It Was In Persia that Chess Was First Perfected

From Press TV - I understand it's a semi-official adjunct of the Iranian government. I couldn't make this kind of stuff up! Guardian Council: Over 100% voted in 50 cities Sun, 21 Jun 2009 21:38:30 GMT Iran's Guardian Council has admitted that the number of votes collected in 50 cities surpass the number of those eligible to cast ballot in those areas. The council's Spokesman Abbas-Ali Kadkhodaei, who was speaking on the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) Channel 2 on Sunday, made the remarks in response to complaints filed by Mohsen Rezaei -- a defeated candidate in the June 12 Presidential election. "Statistics provided by Mohsen Rezaei in which he claims more than 100% of those eligible have cast their ballot in 170 cities are not accurate -- the incident has happened in only 50 cities," Kadkhodaei said. The spokesman, however, said that although the vote tally affected by such an irregularity is over 3 million, "it has yet to be determined whether the amount is decisive in the election results," reported Khabaronline. Three of the four candidates contesting in last Friday's presidential election cried foul, once the Interior Ministry announced the results - according to which incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner with almost two-thirds of the vote. Rezaei, along with Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, reported more than 646 'irregularities' in the electoral process and submitted their complaints to the body responsible for overseeing the election -- the Guardian Council. Mousavi and Karroubi have called on the council to nullify Friday's vote and hold the election anew. This is while President Ahmadinejad and his Interior Minister Sadeq Mahsouli have rejected any possibility of fraud, saying that the election was free and fair. MMN/SME/MMN

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Ohmygoddess, are you kidding me? Over 3,000,000 fraudulent votes in 50 cities but the ministry in charge of free and fair elections isn't concerned because it has yet to be determined that this cheating affected the ultimate outcome.

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And here is a very interesting post from the Lede Blog (New York Times): 167. June 21, 2009 5:52 pm Neil, No. 25: NO, these are quite obviously NOT the same people who “chant ‘Death to the USA’ at soccer stadiums… [etc.]…” So many people with little direct experience of totalitarian regimes retain the most superficial of impressions based on glimpses of carefully stage-managed events organized by totalitarian partocracies, in which trained, disciplined masses of supernumeraries perform on cue… as in North Korea. The ‘Death to the USA’ people would be the enforcers sent out by Ahmadinejad & Khamenei to SLAUGHTER AND MAIM these protesters we are watching turn out by the millions all across Iran to reclaim their country. Get your head around the numbers, Neil, and ‘Friends of Neil’: it only takes about 1000-5000 faces to create an impressive staged event to fill up a TV screen with hordes… But in a city of 12 million or so, i.e. about the size of Tehran, we do not often see a crowd of 500,000 to 2 Million –– reassembling day after day even in the face of threats to life & limb & Family & livelihood –– unless there is something far more serious afoot than a propagandist photo op such as the regular Friday ideological marches denouncing America that the Ayatollahs decreed are to take place, without fail, which are run and manned by their own most privileged details of followers… The good old Communist Party of the Soviet Union was really good at this kind of thing, too, only their mass events all had to do with “how much we love Lenin” (just as the ones in North Korea all have to do with “how much we adore our Radiant Glorious Life-giving Leader.” No one could ever take these kinds of required totalitarian rituals seriously –– and you mustn’t. The ongoing mass protests in Iran are the Real Thing, though: as their relentless popularity reveals. No staged event ever draws the kind of attention a real upswell of popular unity commands. Which leads me to this: *HOW KHAMENEI LOST IRAN:* If you think about it, at last Friday’s sermon, Khamenei had only two courses of action open to him: 1 - Accede to the calls for a new election, or 2 - Certify the declared election results as Correct and Truthful. He knew that if he were to follow the first path — announce a retaking of the vote — his candidate, Ahmadinejad, would lose, and his own power would inevitably shrink as the new leadership would have less reason to rely on his own “Supreme Powers” given the popular support the new President and his supporters (Khatami, Rafsanjani et al.) already had. How did Khamenei know this? Because HE HAD THE ACTUAL VOTE COUNT; he knew the actual result. As the protesting masses argue, and demonstrate, the majority vote, by a very healthy margin, was with Moussavi. Indeed, the Interior Ministry had already confirmed this to the winner, even before Khamenei decided — personally decided, upon receiving the news — to simply discard the vote results. Khamenei’s very refusal to go along with a relative moderate request, for a rerun of the vote, betrays his complicity in the falsification. Because it was obviously much simpler, and safer, to order a revote — if Khamenei was honestly convinced that his own preferred candidate had just scored “AN OVERWHELMING LANDSLIDE.” If there was a landslide for Ahmadinejad, why fear a revote? The only reason to refuse a second vote was because Khamenei KNEW that Ahmadinejad had lost… Not merely lost, but been soundly trounced, coming in Third, with a measly five to six million votes… And because Khamenei had put his imprimatur on an outrageous lie, a huge and shameful fraud, he cold not possible follow the first — most reasonable — option available to him, without exposing himself as a fraud, cheat, lie and traitor to the very ideals he pretends to exemplify… This left him with only the second option as a recourse: to insist on the “correctness and complete unassailability” of the false vote count that had been promulgated in such haste, and to hope that a brutal crackdown would quickly stifle resistance as those “little people of no actual consequence” caved in to their “Supreme Leader.” It was a mad hope, and of course, as we can now see, a crazy gamble. Or, as one of history’s wisest sages once so beautifully put it in the original English: “Oh, what a wicked web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!” By following his basest instincts not once, but twice: first, by decreeing the falsification of the vote, and then by insisting this was “the correct result”, Khamenei not only revealed the horrible stuff of which he is made, but sealed his own doom, and the doom of the system that had raised such a one as he was to the dizzying pinnacles of Absolute Power. And so he fell, foolishly, into a very clever trap laid for him by far wiser men, former colleagues who had probably grown weary of his peremptory, absolutist, ridiculously rigid and ultimately unintelligent ways — Rafsanjani, Khatami, Moussavi, Karroubi… It was in Iran, after all, that chess was first perfected. — Maria Ashot

