Revolutionary Guards, for the first time since the beginning of the crisis, are explicitly waving with "revolutionary and strict measures" to crush the opposition if it pursued its protests.
However, protesters are set to continue their display of defiance, supported by presidential candidate Mir Hussein Mousavi and other entities of the opposition.
Why?
When the gap between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi is allegedly as vast as 11 million votes, and still people are willing to sacrifice their lives in the streets in protest of the results then we are in front of two conclusions.
Either the election (and post election investigation) was simply rigged and the people are standing up for a system lying to them; or the numbers are right and people are simply fed up with the whole system that allows only for a tightly controlled election.
In both cases it is freedom stupid.
Neda Sultani, the 27 years old woman, whom the world watched her dying from a Basij sniper bullet to her heart, and whose bloodied face has come to symbolise the face of the post-Khomeini revolution, didn't sacrifice her life for a "re-count" or "annulment" of election results, but rather for freedom.
Caspian Makan, a 37-year-old photojournalist in Tehran, who identifies himself as as the boyfriend of Neda offered an Associated Press reporter an insight at her demands:
She only ever said that she wanted one thing, she wanted democracy and freedom for the people of Iran.
Mohsen Makhmalbaf, a leading Iranian film maker, wrote an op-ed in The Guardian to the request of Mousavi, telling the world what is happening in Iran.
He may have never discussed with Makan the reasons why people like Neda are taking the streets, and surely never discussed her death with him. And Neda might have had no chance to read her fellow citizen's piece that was published in the last 24 hours of her short life, however the came to the same conclusion.
Makhmalbaf wrote:
Hugh Sykes report to the BBC quotes people in the streets calling namely for freedom. One man said:
That they (protesters) continue to gather shows they want something more than an election. They want freedom, and if they are not granted it we will be faced with another revolution.
Another woman said:
We want the freedom to talk, and the freedom to think. We want freedom for our spirit, ok? That's not very much to ask
This later speaks for a thick layer of the multiple layers of those taking the streets in Iran. "women's rights movement (...) has slowly gained strength in Iran over the past several years", observes Anne Applebaum of the Washington Post.
The hijab is not really the problem. The real problem is that men and women are human beings - they are the same, and they should have equal freedoms.
Neda's "martyrdom" comes as an unintended vindication of this struggle, that played a role in the electoral campaigns.
Applebaum sheds some light on that:
If Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear, as George Orwell once said, then it is exactly this, what Iranians are experiencing in the streets of Tehran and other big cities; they said it loudly and freely: "Marg bar dictator" (death to the dictator).
It is no accident that the two main challengers to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the Iranian presidential campaign promised to repeal some of the laws that discriminate against women, and it is no accident that the leading challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi, used his wife, a political scientist and former university chancellor, in his campaign appearances and posters.
The Iranian clerics know that women pose a profound threat to their authority, too: As the activist Ladan Boroumand has written, the regime would not bother to brutally repress dissidents unless it feared them deeply. Nobody would have murdered a peaceful, unarmed young woman in blue jeans -- unless her mere presence on the street presented a dire threat.
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