People power

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2009/953/op121.htm

Al Ahram, 25 June - 1 July 2009

People power

The Iranian elections show that the people's democratic will can no longer be held in, writes Hamid Dabashi*

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Khonak an qomarbazi keh bebakht har cheh budash,
Benamand hichash ella havas e qomar e digar.
[Lucky that gambler who lost all he had,
Left with nothing but the urge for yet another game]
-- Anonymous Persian poet

The Iranian presidential election of June 2009 will go down in history as one of the most magnificent manifestations of a people's indomitable will to achieve enduring democratic institutions. The beleaguered custodians of the Islamic Republic, thoroughly aware of their own lack of legitimacy, were quick to use the occasion as a vindication of their illegitimate rule. They are wrong. This was not a vote for their legitimacy. It was a vote against it -- albeit within the mediaeval juridical fortress they have built around the notions and principles of citizenry in a free and democratic republic. The feeble "opposition" to the clerics abroad also rushed to admonish those who participated in the election, insisting on regime change, at a time when upward of 80 per cent of eligible voters willingly participated in the election. Both these desperate, hasty, and banal readings of the election, predicated on bankrupt positions are false.

Let's begin with the losers of this presidential campaign. The single most important loser of the Iranian presidential campaign of June 2009 is Ali Khamenei, the supreme guide, and the velayet-e faqih. If this election, the process of the election not its fraudulent result, showed anything, it should be the nation is not safih (indigent) enough to need a supreme faqih (most learned) to shepherd it. This election revealed the political maturity of a nation that can now be allowed to return to its own devices and the obscenity of the very notion of a velayet-faqih wiped off its body-politic. The very office of the supreme guide is an insult to the democratic intelligence and the collective will of this nation. If Ali Khamenei had an iota of decency left in him, at the autumn of his patriarchy, he would dismantle this obscene office forever, convene a constitutional assembly and disband the three other undemocratic institutions of the republic -- the Assembly of Experts of Leadership, the Guardian Council of the Constitution, and the Expediency Council of the Regime. These are the enduring vestiges of a theocratic legacy that have no room in a democratic republic. Iranians are Muslim, the vast majority of them, and there are millions of Iranians who are not Muslim, or believing or practising Muslims -- and none of that should matter in their privileges and duties as citizens of a republic. As he witnesses the erosion of every single iota of legitimacy that the Islamic revolution claimed over the nation, the soon-to-be 70- year-old Ali Khamenei can leave a legitimate legacy for himself by seeing to it that this mediaeval banality is wiped out of Iranian democratic aspirations. It is simply unseemly to see grown up people, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Mir-Hussein Mousavi, appear so obsequious and sycophantic towards another man. What is the difference between a shah and a supreme guide? Nothing.

An equally important loser in this campaign, though declared its winner, is the populist buffoonery of that unsurpassed charlatan Ahmadinejad, the bastard son of the Islamist revolution. In his demagoguery and fanaticism he represents the most fascistic tendencies of the Islamic revolution and republic. All revolutions have a dose or two of populism and demagoguery mixed with their idealism and high aspirations. What has happened in the Islamic revolution is that its innate populism has now been personified in one demagogue who seeks to stay in power by manipulating the poor and disenfranchised segments of his constituency by fraudulent economic policies that gives people fish instead of teaching them how to fish, gives governmental subsidies and handouts instead of generating jobs. The economic policies of Ahmadinejad have been catastrophic and institutionally damaging, causing double-digit inflation and endemic unemployment in an oil-based economy at the mercy of global market fluctuation far beyond Ahmadinejad's control or comprehension. His religious populism and ludicrous claims to divine dispensations is a cruel joke on signs and symbols people hold sacred.

The next loser was Mousavi's poorly run presidential campaign -- ill-advised, ill-prepared, sentimental, full of necessary colour symbolism but lacking substance, a clearly articulated platform, economic detail, political programming or an attempt to reach out to a wider spectrum of his constituency. His campaign was too elitist, tied in its visual paraphernalia to a northern Tehran sensibility and lacking appeal across an oil-based economy. His delay in entering the race, his to-ing and fro-ing with Mohamed Khatami, suggested poor preparation, as did his debate with Ahmadinejad. While Ahmadinejad had come with charts and graphs and dossiers, flaunting his lumpen demeanour, thinking himself "a man of the people", Mousavi had nothing except his gentility to offer. He rambled along, read from written statements in a barely audible voice, ran out of things to say before his time was over. The problem with the Iranian democratic movement is not that it is unable to produce an Obama -- if he is the model. Mousavi could have very well been an Iranian Obama. The problem is there was no David Axelrod or David Plouffe, what the Mousavi campaign desperately needed and sorely lacked. A band of self-indulgent Muslim yuppies surround him with not an idea of how to reach his multiple constituencies. If Mousavi did reach these constituencies it was becomrades in arms), for having saved the integrity of the country during the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988). But he faced a new Iran, a new generation, an entirely different constituency that loved and admired him and his wife Zahra Rahnavard at face value. But you never win a campaign on good will. This is not to suggest that the election was not rigged -- it may or may not have been. But there are rudimentary strategies for reaching out to diverse constituencies which his campaign ignored.

