Harry's Place

The passport Iranian television is claiming belonged to the alleged “Israeli spy” (see Gene’s story below) is a crude forgery copied directly from a facsimile of an Israeli passport on Wikipedia. Such was the ineptitude that the word “forgery” is in fact too generous – they made no effort to even change the details. The [...]

Potkin Azarmehr and Emanuele Ottolenghi raise doubts about Iranian claims that a “Mossad spy” was executed for the murder of an Iranian nuclear scientist.
Iranian TV showed what it claimed was an Israeli passport issued to the alleged spy, Majid Jamali Fashi.

Ottolenghi writes:
I will leave it to others to decide whether Fashi’s execution was a fake. [...]

The last couple of days have seen both Democrat and Labour politicians voicing exasperation at their opposite numbers’ apparent lack of toughness on the question of sanctions against Iran.
It seems that Britain, concerned by the possible impact on global oil prices, is trying to delay implementing a ban on providing protection and indemnity insurance for [...]

First Israel is the featured country at the LGBT Equality Forum in Philadelphia, at which Israeli ambassador Michael Oren speaks. Then President Obama endorses same-sex marriage. And now the overwhelmingly Shia Muslim nation of Azerbijan prepares to host the famously gayish Eurovision contest. (It seems rumors that the contest will be followed by a gay [...]

This is a cross post by Hussein Ibish. This piece was originally published at NOW Lebanon.
The Council on Foreign Relations, one of the most respected international affairs organizations in the United States, now finds itself in the grip of an exceptionally embarrassing scandal. Ed Husain, a senior fellow for Middle Eastern Studies, recently generated an [...]

Tehran Bureau reports:
Government anxieties about social networking featured in a military parade held in the central-Iranian city of Isfahan on Tuesday to mark Iran’s Army Day.
In the course of the procession, military vehicles bore oversized placards labelled “instances of soft war”, the first of which was headed “damages of the Facebook internet site”.
It was followed [...]

Although Mansour Osanloo, the seriously ill leader of the Tehran bus workers’ union, was released by the Iranian regime in 2011 after years of imprisonment, news now comes of another outrage against trade union and human rights in the Islamic Republic.
The International Alliance in Support of Workers in Iran reports:

Reza Shahabi has now been sentenced [...]

Cross-posted from Potkin Azarmehr

The woman above holding the little girl is Hajer Rostami Motlagh, mother of Neda Agha Soltan, the young girl who was killed in the post-election protests. Images of Neda Agha Soltan’s last breaths after she was shot became viral around the globe and she became a symbol of Iran’s Green Revolution.
The [...]

Over the years, we’ve been informed that the official Internet firewall of the Islamic Republic of Iran filters out Harry’s Place.
I think I speak for everyone at HP when I say it’s a point of pride that someone in that thuggish regime has considered our humble blog dangerous (or at least annoying) enough to ban. [...]

As promised, the latest sanction to hit the Islamic Republic of Iran took effect on Saturday.
The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) has halted service for some two dozen Iranian banks that have been sanctioned by the European Union, including Iran’s central bank. SWIFT is the major means that banks worldwide use for cross-border [...]