Iran’s Parliament makes U.S. Congress look civilized

Members of Iran’s Parliament clamored on Tuesday for two leaders of the opposition movement, Mir Hussein Moussavi and Mehdi Karroubi, to be hanged.

Lawmakers Urge Death for Opposition Leaders

By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
NYT

A day after the largest antigovernment protests in Iran in more than a year, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Tuesday dismissed opposition attempts to revive mass demonstrations as certain to fail, while members of the Iranian Parliament clamored for the two most prominent leaders of the protest movement to be executed.

Critics have called in the past for the two men, Mir Hussein Moussavi and Mehdi Karroubi, to be prosecuted for alleged crimes that would merit the death penalty. The calls for punishment on Tuesday, however, appeared to be the most strident yet — with members of Parliament shouting in unison, “Moussavi, Karroubi should be hanged!”

But while the government has tried and convicted many opposition members since large street protests in 2009, it has so far shied away from putting the two men on trial, perhaps fearing that would lead to further unrest.

The government on Tuesday continued to try to squelch reports about the demonstrations on Monday, arresting or sequestering critics and revoking the working credentials of about a dozen foreign correspondents who had been ordered not to cover the protests.

(More here.)