The next big loser in this Iranian election was the legacy of George W Bush, i.e. the Bush-Wolfowitz doctrine. Look at Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, on two sides of Iran, and then look at Iran on 12 June 2009. Millions of Iranians in a peaceful, orderly, joyous and enthusiastic march to the ballot box. The second they thought their votes were stolen they poured into the streets, what Americans should have done in 2000. Along with the Bush and Wolfowitz doctrine, the losers include the US Congress, and its headquarters at AIPAC. The US congress can scarce be imagined more transparently hypocritical. On the night before the Iranian election, on 12 June, AIPAC pushed a button and its stooges in the US Congress began pushing for a resolution imposing more severe economic sanction on Iran, knowing only too well that the following day its news would increase the chances of Ahmadinejad, Israel's choice of candidates, as Israeli officials have been only too keen to admit.

Losers also include expatriate Iranian monarchists along with all other politically bankrupt banalities and their native informers and comprador intellectuals, from Washington DC to California, who have established vacuous centres for "dialogue" or and to save "democracy" in Iran. What a band of buffoons they were made to look like after this grassroots, inborn rise for democratic rights.

The sole winners of the presidential election of 2009 were the Iranian people, whoever they voted for -- some 40 million of them, out of an eligible voting population of 48 million, upward of 80 per cent. This election showed the democratic will of Iranians has matured beyond any point of return, no matter how violently the unelected officials of the Islamic Republic wish to reverse it. It is too late. As made evident during the presidential election of 2009, Iranians are perfectly capable of organising themselves around competing views, campaigning for their preferred candidates, peacefully going to polling stations and casting their vote. It is high time that the Shia clerics pack their belongings and go back to their seminaries, and for regime change charlatans like Paul Wolfowitz to retire in ignominy, and for career opportunist comprador intellectuals of one think tank or another in Washington DC or Stanford University to go back to the half decent teaching position they had before.

Before I close, I must also say that a major loser is Hassan Nasrallah of Lebanon. Nasrallah must know that the deep and variegated roots of Iranians' commitment to the Palestinian cause and the fate of the Shias in Lebanon are in the vast ocean of their hearts and minds, fed to them with their mother's milk and not in the dirty pool of Ali Khomeini's pocket. Arabs in general, and Palestinians in particular, ought to know that Iranians are watching them closely, and wish to hear their voices. This is the Iranian Intifada. A leading slogan in the streets of Tehran is Mardom chera neshestin, Iran shodeh Felestin (People why are you sitting idly by, Iran has become Palestine). Arab and Muslims, their leading public intellectuals, must come out and take the side of this grassroots, inborn, and peaceful demand for a healthy and robust democracy.

The US congressional stooges of AIPAC -- the Israeli generals were all squarely on the side of Ahmadinejad -- are in the same league as Hassan Nasrallah.

All Arab and Muslim potentates ought to know that their young are watching events in Iran with a keen interest. It is not only Iranians that are wired to Facebook and Twitter, so are their brothers and sisters around the globe, throughout the Arab and Muslim world. Young Arab and Muslims around the globe are not immune to the demands young Iranians are exacting at the heavy cost, courageously exposing their bare chests against the bullets and batons of tyranny. This is a post-ideological generation. They could not care less about their parents' political hang-ups. They demand, and will exact, human, civil and women's rights, through a grassroots, entirely legitimate uprising, without compromising an inch to the imperial machinations of the United States or the colonial thuggery of Israel. The custodians of the Islamic Republic are in violation of Article 27 of the constitution of the Islamic Republic. To the best of my knowledge, this is not a revolution to topple the Islamic Republic. This is a grassroots demand for civil rights. Iranians being clubbed and shot in the streets of Tehran are not the stooges of the United States. The Arab and Muslim mediaeval potentates suffocating the democratic aspirations of their people are. Fear the day that young Arabs and Muslims learn from their Iranian brothers and sisters and demand their inalienable human rights, freedom of peaceful assembly, freedom of expression, equal rights for men and women, economic opportunity, respect for human decency and for the rule of law.

