Regretfully you have just left a list that passionately cares for Iran, and prosperity of Iranians. You just turned your back to Iran and oppressed people of Iran, in their struggle to re-gain their FREEDOM.I think it'd be more effective if they laid on the guilt a little thicker. "You have just personally killed four political prisoners. If you don't rejoin our list right away, their dead bodies will be mutilated and their corpses hung above their families' doors, and it will be all your fault. I hope you're happy now."
Showing posts with label Iran. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Iran. Show all posts
Friday, April 16, 2010
I do not respond well
I somehow got subscribed (without my consent, btw) to a listserv that sent out emails about Iran. Of course, more than half these emails are in Farsi, a language I cannot read. So, I ask to unsubscribe. The response I got was priceless. And, jeez, so freaking Persian.
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Why Iran is crossed off my post-bar travel list
Maziar Bahari was imprisoned in Iran for 118 days on charges of espionage. What did he do? He gave an interview to The Daily Show's Jason Jones, who was pretending to be a spy. Clearly the Ayatollah didn't get the joke.
What follows is a snippet from his Daily Show interview with Jon Stewart last night.
Maziar Bahari: I thought that maybe they'd cancel my press card or maybe they put me in prison for 2-3 days, maybe a week, and then they let me go, but charging me with espionage because of an interview with Jason, it was beyond my wildest dreams.
Jon Stewart: You know, we hear so much about the banality of evil, but so little about the stupidity of evil.
MB: It's--evil is stupid, you know. Whenever you take anything to the extremes, you see the humor in it and you see the stupidity in it. And I think what the Iranian government did, and what my interrogator as the representative of the Iranian government was doing to me, it was stupid and it was funny at the same time. It was not funny while I was in the interrogation room, blindfolded, in a dark room, and being beaten, you know, that was not funny. But when I was going back to my cell, I had to laugh. I mean, that was my defense mechanism.
JS: Well they say comedy is imprisonment plus time.
MB: Exactly, yeah. And you know, my interrogator, for some reason after a while he became my muse. And I never told him, but he gave me ideas. You know, he was so exaggerated in whatever he did, that he just gave me ideas. And I just, I just laughed at him.
JS: It's all so Dostoevsky--or this crazy existentialist nightmare that you entered into, but--he was obsessed with the idea that you had been to New Jersey.
MB: Yes.
JS: This is--this is true!
MB: You know, to him, New Jersey sounded like the most American place that you could be. And he thought that New Jersey is paradise on Earth. And, you know, he thought that New Jersey is a place where people drink all the time, they have sex all the time, and where there are no Jews.
JS: I'm apparently the exception to the rule, I didn't get to do any of that stuff.
MB: I never told him about you, yes.
JS: It's funny and tragic and horrible because this is a man invested with a great deal of power. He is in the Revolutionary Guard in Iran.
MB: He was a Revolutionary Guard and he was in charge of my life, you know. I had to be very respectful of him, I had to be very deferential, you know, I always had to call him "Sir," and whenever I wanted to answer back I was always saying that, "I beg to differ, but you're stupid." I never said that, but you know, I always had to respect him. And he had a lot of power. I mean, he--you know, one thing that was very smart was that I was not confronting the system, I was not confronting the government. They made him in charge of my life. So it was as if that he had a personal grudge against me, not that I was, you know, tried or imprisoned by the Iranian government. They made it more personal. He came to arrest me. He was my interrogator. And on the last day, just the night before I left Iran, he told me that "We can arrest you wherever you are, we can always bring you back in a bag."
What follows is a snippet from his Daily Show interview with Jon Stewart last night.
Maziar Bahari: I thought that maybe they'd cancel my press card or maybe they put me in prison for 2-3 days, maybe a week, and then they let me go, but charging me with espionage because of an interview with Jason, it was beyond my wildest dreams.
Jon Stewart: You know, we hear so much about the banality of evil, but so little about the stupidity of evil.
MB: It's--evil is stupid, you know. Whenever you take anything to the extremes, you see the humor in it and you see the stupidity in it. And I think what the Iranian government did, and what my interrogator as the representative of the Iranian government was doing to me, it was stupid and it was funny at the same time. It was not funny while I was in the interrogation room, blindfolded, in a dark room, and being beaten, you know, that was not funny. But when I was going back to my cell, I had to laugh. I mean, that was my defense mechanism.
JS: Well they say comedy is imprisonment plus time.
MB: Exactly, yeah. And you know, my interrogator, for some reason after a while he became my muse. And I never told him, but he gave me ideas. You know, he was so exaggerated in whatever he did, that he just gave me ideas. And I just, I just laughed at him.
JS: It's all so Dostoevsky--or this crazy existentialist nightmare that you entered into, but--he was obsessed with the idea that you had been to New Jersey.
MB: Yes.
JS: This is--this is true!
MB: You know, to him, New Jersey sounded like the most American place that you could be. And he thought that New Jersey is paradise on Earth. And, you know, he thought that New Jersey is a place where people drink all the time, they have sex all the time, and where there are no Jews.
JS: I'm apparently the exception to the rule, I didn't get to do any of that stuff.
MB: I never told him about you, yes.
JS: It's funny and tragic and horrible because this is a man invested with a great deal of power. He is in the Revolutionary Guard in Iran.
