TEHRAN — Tens of thousands of protesters — many decked out in the green colors of the reform movement and chanting “Death to the dictator!” — rallied Friday in defiance of Iran’s Islamic leadership, clashing with police and confronting state-run anti-Israel rallies.
In the first major opposition protests in two months, demonstrators marching shoulder to shoulder raised their hands in V-for-victory signs on main boulevards and squares throughout the capital.
Lines of police, security forces and plainclothes Basij militiamen kept the two sides apart in most cases. At times they waded into the protesters with baton charges and volleys of tear gas. The marchers responded by throwing stones and bricks and setting tires ablaze.
The protests were a significant show of defiance after supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei explicitly banned anti-government marches on Quds Day, an annual memorial created by Iran’s Islamic Republic to show support for the Palestinians and denounce Israel.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who the opposition contends won re-election by fraud, delivered a nationally televised address, railing against Israel and the West. Speaking before a crowd of supporters at Tehran University, he questioned whether the Holocaust was a “real event” and called it a pretext for the creation of Israel.
Outside the university, opposition protesters shouted “Liar, liar!”
U.S. officials denounced the Holocaust comments, which Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, called “hateful.” She said President Barack Obama would not meet with Ahmadinejad during next week’s gathering of world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly.
In protests around Tehran and other Iranian cities, demonstrators chanted “Not Gaza, not Lebanon — our life is for Iran” in a challenge of the government’s priority of supporting Palestinian militants in Gaza and Lebanon’s Hezbollah guerrillas instead of focusing on problems at home.
