The Iranian student uprising

NY Times:

As protests broke out last week at a prestigious university here, cutting short a speech by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Babak Zamanian could only watch from afar. He was on crutches, having been clubbed by supporters of the president and had his foot run over by a motorcycle during a less publicized student demonstration a few days earlier.

But the significance of the confrontation was easy to grasp, even from a distance, said Mr. Zamanian, a leader of a student political group.

The Iranian student movement, which planned the 1979 seizure of the United States Embassy from the same university, Amir Kabir, is reawakening from the slumber of recent years and may even be spearheading a widespread resistance against Mr. Ahmadinejad. This time the catalysts were academic and personal freedom.

“It is not that simple to break up a president’s speech,” said Alireza Siassirad, a former student political organizer, explaining that an event of that magnitude takes meticulous planning. “I think what happened at Amir Kabir is a very important and a dangerous sign. Students are definitely becoming active again.”

The protest, punctuated by shouts of “Death to the dictator,” was the first widely publicized outcry against Mr. Ahmadinejad, one that was reflected Friday in local elections, where voters turned out in droves to vote for his opponents.

The students’ complaints largely mirrored public frustrations over the president’s crackdown on civil liberties, his blundering economic policies and his harsh oratory against the West, which they fear will isolate the country.

But the students had an additional and potent source of outrage: the president’s campaign to purge the universities of all vestiges of the reform movement of his predecessor, Mohammad Khatami.

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I am still not sure Ahmadinejad was not using them as props for a false bit of tolerance to promote his willful ignorance of the holocaust conference where he complained that Europeans prosecuted people for denying the obvious about the holocaust. As this story points out the government has also instituted a system to deny admission to students who protest against the government. This is the original post on the demonstration.

It looks like the Iran Syria PR offensive of the past few weeks is beginning to sputter. It may be blow back time already.