MB: He was a Revolutionary Guard and he was in charge of my life, you know. I had to be very respectful of him, I had to be very deferential, you know, I always had to call him "Sir," and whenever I wanted to answer back I was always saying that, "I beg to differ, but you're stupid." I never said that, but you know, I always had to respect him. And he had a lot of power. I mean, he--you know, one thing that was very smart was that I was not confronting the system, I was not confronting the government. They made him in charge of my life. So it was as if that he had a personal grudge against me, not that I was, you know, tried or imprisoned by the Iranian government. They made it more personal. He came to arrest me. He was my interrogator. And on the last day, just the night before I left Iran, he told me that "We can arrest you wherever you are, we can always bring you back in a bag."
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
"Really classy dudes."
Jason Rezaian, a journalist who recently left Iran, has a nice on-the-ground piece in Slate.
"I had watched public sentiment go from one of apathy a few weeks before the election to the point at which many people felt they had been robbed. In Iran, public opinion flows in waves. The sea seemed tranquil for the supreme leader and the president in the run-up to the election, but after June 12 a tsunami of resentment and frustration came crashing down on top of them, and they've been bailing water ever since. I don't even think they realize how ridiculous their public reactions to the current turmoil look. . . .
"When I got to Imam Khomeini airport, it was crawling with government security forces. They're never hard to spot: dark suits, blue shirts, cropped beards, big ruby or turquoise pinky rings, trying conspicuously to be inconspicuous. Really classy dudes.
"People preparing to depart huddled around a lone TV monitor to watch a report about the terrorism being inflicted on the people of Tehran by the protesters. It showed a member of the Basij being beaten with his own baton. It was meant to induce sympathy for the militiamen. People only smiled. These punks, who have long been a face of Iran to many outside the country, were finally getting some comeuppance.
"Over the years, I've read several authors describing Iranian society as a place where people live as if they were free—doing all the things that are banned in public behind closed doors, accepting the rules of the Islamic republic as a series of annoyances to be worked around. Over the last few weeks, those doors blew open, and now it feels like the regime is the one acting as if it still has a handle on things. . . ."
"I had watched public sentiment go from one of apathy a few weeks before the election to the point at which many people felt they had been robbed. In Iran, public opinion flows in waves. The sea seemed tranquil for the supreme leader and the president in the run-up to the election, but after June 12 a tsunami of resentment and frustration came crashing down on top of them, and they've been bailing water ever since. I don't even think they realize how ridiculous their public reactions to the current turmoil look. . . .
"When I got to Imam Khomeini airport, it was crawling with government security forces. They're never hard to spot: dark suits, blue shirts, cropped beards, big ruby or turquoise pinky rings, trying conspicuously to be inconspicuous. Really classy dudes.
"People preparing to depart huddled around a lone TV monitor to watch a report about the terrorism being inflicted on the people of Tehran by the protesters. It showed a member of the Basij being beaten with his own baton. It was meant to induce sympathy for the militiamen. People only smiled. These punks, who have long been a face of Iran to many outside the country, were finally getting some comeuppance.
"Over the years, I've read several authors describing Iranian society as a place where people live as if they were free—doing all the things that are banned in public behind closed doors, accepting the rules of the Islamic republic as a series of annoyances to be worked around. Over the last few weeks, those doors blew open, and now it feels like the regime is the one acting as if it still has a handle on things. . . ."
Monday, June 22, 2009
This makes sense
To those of you who've asked me about what's going on in Iran, I recommend this Op-Ed in the NYT.
I believe the loss of trust by millions of Iranians who’d been prepared to tolerate a system they disliked, provided they had a small margin of freedom, constitutes the core political earthquake in Iran. Moderates who once worked the angles are now muttering about making Molotov cocktails and screaming their lungs out after dusk.
I believe the loss of trust by millions of Iranians who’d been prepared to tolerate a system they disliked, provided they had a small margin of freedom, constitutes the core political earthquake in Iran. Moderates who once worked the angles are now muttering about making Molotov cocktails and screaming their lungs out after dusk.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Every culture needs one
Meet the Persian Richard Simmons!
I about fell off my chair. Thanks to JMC for the tip.
I about fell off my chair. Thanks to JMC for the tip.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
"Rogue state"
Could we please stop talking about how Iran is a "rogue state" like it's the only one on Earth? Let's take Zimbabwe, where the current government has undertaken an intense and borderline unbelievable campaign of suppression to further its stated intent of remaining in power forever and ever. Or Burma, where the military junta moved the capital out of paranoia and has kept the country's elected leader under house arrest for more years than I have fingers. Or, for Christ's sake, Turkmenistan, where the demented leader has banned opera, libraries, and beards, and recommends that people chew on bones instead of going to the dentist. Seriously, I am not making this stuff up.
Iran has a nutjob for a president. But--and this is the key--he has no real power. He doesn't have his finger on any big red nuclear button. He's all talk and no walk. I don't think heads of state should be able to talk about wiping their neighbors off the map without feeling any international repercussions. But Iran isn't any more of a "rogue state" than its neighbors in the middle east or any one of the dozens of other oppressive regimes around the world. As for nuclear weapons, you know who else has them? Pakistan, home of Al Qaeda. And also, North Korea, a country we have tried to bribe time after time after time to stop.
Iran has a nutjob for a president. But--and this is the key--he has no real power. He doesn't have his finger on any big red nuclear button. He's all talk and no walk. I don't think heads of state should be able to talk about wiping their neighbors off the map without feeling any international repercussions. But Iran isn't any more of a "rogue state" than its neighbors in the middle east or any one of the dozens of other oppressive regimes around the world. As for nuclear weapons, you know who else has them? Pakistan, home of Al Qaeda. And also, North Korea, a country we have tried to bribe time after time after time to stop.
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