* The writer is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York.

"Boycott Israel in response to its crimes"Published in "Ann Arbor News", July 22, 2009:

Click on this Letter to the Editor to enlarge it.

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Tehran July 9th 2009

A response to Paul Craig Roberts’s: “Threatening Iran”

"The people have already won in Iran.
"The bankrupt rulers are losing more each day.

July 22, 2009

On the Web at:

http://palestinethinktank.com/2009/07/22/the-people-have-already-won-in-iran-the-bankrupt-rulers-are-losing-more-each-day/



The dreams, aspirations, and accomplishments of millions of Iranians (youth and others), who have filled the streets of every city in Iran for a month, did not even get as much as a sentence in Mr. Roberts’ long article (“Threatening Iran”). His article reflects the attitudes of his public career at the service of an infamous American warmonger, Ronald Reagan.http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts07202009.html



Wielding real and imagined war plans against Iran, which he claims are coming from Russia, China, the U.S., and Israel, Mr. Roberts is waving a scary-looking club to threaten sincere domestic dissent in Iran.



Mr. Roberts completely forgets the main lesson which Palestinians, Lebanese, Iraqis, and Afghans have taught U.S. and Israeli warmongers: Imperial militarism does not cut the mustard any more. In the words of Iranians, who are resisting foreign and domestic bullies every day, “Bombs, tanks, and machine-guns are no longer effective!”



Mr. Roberts believes that the U.S. and Israel will “dominate” the region, because, in his words, “they have effective Psychological Operations (PSYOPS).” However, if Mr. Roberts had taken so much as a weekend trip to the area, and if he had the ability to talk to the objects of these Psychological Operations, he would have easily been able to detect people’s pride in having confined Israel, through decades of successful struggle, to its present minuscule size.



To date, according to Congressman John Dingell of Michigan, $300 billion U.S. dollars have been poured into Israel, all from the U.S. Congress. This loot was used to extinguish Palestinian resistance, through massive violence and terror. Yet, it does not take a genius to see that resistance continues in Palestine, and, what is more, the international community has increasingly backed boycotts against the apartheid state of Israel. Lebanon, too, struggling under a corrupt U.S.-backed government, has managed to drive Israel out of its territories; a similar situation has also transpired in Syria.



The upshot of it all is that because of successful local resistance to Israel and the U.S., Israel has not grown an inch in size. With the 4th largest army in the world at its brutal command, with hundreds of atomic weapons at the ready, Israel cannot even control the West Bank or Gaza.



The Israeli siege of Gaza is challenged constantly by the international community. Israel is humiliated before the whole world, as it is forced to make a show of allowing medical supplies or food to enter Gaza. The people of Gaza are suffering tremendously, but they know they are withstanding the most ferocious military in the area (second only to the U.S.). The cluster bombs, the white phosphorous, the uranium bombs, all $300 billion worth of it, have crumbled in the face of Palestinian and Lebanese popular resistance.



Proudly we acknowledge that dreams of freedom and democracy have not been extinguished even after decades of massive military invasions and occupations by the most openly racist warmongers ever known to mankind, U.S. /Israel.



You, Mr. Roberts, from your post in Reagan’s White House, wrote the checks to finance those invasions and occupations, for years.



Mr. Roberts asks, “Why does anyone in Iran doubt that Iran is on her way to becoming another Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan...?”



Here is the answer: not a single Iranian (there are 75 million Iranians) believe Iran will be the next Iraq. That is because Iranians have not only won a revolution in recent history, they have also managed to withstand the U.S.-instigated, U.S.-fueled, eight-year war with Iraq, as well as thirty years of suffocating U.S. sanctions. Throughout all the pressures that U.S. has imposed on them, Iranians have managed to keep their schools and universities open, their hospitals running, their transportation system functional, and their water and electrical plants in order. Their ability to maintain basic services (despite crippling sanctions) has enabled them to raise a literate young population with enough time on its hands to think and dream of a better world.



As if that was not enough accomplishment for a people on top of the U.S.’s “kill em” list, Iranians decided to make the most of what democratic rights they had. They are stretching and breaking all the limits on their freedom to rule themselves. Faced with this magnificent spectacle, Mr. Roberts can only take pot-shots from the sidelines.



