IRAN: A matter of timing
By Peyvand Khorsandi
It is too early now to publicly attack Messrs Khatami and Mousavi, two appalling political fraudsters hoisted on to the placards of masses who for thirty years have suffered under the brutal reign of the Islamic Republic of Iran. It is too early because blood is being spilled by young people whose lives are denied their full expression by the medieval sensibilities of Iran’s ruling clerics.
Khatami and Mousavi are, for now, untouchable – to criticise them, judging by the competing emotions on Facebook – is to attack the very demonstrators who are risking their lives for freedom. It is too early to say that these two shining lights are in fact agents of darkness. It is too early because blood is being spilled.
“The Islamic Republic,” a friend of mine writes, “is too deeply rooted to go. We have to take what we can.” So deeply rooted that it is afraid of bloggers and tortures them and executes them. So deeply rooted that after 30 years, death is still its best answer to dissent.
But what about those of us in the West, showing solidarity? Is it too early for us to chant for a separation of religion and state? Is it too early do say “Death to the Islamic Republic of Iran?”
It is too early for the lion and sun to return to our flag (not with Reza in tow, thank you)? So we watch with frustration as people, our people, risk their lives for unworthy men who believe in consolidating the very rule people are trying to shake off.
For a dispassionate look at what’s happening in Iran — as history whether it has been made or is being made demands we should — perhaps we should turn to Iran’s enemies. President Obama this week told CNBC: “The difference between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi in terms of their actual policies may not be as great as has been advertised.”
Amazingly, the dark lord who heads Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad, Meir Dagan, would prefer it if Ahmadinejad’s victory stayed intact. He told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz: “The reality in Iran is not going to change because of the elections. The world and we already know [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad. If the reformist candidate [Mirhossein] Mousavi had won, Israel would have had a more serious problem because it would need to explain to the world the danger of the Iranian threat, since Mousavi is perceived internationally arena as a moderate element.”
Who better to read a fundamentalist religious state than another fundamentalist religious state? They know each other well, cut from the same fabric, these men of cloth.
Most of my Facebook friends are Mousavi supporters. People are dying for the reformist camp. Surely they deserve to live? Surely he should renounce the Islamic regime and offer himself up to human rights investigators – surely that’s what he should do? Surely once, and only if, he’s proven to have had no hand in any disappearances and killings and corruption, surely only then he can be fit to lead? But’s it’s too early for that. People are dying. You can’t question things when people are dying. Strange, that. It’s precisely when you should.
Rebel with a pause
“How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal?”
News of playwright Harold Pinter’s death arrived in primetime, Christmas – a religious date, in Britain, for watching telly. You couldn’t escape the news and the news couldn’t escape reporting on Pinter’s final years and his opposition to the war in Iraq, as well as his monumental literary achievements. His stance on the war demanded to be featured in the briefest of TV obituaries. Of course, in the BBC News bulletin I caught, there was no mention of the fact that, in accepting his Nobel prize for literature in 2005, he had called for Tony Blair to be prosecuted for war crimes. That would have been too much given the mince pies, turkey, pigs in blanket and booze viewers will have been digesting – going after Blair would, after all, mean hauling key government figures into the dock, too, such as justice minister Jack Straw or even prime minister Gordon Brown and we need him to steer us out of the economic downturn.
Pinter’s death pushed Her Majesty into being the news programme’s second item. In her speech, she had wasted no time in reminding us that troops in Santa hats are still risking their lives for us in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In his video address to the Nobel prize people three years ago he said: “The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law.
“The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading – as a last resort – all other justifications having failed to justify themselves – as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people.
“We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it ‘bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East’.
“How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice.”
While tributes have poured in for Pinter, the ultimate tribute to him will not be paid as the unrepentant duo remains outside the grasp of justice.
In 2003 I went to a Stop the War Coalition meeting in London where I heard the great man speak. In the middle of his speech he was heckled – it was a friendly heckle, in support of what Mr Pinter had been saying but clearly an unwelcome interruption. Mr Pinter responded with a pondering silence before resuming his sentence. “It’s a Pinter pause!” I nearly shouted. Perhaps that’s all his passing is.
Life is Beautiful
“What’s that noise dad?”
“Happy Christmas!” he shouts. “No sleigh balls in Mexico Christmas. I hate sleigh balls.”
“Sleigh bells, baba. Not balls.”
