Iran’s Green Movement Revives, Energized by Egyptian Revolt

James Phillips / February 18, 2011

On February 11, Iran’s unpopular regime celebrated the 32nd anniversary of its 1979 revolution as well as the ouster of Egypt’s President Mubarak. The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, claimed that Iran’s Islamist revolution had inspired Egyptians and charged that the United States was trying to “derail” Egypt’s revolution. Although the regime did its cynical best to conflate the two events and trumpet the Egyptian revolt as an echo of Iran’s Islamist revolution, few Iranians bought the propaganda line spread by the regime.

Iran’s opposition Green Movement is both a forerunner and a beneficiary of many of the same forces that animated Egypt’s popular uprising. The Green Movement, fully realizing this, took the opportunity to launch its own demonstrations in support of the Egyptian revolt to embarrass and defy the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad regime on February 14. The regime, caught off guard by the size of the demonstrations, with tens of thousands of protesters marching in Tehran and other cities, denounced the protesters as “hypocrites, monarchists, thugs and seditionists.” Hardline members of Iran’s rubber-stamp parliament called for opposition leaders to be executed as traitors. (more…)