While you may not see this, Mr. Roberts, in the eyes of Iranians, they have already won a lot and they have the stamina to fight for more. Imagine Iran’s example, of mass protest, catching on in the streets currently ruled by U.S. and Israeli puppets (in Cairo, in Baghdad, in Beirut, in Kabul, in Karachi, and in Riyadh.)



If you knew Farsi, and if you were interested in the people and their aspirations to determine their own destiny, you would easily be able to decipher all of that by looking at them march on the streets with their children and their elderly on their side. And you would be able to figure out that people of Iran are united in one thing; they want to establish a home-grown democratic system in their country to enable them to exercise full power over their own fate. Iranians know full well that neither Mr. Rafsanjani, nor Mr. Khamenei, can deliver that.



All these butchers have to show, for their decades in office, is an under-served public, and a fat foreign bank account.



Mr. Rafsanjani is said to have accumulated close to $600 million dollars (a sum that puts Master Butcher Rumsfeld’s capital achievement of only $250 million to shame). Unlike Americans, who see amassing of such personal wealth as a legitimate right, who are taught that they, too, can become as rich as their butcher politicians, Iranians see this as a sign of corruption and decay.



Iranians are now working toward a system-change: a real democracy, articulated by the people and responsive to the people’s long-neglected needs.



For now, Iranians have settled on Mousavi, who had to follow the people’s demands and had to show up at rallies he never intended to participate in. As Mr. Roberts states, Rafsanjani may be the perfect person for Washington. However, Mr. Roberts, Rafsanjani has zero credibility with the people of Iran. As a president, he exhibited his lust for money and his total disregard for the will of the nation. Rafsanjani’s support for Mossavi only became fully public late in the process, since that would hinder, not help, Iranians’ enthusiasm for Mousavi.



While you, Mr. Roberts, see doom and gloom descending onto Iran, Iranians continue to pour into the streets every single day, at great personal risk, demanding their dignity and civil rights. Are you really unable to see that Iranians are demanding real democracy, real people’s participation in decision-making on all aspects of life in Iran? What Iranians want, what we will get, will not be wiped off our minds by Israeli bullying, by U.S. bullying, or by Mr. Roberts’ scary scenarios, designed to make us all hide under our beds.



Even without Mr. Roberts’ help, we will never forget that Israel trained SAVAK torturers, for the Shah, when Iran looked like a permanent captive of the U.S. and Israel. Mr. Roberts is not protecting Iran from Israel by siding with those who shoot Iranian human rights marchers in the streets.



The illegitimacy of both Israel and the U.S., and their desperate economic condition, does not allow any more bloodbaths to be created in the region. Iraqis and Afghans are not exactly silent. It has taken all of America’s military might, just to hide behind thick fortified walls in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Simply put, Iraq and Afghanistan have NOT been a “cakewalk” for the U.S. occupation forces.



An Iranian physician recently said: “Everything has a price. Many bad things are happening but the trend is toward the light.” Light is a commonly used metaphor for Iranians, whose roots are in Zoroastrianism (the religion of fire and light).



“We are standing to the end”, says the chant on the streets of Iran. We are telling the U.S. and Israel, the most bankrupt and racist powers of our times, that Iranians do NOT want wars and that we WILL stand for democracy “...to the end”, whatever the price may be. We already know that the price of hiding, under our beds, is far higher.


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Friday 17 July 2009, at the University of Tehran.

Left is wrong on Iran

Photos from protest outside of University of Tehran on Friday 17 July 2009.


Slogans of the day: "political prisoners must be freed", "government of coup d'etat: resign, resign", and "shameless Russia, let go of my country".


weekly.ahram.org.eg/2009/956/op5.htm



Left is wrong on Iran

By: Hamid Dabashi

Who are and who promoted these leftist intellectuals who question the social uprising of the people in Iran, asks Hamid Dabashi*

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When a political groundswell like the Iranian presidential election of June 2009 and its aftermath happen, the excitement and drama of the moment expose not just our highest hopes but also our deepest fault lines, most troubling moral flaws, and the dangerous political precipice we face.


Over the decades I have learned not to expect much from what passes for "the left" in North America and/or Western Europe when it comes to the politics of what their colonial ancestry has called "the Middle East". But I do expect much more when it comes to our own progressive intellectuals -- Arabs, Muslims, South Asians, Africans and Latin Americans. This is not a racial bifurcation, but a regional typology along the colonial divide.
By and large this expectation is apt and more often than not met. The best case in point is the comparison between what Azmi Bishara has offered about the recent uprising in Iran and what Slavoj Zizek felt obligated to write. Whereas Bishara's piece (with aspects of which I have had reason to disagree) is predicated on a detailed awareness of the Iranian scene, accumulated over the last 30 years of the Islamic Republic and even before, Zizek's (the conclusion of which I completely disagree with) is entirely spontaneous and impressionistic, predicated on as much knowledge about Iran as I have about the mineral composition of the planet Jupiter.


The examples can be multiplied by many, when we add to what Azmi Bishara has written pieces by Mustafa El-Labbad and Galal Nassar, for example, and compare them to the confounded blindness of Paul Craig Roberts, Anthony DiMaggio, Michael Veiluva, James Petras, Jeremy Hammond, Eric Margolis, and many others. While people closest to the Iranian scene write from a position of critical intimacy, and with a healthy dose of disagreement, those farthest from it write with an almost unanimous exposure of their constitutional ignorance, not having the foggiest idea what has happened in that country over the last 30 years, let alone the last 200 years, and then having the barefaced chutzpah to pontificate one thing or another -- or worse, to take more than 70 million human beings as stooges of the CIA and puppets of the Saudis.


Let me begin by stating categorically that in principle I share the fundamental political premise of the left, its weariness of US imperial machination, of major North American and Western European media (but by no means all of them) by and large missing the point on what is happening around the globe, or even worse seeing things from the vantage point of their governmental cues, which they scarcely question. It has been but a few months since we have come out of the nightmare of the Bush presidency, or the combined chicaneries of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and John Ashcroft, or of the continued calamities of the "war on terror". Iran is still under the threat of a military strike by Israel, or at least more severe economic sanctions, similar to those that are responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis during the Clinton administration. Iraq and Afghanistan are burning, Gaza is in utter desolation, Northern Pakistan is in deep humanitarian crisis, and Israel is stealing more Palestinian lands every day. With all his promises and pomp and ceremonies, President Obama is yet to show in any significant and tangible way his change of course in the region from that of the previous administration.


The US Congress, prompted by AIPAC (the American Israel Political Affairs Committee), pro-war vigilantes lurking in the halls of power in Washington DC, and Israeli warlords and their propaganda machinery in the US, are all excited about the events in Iran and are doing their damnedest to turn them to their advantage. The left, indeed, has reason to worry. But having principled positions on geopolitics is one thing, being blind and deaf to a massive social movement is something entirely different, as being impervious to the flagrant charlatanism of an upstart demagogue like Ahmadinejad. The sign and the task of a progressive and agile intelligence is to hold on to core principles and seek to incorporate mass social uprising into its modus operandi. My concern here is not with that retrograde strand in the North American or Western European left that is siding with Ahmadinejad and against the masses of millions of Iranians daring the draconian security apparatus of the Islamic Republic. They are a lost cause, and frankly no one could care less what they think of the world. What does concern me is when an Arab intellectual like Asad AbuKhalil opts to go public with his assessment of this movement -- and what he says so vertiginously smacks of recalcitrant fanaticism, steadfastly insisting on a belligerent ignorance.


On his website, "Angry Arab", Asad AbuKhalil finally has categorically stated that he is "now more convinced than ever that the US and Western governments were far more involved in Iranian affairs during the demonstrations than was assumed by many." He then tries to be cautious and cover his back by stipulating, "Let us make it clear: the US, Western and Saudi intervention in Iranian affairs does not necessarily implicate the Iranian protesters themselves. And even if some of them were involved in those conspiracies, I do believe that the majority of Iranian protesters were motivated by domestic issues and legitimate grievances against an oppressive government." This latter stipulation is in fact worse than that categorical statement about the conspiratorial plot behind the movement, for it seeks to play fancy speculative footwork to cover up a moral bankruptcy -- that he dare not take a stand, one way or another. AbuKhalil's final edict: "I was just looking at US and Western media coverage of Honduras, where the situation is rather analogous, and you can't escape the conclusion that the US media were involved with the US government in a conspiracy the details of which will be revealed years from now." In other words, since the US media is not covering the Honduras development as closely as it does (or so AbuKhalil fancies) the Iranian event, then the US media is in cahoots with the US government in fomenting unrest in Iran, and thus this movement is manufactured by US imperial designs with Saudi aid; and though we may not have evidence of this yet, we will learn of its details 30 years from now, when a Stephen Kinzer comes and writes an account of the plot, as he did about the CIA- sponsored coup of 1953.


One simply must have dug oneself deeply and darkly, mummified inside a forgotten and hollowed grave on another planet not to have seen, heard and felt for millions of human beings risking their brave lives and precious liberties by pouring into the streets of their cities demanding their constitutional rights for peaceful protest. Thousands of them have been arrested and jailed, their loved ones worried sick about their whereabouts; hundreds of their leading public intellectuals, journalists, civil and women's rights activists, rounded up and incarcerated, harassed and even tortured, some brought to national television to confess that they are spies for "the enemy". There are pregnant women among those leading reformists arrested, as are such leading intellectuals as Said Hajjarian, who is paralysed having barely survived an assassination attempt by precisely those in the upper echelons of the Islamic Republic who have yet again put him and his wheelchair in jail. Three prominent reformists, all heroes of the Islamic revolution (Khatami, Mousavi, and Karrubi: a former president, a former prime minister, and a former speaker of the house to this very Islamic Republic) are leading the opposition, charging fraud, declaring Ahmadinejad illegitimate. The senior most Grand Ayatollah of the land, the octogenarian Ayatollah Montazeri, has openly declared Khamenei illegitimate. The Iranian parliament is deeply divided and in turmoil. A massively militarised security apparatus has wreaked havoc on the civilian population: beating, clubbing, tear gassing, and plain shooting at them. University dormitories have been savagely raided by plainclothes vigilantes and students beaten up with batons, clubs, kicks, and fists by oversize thugs. Millions of Iranians around the globe have taken to the streets, their leading public figures -- philosophers like Abdul-Karim Soroush, clerics like Mohsen Kadivar, public intellectuals like Ata Mohajerani, filmmakers like Mohsen Makhmalbaf, pop singers like Shahin Najafi, footballers of the Iranian national team, countless poets, novelists, scholars, scientists, women's rights activists, ad infinitum --coming out to voice their defiance of this barbarity perpetrated against their brothers and sisters.


Not a single sentence, not a single word that I utter comes from CNN, The New York Times, Al-Arabiya or any other sources that Asad AbuKhalil loves to hate. None of these people means anything to Mr AbuKhalil? Can he really face these millions of people, their best and brightest, the mothers of those who have been cold- bloodedly murdered, tortured, beaten brut ally, paralysed for life, and tell them they are stooges of the CIA and the Saudis, and that CNN and Al-Arabiya have put them up to it? AbuKhalil has every legitimate reason to doubt the veracity of what he sees in US media. But at what point does a legitimate criticism of media representations degenerate into an illegitimate disregard for reality itself; or has a sophomoric reading of postmodernity so completely corrupted our moral standards that there is no reality any more, just representation?
Asad AbuKhalil dismisses a mass social uprising that is unfolding right in front of his eyes as manufactured by Americans and the Saudis. What else does AbuKhalil know about Iran? Anything? Thirty years (predicated on 200 years) of thinking, writing, mobilising, political and artistic revolts, theological and philosophical debates -- does any of it ring a bell for Professor AbuKhalil? Do the names Mahmoud Shabestari, Abdul-Karim Soroush, Mohsen Kadivar, among scores of others, mean anything to him? Has he ever listened to these young Iranians speak, cared to learn the lyrics of their music, watched the films they make, gone to a photography exhibition they have put together, seen any of their art work, or perhaps glanced at their newspapers, journals, magazines, weblogs, websites? Are all these stooges of America, manipulated by CIA agents, bought and paid for by the Saudis? What depth of intellectual depravation is this?


In his most recent posting, AbuKhalil has this to say about Iran: "For the most reliable coverage of the Iran story, I strongly recommend the New York Times. I mean, they have Michael Slackman in Cairo and Nazila Fathi in Toronto, and they have 'independent observers' in Tehran. What else do you want? If you want more, the station of King Fahd's brother-in-law (Al-Arabiya) has a correspondent in Dubai to cover Iran. And according to a report that just aired, Mousavi received 91 per cent of the vote in 'an elite neighbourhood'. I kid you not. They just said that." The Iranians have no reporters, no journalists, no analysts, no pollsters, no economists, no sociologists, no political scientist, no newspaper editorials, no magazines, no blogs, and no websites? If AbuKhalil has this bizarre obsession with the American or Saudi media that he loves to hate, does that psychological fixation ipso facto deprive an entire nation of their defiance against tyranny, their agency in changing their own destiny?


What a terrible state of mind to be in! AbuKhalil has so utterly lost hope in us -- us Arabs, Iranians, Muslims, South Asians, Africans, Latin Americans -- that it does not even occur to him that maybe, just maybe, if we take our votes seriously the US and Israel may not have anything to do with it. He fancies himself opposing the US and Israel. But he has such a deeply colonised mind that he thinks nothing of us, of our will to fight imperial intervention, colonial occupation of our homelands, and domestic tyranny at one and the same time. He believes if we do it then Americans and the Saudis must have put us up to it. He is so utterly lost in his own moral desolation and intellectual despair that in his estimation only Americans can instigate a mass revolt of the sort that has unfolded in front of his eyes. What an utterly frightful state for an intellectual to be in: no trust, no courage, no imagination and no hope. That we, as a people, as a nation, as a collective will, have fought for over 200 years for our constitutional rights has never occurred to AbuKhalil. What gives a man the authority to speak so cavalierly about another nation, of whom he knows nothing?


Ten years I spent watching every single Palestinian film I could lay my hands on before I opened my mouth and uttered a word about Palestinian cinema. I visited every conceivable archive in North America and Western Europe, travelled from Morocco to Syria, drove from one end of Palestine to another, was blessed by the dignity of Palestinians resisting the horror of a criminal occupation of their homeland, walked and showed bootlegged videos on mismatched equipment and stolen electricity from one Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon to another; then I went to Syria and found a Palestinian archivist who knew infinitely more about Palestinian cinema than I did, and I sat at his feet and learned humility, and I still did not dare put pen to paper or open my mouth about anything Palestinian without asking a Palestinian scholar -- from Edward Said to Rashid Khalidi to Joseph Massad -- to read what I had written before I dared publishing it. This I did not out of any vacuous belief in scholarship, but out of an abiding respect for the dignity of Palestinians fighting for their liberties and their stolen homeland, and fearful of the burden of responsibility that writing about a nation's struggles puts on those of us who have a voice and an audience.


For people like Zizek, social upheavals in what they call the Third World are a matter of theoretical entertainment. It is an old tradition that goes back all the way to Sartre on Algeria and Cuba in the 1950s, down to Foucault on Iran in the 1970s. That does not bother me a bit. In fact, I find it quite entertaining -- watching grown up people make complete fools of themselves talking about something about which they have no blasted clue. But when someone like AbuKhalil indulges in cliché ridden leftism of the most banal variety it speaks of a culture of intellectual laziness and moral bankruptcy so outrageously at odds with the struggles of people from which we emerge. Our people are not to conform to our tired, old, and cliché-ridden theories. We need to bypass intellectual couch potatoes and catch up with our people. Millions of people, young and old, lower and middle class, men and women, have poured in their masses of millions into the streets, launched their Intifada, demanding their constitutional rights and civil liberties. Who are these people? What language do they speak, what songs do they sing, what slogans do they chant, to what music do they sing and dance, what sacrifices have they made, what dungeons have they crowded, what epic poetry are they citing, what philosophers, theologians, jurists, poets, novelists, singers, song writers, musicians, webloggers soar in their souls, and for what ideals have their hearts and minds ached for generations and centuries?
A colonised mind is a colonised mind whether it is occupied by the European right or by the cliché-ridden left: it is an occupied territory, devoid of detail, devoid of substance, devoid of love, devoid of a caring intellect. It smells of ageing mothballs, and it is nauseating.


* The writer is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York.

Tehran, June 22nd 2009

ما تا آخر ایستاده ایم

Iranian students who died protesting Nixon's visit in 1953.

بزرگ نیا

قندچی

شریعت رضوی

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Students sing "Yare dabestani" on Kashan University campus, in Iran.

Protest in Kashan University, Iran, July 2009


Video posted, July 3, 2009, at:

http://linkthe.com/2009/07/03/protest-in-kashan-university-july-2009/

Click on the video to see it.

This video shows students at Kashan University forming a human chain, singing "Yare dabestani" (“My fellow schoolmate"), a classic revolutionary song that every Iranian knows by heart. The song was written in 1980, right after the revolution.

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Another video, with the same song, includes a brief photo history of student protests against tyranny:

یار دبستانی

Click on video to see it.

The video is on YouTube at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iatN6BjifI0&NR=1



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(Rough translation of the same song, "Yare dabestani"--)

My old school chum,

You’re with me and alongside me.
When the alphabet stick is wielded over our heads,
You choke up and cry with me.

Our names have been carved
On the body of this blackboard.
The scars and lashes of injustice and tyranny
Still remain on our body.

This desolate and uncultured plain of ours--
All these shrubs are just weeds,
This is what we've got,

For better or for worse,

Dead is the heart of its people.