Ayatollah Sistani Gets Hacked Off!

Couldn't happen to a nicer guy... tee hee hee. From The Los Angeles Times blog, Babylon and Beyond, September 19, 2008: Babylon & Beyond IRAQ: The ayatollah gets hacked Shiite Muslims who check Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani's website, sistani.org, for advice on everything from chess to sex were in for a shock today. Hackers attacked the site of the spiritual guide to millions of Shiites and slapped a video showing comedian Bill Maher poking fun at Sistani's advice-giving on the home page. A group calling itself Group-XP claimed responsibility, according to a statement on the hacked site, which normally invites visitors to write in with questions on what is permitted under Shiism, and to get advice on how to be a better Muslim. Sistani is Iraq's most revered Shiite religious leader and though he stays mostly out of politics, his words hold immense sway. Iran's Fars News Agency said the hackers had shut down about 300 Shiite websites and were Sunnis based in the United Arab Emirates. It described the attack as the most serious of its kind in years. For several hours, visitors to the Sistani site were greeted with what appeared to be a video of the white-bearded cleric and a statement written in red lettering scrolling down the screen. "Did you think you were alone on the Internet and nobody was capable of hacking your site?" the statement reads. It went on to make fun of Sistani and his sexual pronouncements, referring to him as Sextani and urging people to click on the video. That launched several minutes of Maher joking about the site's advice on what is haram, or forbidden, and what is allowed. Chess is deemed haram, apparently because it requires so much mental concentration that players are distracted from thinking about anything else, including prayer. [Does that mean that Iranian chess players are BAD Muslims? Then why haven't they been arrested and whipped for crimes against Allah?] Backgammon also is not permitted, nor are most forms physical contact between unmarried men and women. Late Friday, the site was off-line altogether, or so it seemed. But the incident generated chatter among Arabic-language websites, and one cyber sleuth wrote that the hack was not successful the world over. The writer said the site had been redirected, not hacked, and that if readers went to http://66.230.195.121/ and did not use the domain name, it would work. Indeed, it did. There was no reaction from Sistani, who rarely speaks publicly and almost never talks to the media. The last time he met with reporters was last month, when Sistani summoned some journalists to his home to refute reports he was gravely ill. — Tina Susman and Caesar Ahmad in Baghdad

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September 20, 2008, Tehran Times: Iran's Grandmaster Ehsan Qaem Maqami beats Ronald Bancod from the Philippines in the fourth Prospero Pichay Cup International Chess Championship. So much for Ayatollah Sistani's advice on chess...

