Iran's Leaders Warn More Election Protests Will Not Be Tolerated: Via washingtonpost.com.

TEHRAN, June 30 -- Iran's religious and political leadership warned the opposition and Western powers Tuesday that no further protests against a disputed election would be tolerated following the official certification of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's reelection.

The comments by Ahmadinejad and leaders of the Shiite Muslim theocracy came a day after Iran's Guardian Council, a top supervisory body, dismissed all opposition complaints of fraud and affirmed a landslide victory for Ahmadinejad in the June 12 election. The announcement set off shouts of protest from Tehran's rooftops Monday night but left opponents with few options amid an intensifying government crackdown.

In another sign of an increasingly restrictive atmosphere, authorities Tuesday presented a detained Canadian Iranian filmmaker and Newsweek correspondent, Maziar Bahari, who described Western journalists in Iran as spies.

He also said he covered "illegal gatherings" and helped promote a "color revolution" in Iran, a reference to democratic movements in former communist countries of eastern and central Europe earlier this decade.

In a speech to employees of the Intelligence Ministry Tuesday, Ahmadinejad said, "The overt and covert conspiracies of enemies for soft regime change in Iran were defeated," the pro-government Fars News Agency reported. He lashed out at Western nations for their response to his government's crackdown on protests and called on Iranians to use all means "to break the monopoly of the global powers."

In Qom, the Shiite holy city that is a base for leading clerics, the influential head of a Shiite seminary decreed that "opposing the view of the Guardian Council is not legal, religious or socially acceptable."

Ayatollah Morteza Moghtadai called for a continued clampdown on opposition demonstrations, saying that "the view of the leadership is the last word, and everybody in the country must obey it," Fars reported.

"Continued objections are unacceptable, and if some continue the unrest, they are carrying out the will of the world arrogance, and the system must confront them," Moghtadai said, referring to Western powers. "Those who walked in the path of the enemy have weakened the revolution and the system and are against the principles of the system," he said.

Another hard-line cleric, Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami, a leader of Friday prayers in Tehran, even described opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi as "anti-revolutionary and against the regime." Mousavi served as prime minister for eight years in the 1980s and was once a close aide to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the father of Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution.

Khatami, who suggested at Friday prayers last week that protest leaders could face the death penalty, said Tuesday, "If anyone said there was fraud in the election, he has lied and committed a sin," Agence France-Presse reported.

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