More Iranian Internal Troubles, Rare Color Footage of 1940s Israel Discovered
Yesterday was designated “Revolutionary Guard Day” by the Iranian government. Yesterday also, two bombs exploded in a mosque in the city of Zahedan, in southeastern Iran. According to Iranian reports, two suicide bombers entered the mosque and detonated themselves, killing 30 and injuring more than 100 people. The “People’s Resistance Movement of Iran” (PRMI or Jundallah) said the bombing was “retaliation.”
Yesterday was designated “Revolutionary Guard Day” by the Iranian government. Yesterday also, two bombs exploded in a mosque in the city of Zahedan, in southeastern Iran. According to Iranian reports, two suicide bombers entered the mosque and detonated themselves, killing 30 and injuring more than 100 people. The “People’s Resistance Movement of Iran” (PRMI or Jundallah) said the bombing was “retaliation.”
For what? In February, JINSA noted, “a Kyrgyzstan Airways commercial flight from Dubai bound for Bishkek was ordered by the Iranian government to land in Iran and a passenger, Abdolmalik Rigi, was taken off in handcuffs.” (JINSA Report #966) The lack of international interest in the forced landing and rendition of Rigi by Iran would have been mind-boggling except that it wasn’t done by Israel.
On June 20, Rigi was hanged in the Evin Prison in Teheran. IRNA, the Iranian news agency, said the execution was “carried out following a decision of the Tehran revolutionary tribunal” and quoted a court statement saying: “The head of the armed counter-revolutionary group in the east of the country…was responsible for armed robbery, assassination attempts, armed attacks on the army and police and on ordinary people, and murder.” His execution was called a “severe blow” to Jundullah.
Rigi’s brother Abdolhamid Rigi was executed one month earlier in Zahedan. The sentence was carried out in private, Iranian sources said, but with his family in attendance, presumably to ensure their future quiescence. The explosion in the mosque is an indication that at least some people were not cowed. The bombers, according to a Jundallah statement, were Mohammad and Abdolbaaset Rigi
It is unnecessary to know anything about the Jundallah organization to understand that the Iranian regime is secretly executing its enemies and is reaping the revenge.
Monosson: Something Very Nice for a Very Hot Weekend in July
In the 1940s Fred Monosson was a wealthy American with a most rare device – a color movie camera. He started in Europe chronicling post-war devastation and Jewish refugees, moved to the detention camps of Cypress, and to pre-State Israel, including Israel’s Woodstock, the second folk dance convention at Kibbutz Dalia in 1947. In a country of 500,000 people, 25,000 were there to sing and dance under the stars and the eyes of the British army. Monosson kept the camera on for the destruction of Jewish Jerusalem, early independence, Operation Magic Carpet, the Sinai Campaign and the Six Day War. Then he went back to Boston, stowed the film, lived and died. His grandchildren, preparing to sell his house, found the archive in the attic.
Check out Israel’s Channel 2 report on the Monosson film. A longer film from the archives is in the works.
There is David Ben Gurion, Shimon Peres (who speaks movingly of Monosson and of the early days of the State in the clip) and a young Golda Meir. See café society in Tel Aviv and the grave of Theodore Herzl when there was nothing else on Mt. Herzl but that. But mostly, see in color the people – young and old, religious and secular, British soldiers and Palmachniks, Yemenite and Moroccan refugees joining Europeans who came only shortly before and the native Israelis who had been there for centuries, or who had never left at all. See folk dancing, farming, governing, building, walking, talking, eating and praying and building the State of Israel with hope, determination, joy and love.
And spend just one regretful moment thinking what the Palestinians could have if they had worked with that energy instead of against it.