A White Knight for Iran's Women

From The Sunday Times December 9, 2007 As coach to the Iranian chess team the British grandmaster found a way to put the nation’s zealots in check Nigel Short It was on, perhaps, the fifth occasion that the tournament hall was plunged into darkness at the Asian Cities chess championship in Tehran earlier this year that a daring, heterodox thought entered my head: could it be possible that when President Mahmoud Ahmadine-jad says Iran needs nuclear power for civilian purposes he might be telling the truth? I am still slightly baffled as to how I, an oenophile, atheist Englishman, became Iran’s national chess coach: it began one evening five years ago when I was in my study thinking of interesting places to visit. Belgium did not set my pulse racing. Iran, on the other hand, had real novelty value. Unfortunately I didn’t know anyone there. Undeterred, I fired off an e-mail to the president of the Iranian chess federation proposing that I play a match in Tehran against Ehsan Ghaem Maghami, the young Iranian champion. Twelve days later I received a response – “Dear Grandmaster Short, we agree with everything.” Chess allegedly originated in India, although the first clear references to the game appear in Persian in the 6th century AD. The word “checkmate” is derived from the Persian “shah mat” – “the king is dead”. Alas, in more recent times the game did not enjoy official approval in Iran, and in the early 1980s it was banned by Ayatol-lah Khomeini as unIslamic. Shortly before his death, the supreme leader, in an uncharacteristic act of liberalism, revoked this measure, but not before he had ruined a generation of players. The match with Ghaem Maghami proceeded smoothly (I won) and received excellent publicity. I was greatly touched by the warmth and friendliness of ordinary Iranians. However, there were a couple of jarring notes amid all the goodwill. One of the girls on the national team invited me to her home for dinner, to which I agreed. It turned out that in order to take up her invitation I had to have the permission of both the federation and the religious police. Then, on the last day, as Mehrdad, an official and by now a friend, came to collect me from the hotel, a disagreement over payment occurred, which was odd because the federation owned the hotel. When I asked for my passport, the woman at reception smiled but pointedly did nothing. Once previously I had been denied egress from a hotel, in Azerbaijan in the then Soviet Union in 1983, when I had been incarcerated for a day to prevent me, presumably as a potential spy for Her Majesty’s government, from witnessing the October revolutionary parade. It seemed quite fitting: Baku and Tehran, geographically so close; Marx and Muhammad, so radically different for their countless devotees but, from my perspective, more or less the same thing. This time, having finally been given my passport, I fought my way out, pushing, shoving, elbowing and barging my way past the porter who was blocking the door until I tumbled outside. Hailing a taxi, I reached the airport with minutes to spare. After this highly stressful experience, I was in no particular hurry to return. However, more than three years later, after a chance chat with Mehrdad, I agreed to become the coach for the Iranian team for the Asian Games in Doha, Qatar, in 2006, in which chess had been included as a sport for the first time. I was assisted by the urbane, chain-smoking Khosrow Harandi. As Iran’s leading player during the 1970s, he had enjoyed an active international career. After Khomeini’s prohibition, Khosrow, who was living in Britain at the time, registered with the British Chess Federation so that he might continue to play. He is apparently the only Iranian sportsman since the revolution to have competed against an Israeli, despite dire warnings as to the possible consequences. “I won,” he told me with a smile. “I had to.” My team comprised two men (Ehsan Ghaem Maghami and Elshan Moradiabadi) and a woman (Atousa Pourkashiyan). Realistically we had little chance of competing successfully against the superpow-ers of India and China, but against the others we could hope. Ehsan was on poor form but both Elshan and, in particular, Atousa excelled. Both were in contention for individual medals. Sadly Atousa, who was within a whisker of success, blew the bronze with an unexpected last-round defeat. How should one comfort a distraught 18-year-old girl when it is expressly forbidden to shake hands, let alone hug her? Such are the problems of coaching Iran. Nevertheless, after recovering from these individual setbacks and by routing the strong Qatari team in the final round of the team event, we took a bronze – a great result. In my report of the event, I stressed a vital and obvious point: if women are