“¡Próspero año nuebbo!”
“It’s 9am!” I shout.
“Six hours to Queen’s speech.”
I ask for one of his blood pressure tablets and stick my head in a pillow.
“These pills are great dad, you should try them some time.”
“I prefer cigarettes,” he says. “Honestly, you’re an old man. You should be up celebrating the birth of Christmas.”
“It’s Christ, dad. Christmas is a cake.”
Mother is at my sister’s. They will be having turkey with the rest of the family while dad and I are going to eat lamb kebabs. There was no row but it does feel like we’re a splinter group dedicated to red meat.
Half an hour later I’m in the kitchen putting on a brew. Dad is grating onion.
“Do me a favour and pass the meat from the fridge,” he says.
All I find in there is a half-eaten slice of cheese and a cabbage.
“What’s the matter?”
“There is no meat in here.”
“How can that be?” says dad, touching the interior of the fridge as if the 4lb bag of minced shoulder – ground twice – we bought yesterday from a kosher butcher might actually be there but we can’t see it.
“It must be in the car,” says dad.
I check the glove compartment, under the seats and the bonnet but no meat.
“Baba jan, I don’t know how to break this to you but there is no meat in the car.”
“What about your car?”
“We went to the butcher’s in your car.”
Dad opens a bottle of red wine and pours me glass – I’ve forgotten all about my tea. It’s his way of making me feel better about the elephant in the living room – the fact that it was me who last had the meat.
xxxx
We had never been to M Lipowicz, the kosher butcher’s, before. The two old men who run it were shocked when the two of us we went in – two unshaven, unkempt Arabs or Pakistanis. Dad ordered some meat. It took fifteen minutes to prepare so we went to the Indian restaurant next-door for a quick curry and returned two hours later.
“Discount?” said one of the old men, stroking his beard.
“Yes,” said dad. “You charge a little more for your meat being kosher, sir, no?”
“Yes,” said the man.
“Well, I am Muslim – what use is kosher to me? You can discount the kosher!”
“Hahahaha.”
“Ha!”
“Hahaha.”
As this went on I was cowering behind a pyramid of Hebrew-lettered tins of pickled cucumbers where, reduced to infantile embarrassment by dad’s haggling, I left the meat.
xxx
“I have an idea,” says dad. He sticks a bag of walnuts, a gift from Iran, in the grinder in an effort to rustle up vegetable kebabs. An hour later the kitchen looks like a war zone, with flour everywhere and his test kebab in pieces. He looks distraught. I pat him on the back.
Dad calls M Lipowicz after fishing for their number online but no reply. He does a search for “Meat+Christmasday+west London+emergency” but nothing.
We watch Mary Poppins and fall asleep on the sofa. I wake up two hours later, greeted by a glass of freshly made tea. With the Queen’s speech an hour away we decide to swallow our pride and drive to my sister’s house. The whole family is surprised to see us and we are greeted like heroes.
“Did you bring your meat?” says my sister.
“No, we thought that would be silly,” I say.
“So silly,” dad pipes up, “we left it at the butcher’s.”
We end up eating turkey and watching the Queen on TV with the volume turned down. Dad nudges me and says: “Perhaps the English know something when they eat a dumb vegetable like turkey on such a special day. Meat would only distract us from the wonderful time we are having with the family.”
FT’s First Person column
Amazing….
First Person: Omer Goldman
I first went to prison on September 23 of this year and served 35 days. By the time you read this, I will be back inside for another 21. This is going to be my life for the next two years: in for three weeks, out for one. I am 19 years old now and by the time the authorities give up hounding me, I will be 21. The reason? I refused to do my military service for the Israeli army.
I grew up with the army. My father was deputy head of Mossad and I saw my sister, who is eight years older than me, do her military service. As a young girl, I wanted to be a soldier. The military was such a part of my life that I never even questioned it.
Earlier this year, I went to a peace demonstration in Palestine. I had always been told that the Israeli army was there to defend me, but during that demonstration Israeli soldiers opened fire on me and my friends with rubber bullets and tear-gas grenades. I was shocked and scared. I saw the truth. I saw the reality. I saw for the first time that the most dangerous thing in Palestine is the Israeli soldiers, the very people who are supposed to be on my side
When I came back to Israel, I knew I had changed. I told my dad what had happened. He was angry that I had been over to the occupied territories and told me I had endangered my life. I have always discussed history and politics with my father but on this subject – my rejection of the military and my conscientious objecting – we can’t speak.
