'There were two days a couple of weeks ago when the call-ins stopped," says Menashe Amir, Israel Radio's Farsi broadcaster, whose shows have attracted millions of listeners in Iran for the past 50 years. "But then they resumed."

Menashe Amir.
Photo: Ariel Jerozolimski

The going-on-70-year-old, who officially retired five years ago, yet continues to transmit on a daily basis, attributes this to the courage of his former countrymen (Amir made aliya in 1959).

In a September 2006 interview in these pages, Amir asserted that a majority of Iranians opposed their regime, yet were helpless in the face of the repression under which they were living. Amir quoted Iranians who told him that if they had someone to lead them in their struggle, "it would be possible to topple the regime very quickly."

This week, in light of the popular uprising that began in the streets of Teheran after the results of the June 12 election were falsely called in favor of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - when the real victor was reformist candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi - I asked Amir for his latest assessment.

In our last interview, you said that the Iranian people would not go against the regime without a leader. Is Mousavi now that leader?

That's still unclear. I'm doubtful about whether Mousavi will be able to hang on. Also, don't forget that Mousavi is part of the regime, so he certainly does not want to bring about its collapse. However, a combination of circumstances has caused him to stand and struggle, which is something I couldn't have anticipated.

Two things got him really angry - one political, the other personal. Politically, he is certain he won the election - and I can confirm that he did. According to all the information I have received, he garnered twice the amount of votes as Ahmadinejad, for whom he has great contempt. He thinks Ahmadinejad has destroyed Iran, both internally and in terms of its foreign relations.

On a personal level, he is furious because Ahmadinejad dishonored his wife. During the televised election debate, Ahmadinejad produced documents supposedly proving that Mousavi's wife received her doctorate fraudulently, and took advantage of her husband's standing to achieve her position in academia. And this is while Ahmadinejad and his henchmen are the epitome of those who take advantage of their positions to further their interests. The elections are a perfect example of how Ahmadinejad manipulated the system in order to declare himself the winner.

Do you think that the popular uprising turned Mousavi into an unwitting leader of a movement that began one way and turned into something else? Has it caused him to change his perspective on actual freedom for the people who are rallying around him?

There are two levels on which figures like Mousavi operate - internal Iranian issues and foreign relations. Where foreign relations are concerned, I don't see a big difference between Mousavi and Ahmadinejad. Furthermore, it is not the president who determines policy. That is done by the Supreme National Security Council. The president's role is to carry out its decisions. On the nuclear issue, for example, it makes no different whether the president is Mousavi or Ahmadinejad. In any case, even Mousavi declared openly that, if elected, he would continue Iran's nuclear program, as well as its policy of supplying weapons to Hizbullah and Hamas.

But where Iran's internal affairs are concerned, there is a big difference between Mousavi and Ahmadinejad. Mousavi believes that Iran's economic policy has to be completely overhauled, and promised to give women greater freedom and more rights. His own wife is an intellectual, after all. He also promised greater rights for the young, and things like that. He even hinted that he would lower Iran's involvement in international conspiracies.

Is this because Iran's international involvement costs so much money, and he wants to try to rescue its economy?

That's certainly part of it. I would say that the real battle in this election was over the economy, not freedom and equality.

From an economic standpoint, who is Ahmadinejad? The one who failed to solve Iran's economic difficulties, in spite of the fact that during his four years in office, Iran earned more money than in all eight years of [Seyed Mohammad] Khatami's presidency [1997-2005]. Where did the money go?

So who received more sympathy among the people during the campaign? The one who headed Iran's government for eight years [as the fifth and last prime minister of the Islamic Republic], from 1981 to 1989, during its war with Iraq - and during a period of austerity. Indeed, Mousavi managed, with almost no money, to handle the Iranian economy. That was the source of his popularity, and what tipped the scales in his favor.

You say that it was Mousavi's economic policies and prowess that gained him public support, but as soon as he was declared the loser of the election, he suddenly became the leader of a spontaneous revolution whose focus is freedom for the Iranian people. Is it that he hadn't meant for this to happen, but once it did, he took the ball and ran with it?

Yes, but the root of the problem is that those who determine policy in Iran decided a year ago that Ahmadinejad was going to win the election. To this end, the interior minister - who is in charge of executing the election law - was replaced, and other such things, all of which were approved by [Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei.

As election day approached, they pulled a trick to raise voter turnout. Why? Because there is a new president in the White House, and he has to be shown that the Iranian regime enjoys the support of the people. So they set up a televised debate, in which each candidate freely raised issues and expressed criticism, thus creating the illusion that this time the elections in Iran would be free ones - something they have never been in Iran. This raised the expectations of the people, and brought a whopping 85 percent of the public to the polls. Well, the level of disappointment was as great as the level of expectation. This 85% of the public turned out to vote, and afterward felt the victory had been stolen from them. This is what caused the people to protest, en masse. And these people today have a leader in Mousavi.