to reach their full potential, they have to be allowed to participate against the best opposition, which in chess means men. Within a week of this report having been submitted, the Iranian minister of sport had agreed to an unprecedented change in regulations. While it would be inaccurate for me to claim full responsibility for this seismic shift, it would, perhaps, be fair to say that I acted as a catalyst. After Qatar, I was engaged as national coach in the run-up to the Asian Indoor Games in Macau, southern China. It was a part-time post, which required occasional visits rather than a permanent presence. There is no way I would have done it otherwise. I have visited 84 countries, and Iran remains low on the list of places I would consider emigrating to. It is not the least bit dangerous – as many people in the West imagine – provided, of course, you observe the laws. However, if you are the sort of person sensitive enough to find Britain’s omnipresent CCTVs and the security checks at Heathrow airport an insult to human dignity, then you are likely to find Iran oppressive. Iran is a strange society. Satellite TV is banned but you will find dishes on many a roof. Alcohol is forbidden but widely available in people’s homes. Cheap heroin, from next-door Afghanistan, is a major problem. And one doesn’t need a tour guide to find (scarf-clad) prostitutes walking the streets. All vices (or perceived vices) are present in abundance. In this, Iran does not differ from western countries, but the amount of hypocrisy is far greater. In February I was appointed captain of the Tehran women’s team for the Asian Cities championship. Three (male) officials from the Islamic guidance ministry were sent to ensure the propriety of my players. Particular emphasis was laid on a good hijab. Outside, in the trendy cafes of the city, seductive expanses of hair can be glimpsed beneath fashionably bohemian attire, but for my girls, aged between 14 and 26, the strictest austerity was required. There were no objections. All were delighted, for once, to be allowed to compete with the boys. Everything went well until one evening, when we all gathered in my suite to analyse a game in preparation for the following day. Suddenly there came an irate banging on the door. I opened it to find a bearded ministry official on the verge of apoplexy. I politely invited him in: after all, he had a job to do, as did I. He didn’t look much fun, but as none of us was naked and I didn’t imagine the subtleties of the Sicilian Najdorf were going to hold his interest, I reckoned he would soon be gone. In he stormed and barked something in Farsi, whereupon my team, in a state of panic, got up, grabbed their belongings and hurried out. I was devastated. When I met them later in the restaurant, I told them, quite sincerely, that I must be insane to do this job and I was going to quit there and then. “Don’t, please. We need you,” they implored. Meanwhile the hirsute ogre submitted a harshly condemnatory report. Interestingly, neither of his colleagues was prepared to sign it. Several members of our delegation quietly spoke to him to explain that coaching does, in fact, involve sitting down around a chessboard. Gradually he admitted that perhaps he had overreacted. On the final day, he came up to me and offered his hand, which I took as, if not an apology, then at least a peace offering. Despite the hassle, my team responded brilliantly, finishing eighth – way ahead of their 15th seeding – which made it all worthwhile. With time I have found visiting Iran progressively easier. Usually only errant British sailors get to travel there visa-free, and the rest of us require approval from the Iranian foreign affairs ministry. Last time I received a multiple-entry visa, which is convenient but difficult to come by. With my expanding circle of friends, evenings at restaurants, coffee shops and homes become ever more enjoyable. My liver enjoys a much-deserved rest. Even the chaotic, cacophonous, clogged traffic has become a familiar friend. I am always impressed by the high levels of education in Tehran. My coaching is conducted exclusively in English and without a translator. That does not mean that every word is understood, but I rarely have trouble communicating. Unfortunately for Iran, the most qualified, moderate people are the ones most likely to emigrate. They do so in massive numbers. Several friends have left the country and many others will follow. It is not only the lack of freedom (on the internet, even social networking sites such as Facebook are banned) but also the lack of good job opportunities that drives them away. With weak private enterprise and a large state sector, jobs are created by such inane expediencies as tearing up parking meters so graduates may write out tickets. How very Soviet.