My parents divorced when I was three and my father has a new family. My mother is an artist and she is very supportive of me. But my father has been horrified by my decision. I think he thought that I was going through a stage that I would grow out of. But it hasn’t happened.
In prison, I wake up at five and clean all day, inside and out. It’s a military prison so we are made to do ridiculous stuff. They painted a white stripe across the floor, and I have to keep the stripe glowing white and clean. I have to wear a US army uniform. The uniforms were given as a present to the Israeli army by the US Marines. I feel stupid. I am anti-military. I am against the whole idea of wearing the uniform.
The other prisoners are women from the army. They are in for silly things such as playing with their guns, smoking dope, running away from the army. None of them is really a criminal. And then there are five girls like me who are conscientious objectors.
We talk to the other girls, tell them things they have never heard about before. Like that everyone is a human, no matter what religion they are. Some of them are really ignorant. They have never heard of evolution theory, or Gandhi or Mandela, or the Armenian holocaust. I try to tell them that there have been a lot of genocides.
Of course I get scared when I am in prison. Three times a week, I have to help guard the prison at night. But also, it’s frightening that my country is the way that it is, locking up young people who are against violence and war. And I worry that what I am doing may damage my future. The worst part is that I have a taste of freedom and then I am back inside, back to my mundane prison life. It’s hard to go from being a free girl who can decide things for herself – what to wear, who to see, what to eat – and then go back to having every minute of the day timetabled.
Last time I was out of prison, I went to see my dad. We tried not to talk politics. He cares about me as his daughter, that I am suffering, but he doesn’t want to hear my views. He hasn’t come to visit me in prison. I think it would be too hard for him to see me in there. He is an army man.
I suppose, actually, we have similar characters. We both fight for what we believe in. It’s just that our views are diametrically opposed.
The Great Library — a dialogue
– I’m sorry which way is your ancient Persian?
– Shhhh. There are people studying.
– Yes, but all I want to know is which way.
– Please be quiet.
– Well instead of telling me to be quiet why don’t you point me?
– Very well. But you must promise that once you are there you will not talk.
– Talk to whom?
– The books.
– The books? Who talks to books?
– Please accept that some people do and that it’s not wise to.
– Who?
– They. Don’t you know who they are?
– No. Who?
– The men who talk to books.
– Right. I won’t talk to the books. Which way.
– Yes.
– Well?
– What?
– Ancient Persia. Where is it?
– Well, it’s in the past.
– So will you be if you don’t help me.
– If you threaten me I shall be forced to leave. I mean, I shall be forced to ask you to leave.
– Just please, tell me where the ancients are.
– Greece or Persia?
– Persia.
– Epoch?
– Ancient!
– Could you be more specific?
– I don’t know.
– Well, I can’t help you if you don’t know. It’s a library, not a school.
– Alright, the Safavids.
– Hardly ancient are they? Do you have a permit for using this library?
– Permit? If you if you don’t tell me where the Persian section is I will start to TALK LOUDLY.
– Shhhhhhh! We can’t have people shouting.
– You’re mad.
– This is the Great Library. Men have come here to learn for centuries.
– It probably took them that long to find a book.
– Which book are you looking for?
– I am not looking for a book, I am looking for a section. Ancient Persian.
– Are you Greek?
– Are you bonkers? What difference does it make?
– Greeks burnt Persia’s libraries. Surely you know.
– Yes, I read it in the Evening Post. Terrible, what’s the world coming to, eh?
– So you are –
– No I’m not bloody Greek.
– You look Greek.
– I am not. Let’s say I am.
– Knew it. Well, can’t have you burning our section, good day sir.
First published August 24, 2006
iranian.com
Comrade Obama? Nah.
The word socialist has been bandied about more in the past few weeks than it has since the early 1990s. John McCain was asked whether nationalising banks was not tantamount to socialism – remarkable, a mainstream network airing the s-word in an interview with a US presidential candidate. In Britain the word socialism is regarded as a terminal virus the Labour party sneezed out in 1994 when the then opposition leader Tony Blair ditched Clause 4 — along with its commitment to “the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange”. After Labour came to power in 1997, its use was phased out.
