IRGC Makes New Corruption Allegations Against Rouhani's Brother

In a Twitter post Friday, the taboo-breaking standup comedian alleged that her page was reported by hardliner cyber-activists paid by state organizations. "It upsets me that some people are now sending invoices, and are getting paid from taxpayers' money, for shutting down my account," she wrote.

Recently, the online admission of a jihadi man proved that hardline followers of Iran's regime get paid for their activities online.

Empress Kuzcooo's Instagram page had over half a million followers before being deleted but she was lucky she had a second Instagram page that she had kept running in the background in preparation for the rainy day.

The video-post that demolished Empress Kuzcooo's very popular Instagram palace was entitled "Expert Scrutiny of Prayer at the Kremlin". In the video she made fun of President Ebrahim Raisi's prayer during his meeting with the Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Wednesday. Iran's hardliners say Raisi's much advertised prayerwas a "spiritual victory" for the Islamic Republic.

In her standup, Empress Kuzcooo criticized Raisi in hilarious terms for using time that should be dedicated to diplomatic negotiations, and "doing something for his country", to pray at the Kremlin Palace in front of cameras and made fun of his not-too-good public speaking skills.

"He knows he is not capable of speaking [diplomatically] … so he communicated his heart's desire to his God instead … Oh, God, he said, make Mr. Putin love me to help our wishes come true," Empress Kuzcooo who speaks like an elderly illiterate woman in Qom accent squeals in the video from under the black veil that only leaves her nose to be seen.

The number of followers for Empress Kuzcooo's 'spare' account, to which she has emigrated since Friday, is growing by the hour as followers discover her new page. In a matter of three hours Saturday, over four thousands followed the new page (iam.kuzcooo) which now has 26.5k followers.

Empress Kuzcooo is the artistic name of Zeynab Mousavi, a 32-year-old computer software graduate. Mousavi is also active on Twitter and Telegram. She works from home in her hometown of Qom, the city of Iran's largest Shia seminaries, and makes her living from advertisements on her social media accounts.

Her artistic name, Empress Kuzcooo, draws from the protagonist in the 2000 Disney animation 'Emperor's New Groove', an arrogant and saucy personality.

Mousavi is known to millions of Iranian social media users for her biting humor, impetuous criticism of clerics and politicians, and for breaking taboos by sometimes explicit sexual references in her standups.

In 2017, Mousavi told The Guardian that she would not give in to censorship and intimidation. On her Tweeter account Mousavi has published dozens of screenshots of abusive messages and comments she receives from hardliners. "Look, we have no toleration for insults against three people: The Leader of the Revolution, President Raisi, and Ghasem Soleimani. Our blood will boil if you insult them and we won't be responsible for anything we do," one such comment read.

Instagram users can report posts, profiles, and comments if they think they are spam or inappropriate directly from their own feed. Instagram will suspend or completely shut down the account if the number of complaints reaches a certain threshold or if the content is too obviously abusive, explicit, etc. Recovering deleted pages is possible if the account owner can prove they were wrongfully reported but it may take some time.

Mohammad Fazeli, a professor of sociology at Beheshti University, and Arash Abazari, a philosophy professor at Sharif University, were dismissed in the last few days.

Abazari is well-known for his book Hegel's Ontology of Power: The Structure of Social Domination in Capitalism, which was published by Cambridge University Press. Fazeli’s works focus on sociology of politics and science, especially in the energy sector.

The Islamic Republic has conducted several ‘cleansing’ operations in universities, firing professors that it has deemed not committed to the regime.

The most widespread firings took place right after the 1979 revolution and was peaked again during the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who forced many professors into retirement.

Kaave Lajevardi, a fellow philosopher and translator, called it a disgrace for Iran’s education system, saying that Abazari is not tolerated while many are busy Islamizing the universities.

Abdonnaser Hemmati, the former head of Iran’s central bank who run for president last June, has protested to Fazeli’s firing and called on President Ebrahim Raisi to intervene.

Renowned reformist Abbas Abdi described such dismissals as part of a larger process to destroy the institution of science in Iran.

Every week a new conservative group emerges on the Iranian political scene. Groups that already existed but were less visible, are given a wider exposure on national TV.

Even compared to Majles Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and his aides who call themselves "neo-cons," the new conservatives, the likes of Tehran Mayor Alireza Zakani, are far more ruthless in their quest for power, according to some local media.

While traditional conservatives started forging alliances following former President Hassan Rouhani's victory in the 2013 presidential election, this time, it is a new generation of conservatives that is marching to occupy positions of power and to get ready for the next parliamentary elections in February or March 2024.

Last week, the party known as the Selfless Devotees of the Islamic Revolution held its congress in Tehran. With two other parties, The Society of Sacrificial Warriors, and the Society of Wayfarers, the three groups are known in the Iranian political circles as the Conservative Triplet. The names these groups use can be defined as super-revolutionary labels, but in fact their leaders are nothing more than typical political actors in an authoritarian system who want a bigger piece of the pie.

Currently, Iran’s parliament is dominated by the hardliner Paydari group, which has not always followed signals coming from the office of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. The re-emergence of the triplet with new momentum, could be Khamenei's policy to introduce them as his favorite so that they could replace Paydari in 2024.

