Iranian opposition to President Ahmadinejad is on the rise following a series of recent setbacks, including election losses for his candidates and criticism of his handling of the nuclear crisis. As discontent increases, however, Mr. Ahmadinejad’s regime is going to spectacular lengths to purge and silence its opposition, much as Nazi Germany did in consolidating its power.

This purge includes the banning of books, reformist papers, Web logs, and satellite TV channels, as well as working against groups such as labor unions and student and women’s organizations.

In the first week of December, Iran cut off its citizens’ access to YouTube and Amazon.com; it had earlier blocked Wikipedia and the New York Times. The Iranian authorities did this, they said, to “purge the country of Western cultural influences.”

In the reformist daily Rooz of January 25, Nooshabeh Amiri discussed the attacks on freedom in Iran and warned that the country will “become a sanctuary for devils and beasts.”

“Iran is the battlefield of evil forces; as if all of the devils that came into existence since the initial days of the revolution have now met at the same place in this historical juncture,” he wrote. The Iranian regime can “instill terror in society,” he added.

Since Mr. Ahmadinejad came to power, a number of student groups that oppose his policies have spoken out against him and have been attacked in response. During a speech by the president at Amir Kabir University on December 11, students burned his picture and shouted, “Death to the dictator.”

One student leader who was blocked from attending his university, Abbas Hakimzadeh, spoke to Rooz on December 4 about government activity against the student movement. The regime is banning student publications, bugging student leaders, maintaining surveillance on them, threatening their families, and even expelling and arresting some of them, he said. But Mr. Hakimzadeh said he was optimistic that “the hardliners” in Iran will lose in their attacks against student organizations, which “act like a watchdog over civil institutions.”

“Under the current conditions, when every section of society suffers from hopelessness, having faith and hope is critical, as this leads to action. Look at how during the last year the government has driven, like a bulldozer, to crush civil organizations, and ignores the wishes of people,” Mr. Hakimzadeh said. Still, “those forces that have not lost hope continue to hold this flame of action and faith high.”

Dissent among university faculty has also been the focus of the Iranian regime’s wrath. According to a report on the Advar News Web site last month, a new “trend” has been to force any faculty member who speaks out against the regime into retirement.

Women’s rights activists in Iran have been another target of the government. At the end of January, four women were arrested on their way to a journalism workshop. The father of one of the women, Farnaz Seyfi, reported on the details of the arrest on his Web log, Emshaspenda.

“They were interrogated on issues related to the campaign known as ‘1 million signatures demanding changes to discriminatory laws,'” one of the lawyers representing the four told the Iranian Students’ New Agency. “The campaign was initiated earlier this year as a grassroots effort to educate the public and raise awareness about gender discrimination in Iran.”

Other women’s rights activists have been harassed this year and “accused of undermining national security and cooperating with the enemy.” Male journalists — including intellectual Ramin Jahanbegloo and Ali Farahbakash, who reportedly is sick in prison — have been arrested on the same charge.

Omid Memarian provided a detailed account of how the Iranian government extracts confessions from its opponents “through torture” and “intimidation” in Rooz on November 29. In one incident, in which he was taken into custody, he wrote: “The judiciary tsar, Ayatollah Shahrudi, showed us images from the Internet where the heads of some the country’s religious leaders had been superimposed on bodies of other people in compromising situations. We were appalled and I made it clear that we had not done that.”

“That incident demonstrated how easy it is for the intelligence personnel to mislead senior decision-makers of the country simply because of their own tunnel vision and dogmatic views of the world,” Mr. Memarian wrote. “This example may also demonstrate how and through what mechanisms Ayatollah Khamenei is convinced that ‘foreign hands’ are threatening the traditional culture of the land, or that the Internet is an ‘enemy.'”

As Iran takes another page from Nazi Germany, one must ask where the Western student groups, women’s right activists, union members, journalists, and other freedom-seeking individuals are, when their Iranian counterparts desperately need support. Many things are possible through the Internet and e-mail.

Mr. Stalinsky is the executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute.