]

So, the fact that a good and noticeable portion of slogans to have narrowed down and become more specifically focused on the person of Khamenei can indicate that over the one year period of suppressed-depressed existence that the movement is just snapping out of -- during which it must have gone through a process of valuation and reevaluation of events, acts and the thoughts behind the acts -- it must have come to the conclusion that since the crux of the system is the so-called supreme leader, he may as well have to be targeted and targeted by his proper name, not merely by an adjective, 'dictator', that could apply to about anybody with state power in Iran.

At the same time, the Iranian people must well know that by naming the most crucial enemy, they are naming the system as well. It's just the same as an absolutist monarchy, without the monarch, but with something worse: a guy who claims to be god's own representative on earth, so will commit whatever atrocities against his subjects as he pleases, because god told him to do so! His subjects are not born into this world with inalienable rights; they get whatever rights the state, personified in Khamenei, will throw them.

People have learned. "Mobarak, Ben-Ali, nobate Seyed Ali!" (Mobarak, Ben-Ali, next is Seyed Ali [Khamenei, the supreme leader]) That was the most frequently heard slogans being shouted, from an admittedly limited number of video clips observed online.

Naming the enemy has a big positive power. Long live this new/renewed phase of the Iranian uprising for democracy and economic justice.

[Videos found on Iranian.com, available on YouTube:]

"Mobarak, Ben-Ali, Nobate Seyed Ali" (Mobarak, Ben-Ali, Next is Seyed Ali [Khamenei])

"Marg bar Khamenei" (Down with Khamenei)

Motorized security forces preparing to attack:

"Mobarak, Ben-Ali, Nobate Seyed Ali!" "Seyed Ali bi-chaareh, Jonbesh hanooz bidaareh!" (Wretched Seyed Ali [Khamenei], the movement is still alive!)

"Khameni bedooneh, bezoodi sar-negooneh!" (Khamenei should know, soon he'll be overthrown!)

Protests continue into the night ... "Marg bar Khamenei!"


"Freedom, Freedom, Freedom ..."