Apart from their leaders, most of the members of the three parties have been hitherto unknown. The Sacrificial Warriors come from a background of former revolutionary guards (IRGC), the Wayfarers are former, or current Basij militia members and the Selfless Devotees are the family members of the veteran soldiers of the 1980s Iran-Iraq war.

After Alireza Zakani took office as the Tehran Mayor last summer, many of the members of the Sacrificial and the Wayfarers have joined the Tehran municipality as managers. Meanwhile, as some newspapers in Tehran have noted, members of all the three parties frequently take part in news and current affairs programs on state television in a bid to build recognition and credibility for the future.

The Selfless Devotees have their roots in a pre-1979-armed group, which would have been characterized as terrorist if it was active today. The group's name was Saf (Rank) and its members included Yahya Rahim Safavi the former IRGC commander and the current military adviser to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Low-ranking members of that group included current IRGC General Esmail Kowsari who has been a member of the Iranian parliament three times so far and every time he immediately went back to the IRGC to serve as a security officer. Kowsari was, for some time, the secretary-general of the party.

All three groups were formed in the 2000s when the IRGC was beginning to become a major political and economic power in Iran.

Among the three groups, the Sacrificial Warriors is politically more important than the others and has been involved in making all the major decisions of the conservative camp. Former President Ahmadinejad was a member of the central council of this party when he became Iran's president in 2005. Its members include powerful conservative politicians such as Ali Darabi and Hassan Fadaei. The former was the deputy chief of the state television under three different heads of the state TV.

It appears that the three groups are preparing to seize the parliament and dominate the presidential administration as the "young revolutionaries" Khamenei wants for his ‘second step of the revolution,’ his jargon for his vision of Iran in the next 40 years.

"Those who have seen the 21-minute footage released by Ria Novosti know how Putin looks stressed during the meeting, tidying his tie twice, moving his legs and shoulders. Why? Because he feels this is a very important political meeting that is vital for his country," a seven-minute-long video-commentary by media researcher Mohammad Lesani claimed.

The video-commentary entitled "Historical Arrangement, Iranian Power and Authority" which was published Friday by Fars news website affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) was widely circulated by other government-controlled media outlets.

"On the other hand, you see Mr. Raisi's serenity who is speaking calmly without moving his hands and legs," the video went on to say.

Many Iranian social media users have interpreted the placement of a massive table to separate the two presidents in the meeting as an intentional act to imply "distance" and said it was a sign of disrespect that Putin was chewing gum while Raisi was speaking. They have also pointed out that unlike most official meetings, the flags of the two countries were nowhere to be seen in the hall.

While showing a photo of Putin's meeting with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nicol Pashinyan at the same table sitting a closer and facing the Russian president, the narrator said Putin had a "haughty" and "emperor-like" demeanor while Aliyev and Pashinyan looked as if they were being "politically humiliated".

The Fars video went to great lengths to justify the mise-en-scene in the room. Showing photos of Putin's meetings with other foreign dignitaries in the same hall, including his meetings with the former German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the Venezuelan president Nicholas Maduro, the narrator said Putin meets foreign dignitaries in the same hall and "his important working meetings" at the same table.

"But the arrangement this time was a historical and unprecedented arrangement… Two political leaders are sitting at the two ends sides of the table…[resembling] balanced plates of a weighing scale," the video said.

"I wanted to make a response to those people who beat the drums of despair and think that the strategic agreements of our country with Russia, China, and other countries of the East …are supposedly equal to destroying our nation, identity, and Iran's power and authority," the narrator said in the video.

The publication of a photo of President Raisi praying at the same hall has also raised much controversy in social media. State media and hardliners say Raisi broke his meeting with the Russian president not to miss the noontime prayer and to display spirituality at a place where once atheists ruled.

Several Friday imams eulogized Raisi's move to stand to prayer at the Kremlin as a gesture of great significance. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's representative in Alborz province, Mohammad-Mehdi Hosseini-Hamedani, in his Friday sermon also predicted that Raisi may stand to prayer at the White House someday because his act of praying at the Kremlin "bore important messages".

Mohammad-Mehdi Hosseini-Hamedani, a cleric, said in his Friday Prayer that Raisi’s prayers at Kremlin conveyed a very important message.

A photo of Raisi praying at the Kremlin during his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin has been advertised by many officials and followers of the Iranian president, including his wife that described it as a revelation of spirituality.

The photo has been used extensively in what appears to be a publicity campaign for Raisi amid public criticism of his government's efforts to expand relations with Russia and China. Among Iranians the names of both countries are associated with communism and atheism.

During their Friday Prayer sermons, representatives of Khamenei all over the country praised the image, calling it an important event.

Mohammad Ali Nekounam, the Friday Prayer leader of Shahrekord, described Raisi’s prayers at Kremlin as a “conquest” and the Friday Imam of Esfahan said it showed that “We only rely on God”.

The contents of Friday Prayer sermons delivered by Khamenei's local representative in various cities are dictated by two state bodies close to Khamenei's office, officially known as "The Policy-making Council for Friday Prayer Imams" and the "Friday Prayer Headquarters," both dominated by hardliner clerics.