[...]The students, backed by ordinary people in the streets, are no longer asking for reform but for the removal of the clerical regime. They are chanting “death to Khamenei,” the Supreme Leader, which is by law a treasonous act. What makes these protests more serious than those of a few months ago in support of Aghajari, a professor who had been condemned to death for speaking against the regime, is that even after thinly veiled threats of use of force by Khamenei, they have continued.

There are reports of many having been wounded and a few killed by Bassiji vigilante forces, but no sign of the protests slowing down. Also, the protests have now spilled into more areas than the streets around Tehran University. There are rumors that the youth of Naziabad, one of the poorest and traditionally most religious sections of Tehran, have extended their support to the students and offered to do the dirty fighting for them. Even in the well-to-do northern residential areas of town young and old have taken to the streets in support of the uprising.[...]

But anti-Americanism here is staid. Tired of theocratic hard-line rule, the people are happy to get whatever help they can from abroad. The opposition radio and satellite television are widely used even in the poorer sections of Tehran. Accusations of American backing actually have given courage to the demonstrators. Unlike the streets of Paris, Berlin or Berkeley, anti-Americanism is not fashionable in Tehran. The regime, having adopted it for the past twenty-five years since the Islamic Revolution, has beaten the life out of it.

People are encouraged by the presence of U.S. in both the East (Afghanistan) and the West (Iraq) of Iran.[...]