Consequences of Heckling President Khatami

Potkin Azarmehr, Iran va Jahan:

President Khatami’s speech on Iran’s National Student Day, and the way he was heckled by the students received somewhat wide international publicity. During his speech, President Khatami, typical of Iran’s cunning clerics, astutely attempted to save face by reminding the student protesters that “No where in the Middle East, do the students have the privilege of criticizing their president so vociferously”.

So despite the fact that the people of Iran have had three revolutions in the past 100 years and paid with their blood for freedom of speech, the students had to be grateful to the Islamic Republic for allowing them to heckle the president on National Student Day.

A clever ploy by the shrewd president, that got the approval of many of Islamic Republic’s international enthusiasts.

Yet as usual, what is presented in the shop window of the Islamic Republic for the outside world to see is not the same as what goes on inside behind the closed curtains.

Nearly three months later after the foreign press has forgotten about the incident, the university’s disciplinary committee has identified and summoned the ringleaders of the incident. The committee has issued them with a reprimand and a ban from further education.
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These students are Payman Aref and Farid Yekani from the Political Sciences and Law Faculty. Pooya Heybatollahi and Iman Amir-Teimur from Literature and Humanities Faculty. Maziar Firuzmand from Arts Faculty and Salman Rasuli from Agriculture and Natural Resources Faculty.

The charges against the above students is:

- Causing riot and public disorder
- Unlawful demonstration
- Insulting the regime’s figures
- Propaganda against the Islamic regime

According to one of the “reformist” elements of the Tehran University, “the above charges constitute as action against the establishment in its entirety”.

So the question to President Khatami and his sycophants is, “What happened to the privileges you so cleverly pretended Iran’s students enjoy in public?”