With the Feb. 11th anniversary of the 1979 Revolution looming, the Islamic Republic, faced with an unprecedented scale of opposition, seems like a bleeding monster, leading many to think it is facing certain demise. I wrote the poem below on the occasion of the 22bahman/11th Feb. demonstrations against the regime.
Blood dripping from
Gaping mouth:
Wounded monster
Musters one last bout.
Slippery fingers, crooked hands
Grasp brittle branches
Of a dead tree's
Timorous stance.
Flared nostrils
Inhale augur of demise;
Exhale vain fury
At fictional crimes.
Reddened eyes
Bulge at the sight
Of timid victims'
Unfathomable might.
Trampled seedling
Turn into moving forest,
Like Birnam coming to Dunsinane,
Boding the fiend's
Bloody conclusion.
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All I want to point out is that Iran needs to go through an Islamic Republic in order to become a secular democracy in the future.
What I object to is our willingness to deny reality and embrase an interenet manufactured "revolution." We must not deny the fact that Iranians remain devout muslims and the mullah will be capable to muster support, at will.
The secularemovement is embeded in the women's movement. The freer women the more secular will Iran become. And as all women's movements, Iran's march will be a slow and painful one. But like all women's movement it will get there. We must not fool ourselves into believing in false "revolutions" that elude reality and set this America's agenda behind.
The correct policy would be to support women's rights by pointing out the short comings of the IR. That would resonate with more than half the population of Iran. We must also be patient and not rush to policies that are designed by the oil interest or the AIPAC which are short sighted and, as we have seen, are doomed to fail.
Point them out to whom? To the IR? To Iranian women? And who is to do the pointing out?
"That would resonate with more than half the population of Iran."
Who I guess did not know they were oppressed until we pointed it out to them. Or something.
"We must also be patient and not rush to policies that are designed by the oil interest or the AIPAC which are short sighted and, as we have seen, are doomed to fail."
What policies? Supporting the democratic movement in Iran?
"embrase an interenet manufactured 'revolution' "
The internet manufactured the Green Movement? Or AIPAC? (By the way, does your computer underline misspellings? You might want to look into that, Soraya. I mean, leutinizer.)
I don't see the media dedicating any section to Saudi or Egyptian human rights violation. This is all designed to topple the one independent regime in the region and recolonize the nation.
The 1979 revolution would have been impossible if it had not been for the Iranians in exile. But you overlook that because it does not favor your argument.
Which speaks volumes about your intellectual honesty.
The same impetus for freedom which led Iranians in exile to speak out against the Shah leads Iranians in exile to speak out against the reactionary cliques running Iran now.
That revolution was not about those in Tehran or those outside Iran. No part of that revolution was in any way in debted to those people. The revolution was born from the mosques. Tehranis and those in Diaspora who had no clue who Khomeini was, joined in dreaming of Paris. But the reality was that the revolution was the take over of the province over the capital, the take over of the poor and the undereducated over the failed intellectuals who gravitated to European life style and communism.
The current demonstrations, mainly in Tehran, continues to show that Tehrani's and the Iranians in diaspora still don't get it.
You lack intellectual honesty by pretending the revolution started in Paris instead of the Mosque. That a few left leaning, univeristy students in diaspora had a greater influence on that revolution than Khomeini and his cassettes in the Mosques. You are a monument to why America has gotten Iran wrong for 30 years and continues to have disjointed policy that has failed to advance America's agenda.
About as often as the Soviet American 'experts' predicted the 'imminent collapse of the American regime'.
Actually, if you look at more than the one-dimensional image that the western media and governments have been presenting since Iranians regained their freedom, you'll find that, though Iranians are no more monolithic than Americans (in fact, the title of this article from the University of Maryland is 'Iranians aren't monolithic:' http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/pdf/may09/IranianPublic_May09_rpt.pdf ) they are no more supportive of these demonstrators who are trying to overthrow the democratically elected government than Americans would be of a similar group trying to do the same in the US ( http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/brmiddleeastnafricara/652.php?lb=brme&pnt=652&nid=&id= )
Iran has swung to the left and the right over the years, and right now the President is pretty much dead center in the political spectrum (from what he has done, I suspect he would like to be a bit farther left, but, like Obama, has found out that he needs to stay a bit right of center, and talk about moving left)
Though I will say that, to put it in somewhat poetically, they are acting like a person who, having been stung by a swarm of bees fairly recently, are over-reacting to finding one in their house, because they are worried that it may attract more from outside
he knows more about the topic than you.
All, and I mean all, evidence indicate there were no fraud on the election:
1-The ONLY Pre-election polls both from outside the country and the one from the University of Tehran showed Ahmadinejad to be winning on a wider margin than the one he actually got.
2-Mousavi had 42000 monitors on each electoral poll who signed and certified the results of each ballot box. That is why Mousavi, in his letter to the Guarding Councel, did not make any specific challenges to the actual vote count.
3-Millions poured on the streets of Tehran only proved the results to be accurate. The vote count itself showed Mousavi to have won Tehran by a margin of almost 3 to 1. In a city of 14 million, that means millions. But it only confirms the accuracy of the election result.
4-Almost all video of protest are also almost exclusively from Tehran and are showing it is evaporating. Even the videos showcased on the internet show the results are valid.
5-The fact that even you get angry at Richard Pearce and instead you appeal to the emotional and subjective evidence, "millions on the streets," without ever providing objective evidence, poll results or mousavi's own failure to provide a shred of proof, is further evidence Ahmadinejad won.
It is time to have a rational discussion about this matter. Running away from facts only undermines the opposition you seek to support.
Now, this was in the second week of coverage (the first week the majority of the news media numbered them as 'thousands', with the occasional 'tens of thousands' mixed in). And I remember thinking that, though it was too close to the event for people to inflate the numbers that much, it wouldn't take long before 'millions' would indeed be the narrative.
But, if you look at the coverage at the time, you won't see 'millions'.
Here's an example http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0906/17/lkl.01.html