Now that capitalists themselves are forced to accept that a system that rewards complete bastards, for being complete bastards, is doomed, “redistribution of wealth” and “socialism” are out of their cages. Quite what they mean is a different matter. In the run-up to the US election, socialism had turned into a euphemism for black. “I’m not voting for Obama because he’s a socialist” had less to do with any pledge he had made, to create a system of free health care for all at point of use – or lifting the trade embargo on Cuba – and more to do with his ethnicity. Asked to define socialism, one caller to a New York public radio phone-in rambled incoherently before saying: “Marx! It’s about Karl Marx.”
Yet with Obama’s victory, no-one is asking what is this “socialist” going to do. It’s suddenly “Black! Black! Black! Black! African-American! African-American! African-American”. The thing is Obama can as fairly be said to be white as he is black – he is, after all, mixed race. But we live in a world that still considers white to be something pure that can be tainted by the black. Under apartheid, mixed-race South Africans were called “coloureds”, black painted on to white, not the other way around. So in the US, Colin Powell is regarded as a black man – which really beggars belief.
In one of the first signs that the world is changing in terms of racial politics, demonstrators took to the streets in Rome yesterday after Silvio Berlusconi referred to Obama as “sun-tanned”. The protestors were keen to show the world they are not retarded even if their prime minister is. And perhaps, unlike Berlusconi, they knew that a hundred years ago, immigrants to the US from Italy suffered similar prejudice at the hands of their Anglo-Saxon hosts.
One day, our skin-hue obsessed world will allow the mixed-race person to choose whether he, or she, is black or white. For now, though, we can bask in the honeymoon the mere complexion of this capitalist president-elect affords us in the hope that, one day, the US will elect a leader who is young, gifted and Red.
Bonkers nation
A news report on BBC Radio 4 tonight led with the story that the broadcaster’s star chat show host Jonathan Ross has been suspended for three months after making an obscene call an old to much loved comic actor Andrew Sachs, who played Manuel in Fawlty Towers, as part of live radio prank. Ross was joined in this endeavour by the comedian Russell Brand who joked about having had sex with the actor’s granddaughter in a message the pair left on Mr Sachs’ answering machine.
Since then there has been outrage in the form of 30,000 complaints to the BBC in what can fairly be described as a media onslaught against the public broadcaster.
Yesterday, Brand resigned. Today the controller of Radio 2 resigned. No wonder. This week the Prime Minister added to pressure for the BBC to punish the people responsible for this episode of below-the-belt humour — for that is all it was. No more.
Our vocal Prime Minister is the same man who in 2004 decided to stay silent as Tony Blair lied to the country and took us to war, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people and dozens of British soldiers. Not one politician’s head has yet rolled as a result of that war. In fact, Jack Straw, who was foreign secretary at the time is justice minister. At least it is Ross and Brand’s job to be outrageous jokers. What’s Gordon Brown’s excuse?
South London morning
This morning I went to my local cafe, which is attached to a church. A hearse was outside. The funeral men were ordering tea. I wanted to shout — “There’s no coffin in there.” And then, to their bemused looks say: “The door’s open — you’ve got to watch it in this area.”
I decided not to, as if to joke with them was to mess with death itself. Yesterday I went to see the Rothko exhibition at the Tate Modern in London. I had no idea who Rothko was until the other week. But once there I did enjoy the show — he’s big on death but his colours were more nuanced than the dull greys of these funeral men. Once, as a young cyclist, I cut in front a hearse and the driver caught my eye and instead of issuing curses, pointed to me and then gestured towards the back his car as if to say, “That’s where you’ll end up.”
This is no time for novices
Words in a political conference speech can bore — into the very soul of your opponents. Yesterday, young David Cameron, leader of the Conservative party here in Britain, like George Osbourne, the shadow chancellor, the day before, was forced to respond to the charge that he was a novice, issued by prime minister Brown in his speech last week. Both men appeared deeply ruffled by Brown’s quip. Now with six words Brown is back to life again in a way that we haven’t seen since he first became prime minister last year.
Novices. It hurt because it’s true and the best of the Tory party’s speech-writers could not concoct a joke that might slow its impact. No editorial writer could stop these words, even with the full might of our largely right-wing press. To get things into perspective, I believe Brown should do community service in a Basra hospital but he is right, these Conservatives are beatable.
I would harp on about how our Zionist friend Obama needs to find his words to defeat McCain but I wouldn’t want to bore.
