What whets the US's appetite in Iran? What is behind this lack of interest in Egypt?

One should not be surprised that the protests taking place in Iran suddenly landed on the agenda of the whole world. It is also quite normal that the reactions to the events are an expression of everyone's feelings, expectations and even appetite regarding Iran. There are those who, grieving on behalf of the ummah over Iran's meddling in the affairs of other countries, think that Iran is being warned by a kind of divine slap, who interpret the event in this way, and who even expect to be given good tidings in this way. However, the displays of joy shown by the US and Israel toward these events naturally make people's feelings complicated.

I do not think any child of the ummah would wish, these days, to stand in the same emotional line as the US and Israel. Of course, such expectations and emotional approaches distance one from understanding what is happening in Iran. They turn predictions into an expression of wishes, and all predictions and analyses are recorded only as data for understanding wishes about Iran.

Of course, anyone may also wish that Iran draw some lessons of its own from this situation, but this is neither the place nor the time. Iran has a dynamic sociology, as elsewhere, and the missions Iran has taken on in the international arena will inevitably have reflections on that sociology. We know that the whole of the Iranian people is not on the same frequency of feeling and meaning as the Iranian regime. Moreover, the 40-year practice of the revolution is increasingly and rapidly alienating its own people from itself and making them hate it.

Nevertheless, when it faces these protests, there is another section of the people that will stand against them and protect their state and stability. That is, Iran is not merely the protesters we see in the squares these days. Against that protesting, opposing populace there is also another mass that is just as organized and believes to the end in the beliefs and goals of the revolution. Therefore, one must see that those who want to obtain results with such mass demonstrations have not sufficiently taken this dynamic of Iran into account.

In fact, in the Gezi incident too, the meaning attributed to the demonstrators through the media was that they represented the whole of Turkey. When President Erdoğan said "we are barely holding the 50 percent at home", the wholesale perception, or instrumentalization, of the "people of Turkey" that he was challenging was nothing other than this.

Within a short time, with enormous rallies held with crowds he gathered not against the protesters but in separate squares, he showed that what he did was not a bluff, and left the eagerness of those who wanted to topple him through popular protests stuck in their throats.

Popular demonstrations, let us admit, are in the modern world like a possible route around the ballot boxes of democracy. Almost one of democracy's sacred things.

Of course, gathering crowds is easy up to a point, but whether this is enough to change a government depends on whether similar or larger crowds can be gathered against it, or whether that first protesting crowd can unite with certain other elements of power enough to bring about this change. In Egypt, a crowd ten times the size of the first crowd that gathered in Tahrir as a defiance gathered in Rabia Square and demonstrated for forty days, but because the first crowd had behind it both the army and the so-called international community, that relatively small crowd was accepted as a demand for democratic transformation. This acceptance, and this whole process, was of course unjust and did not change the fact that the process was a coup, but let us move on.

In the end, the open support that Trump and Netenyahu gave to the protests taking place in Iran these days, truly, as it destroys the legitimacy of these protests from the start, also eliminates whatever rightful side they may have.

That Trump, who could think of calling the UN Security Council to an extraordinary meeting over the events in Iran, makes no sound over the unjust and hasty executions carried out in Egypt in the same days should also be recorded somewhere.

That after the coup in Egypt tens of thousands of people are held in prisons under the harshest conditions, tortured and deprived of their most basic rights, is by now one of the routine subjects of human rights reports.

Most recently, news came on 2 January that 5 people were quietly executed. Immediately before these, 15 people were executed in just two weeks. The common feature of all the executions is that none of them had a proper interrogation or trial. The defendants are found guilty of some act on evidence hastily compiled or fabricated, and death sentences, disproportionate even to the charges attributed, are carried out.

If you look at it, prison conditions are in any case like a kind of real survivor setting. Under those conditions it seems prisoners could not survive for long anyway. And by hastily carrying out death sentences on the survivors, the death machine is sped up a little more.

If the UN Security Council still preserves, to some degree, a mission such as acting in the name of humanity, this is the real situation that requires it to act, but it is not budging an inch.

Neither from Trump nor from any other member of the UN Security Council is there the slightest question or interest about what is happening in Egypt and in Egyptian prisons.

Why might change in Iran be wanted by the US and Israel? For more democracy? Do not make us laugh, for God's sake. Who are you and who is democracy?

It was of course not God who prescribed to them democracy, the human rights and freedoms they speak of; they made it obligatory for themselves. Just like the clergy who made monasticism obligatory for themselves, they might at least abide by these words they themselves invented and made obligatory for themselves.