My hand and yours
Should tear up these curtains.
Who can, except you and I,
Cure our pain?

My schoolmate,
You’re with me, and going along with me;
The alphabet stick is above our heads.

Our names have been carved
On the body of this blackboard
The marks of injustice and tyranny
Still remain on our body.

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یار دبستانی من ، با من و همراه منی
چوب الف بر سر ما، بغض من و آه منی
حک شده اسم من و تو، رو تن این تخته سیاه
ترکه ی بیداد و ستم ، مونده هنوز رو تن ما
دشت بی فرهنگی ما هرزه تموم علفاش
خوب اگه خوب ؛ بد اگه بد ، مرده دلای آدماش

دست من و تو باید این پرده ها رو پاره کنه
کی میتونه جز من و تو درد مارو چاره کنه ؟

یار دبستانی من ، با من و همراه منی
چوب الف بر سر ما ، بغض من و آه منی
حک شده اسم من و تو ، رو تن این تخته سیاه
ترکه بیداد و ستم ، مونده هنوز رو تن ما

یار دبستانی من ، با من و همراه منی
چوب الف بر سر ما ، بغض من و آه منی
حک شده اسم من و تو ، رو تن این تخته سیاه
ترکه ی بیداد و ستم ، مونده هنوز رو تن ما

دشت بی فرهنگی ما هرزه تموم علفاش
خوب اگه خوب ؛ بد اگه بد، مرده دلهای آدماش
دست من و تو باید این پرده ها رو پاره کنه
کی میتونه جز من و تو درد مارو چاره کنه ؟
یار دبستانی من ، با من و همراه منی
چوب الف بر سر ما ، بغض من و آه منی
حک شده اسم من و تو ، رو تن این تخته سیاه
ترکه ی بیداد و ستم ، مونده هنوز رو تن ما

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"We are standing to the end."

Click on photo to enlarge it.
(Tehran, July 9, 2009)

No to U.S. sabotage in Iran:
Demands for home-grown democracy continue on the streets of Iran.

by Mozhgan Savabieasfahani
July 11, 2009

Published in TLAXCALA, at:

http://www.tlaxcala.es/pp.asp?reference=8147&lg=en



We have to say no to U.S. sabotage in Iran. We have to respect the demands for home-grown democracy on the streets of Iran.

Thousands of protesters risked everything, again, in many locations in Tehran, and in the other cities of Iran, on Thursday July 9th , to continue demanding freedom of expression and human rights on the 10th anniversary of major student resistance in Iran.

Protesters were carrying fewer signs this time, to more easily escape the police. Some of the signs said:

* "We are the children of Cyrus the Great, the world’s ambassador of human rights",
* "Iranian women want equality, justice, and freedom in peace and solidarity",
* "Free education for all and employment for all",
* "Injustice against women is injustice against society and humanity",
* "Death to Islamic dictatorship",
* "Free all political prisoners", and
* "We are standing to the end."

Iranian students have traditionally been the engine behind anti-government resistance and protest as far back as the 1950’s, throughout the Shah Regime (installed by a CIA coup d'état in 1953). On December 7th 1953 (the 16th of Azar), Iranian students came out in large numbers, like they did this week, to demonstrate against the visit of the American vice-president Richard Nixon to Iran after the CIA-supported military coup of August 1953. Three students were shot dead by the Shah's U.S.-installed regime and that day became known as “Students’ Day” ever since.

[Photo: The three students who were shot dead while protesting Richard Nixon's visit to Iran, following the U.S. installation of the Shah.]

After the success of the 1979 revolution, the U.S. and its allies pushed a genocidal war on Iran. Over a million Iranians and Iraqis were killed, which dramatically strengthened the Islamic regime. The regime used the excuse of war to “cleanse” the universities of every rebellious student, and made it very difficult for student organizations to function. As the Islamic regime weakened, and student organizations became more popular, the government cultivated goon squads called "Basij", together with plain-clothes vigilantes, to suppress student activism on all campuses across Iran.

On July 9th 1999, under the cover of darkness, several government-supported vigilante groups (led by the Basij) broke into a Tehran University dormitory. These vigilantes beat the students, trashed their belongings, and called them immoral enemies of Islam. Drunk with hate, shouting Allah hu Akbar, two by two, Basijis hoisted struggling and pleading students to the high windows of the dorm. The vigilantes actually threw the students out of the windows of the tall building, killing them. Many students were killed and wounded on that summer night. Since that day, Iranian students have been coming out every year, to remember their fallen friends and to stand against oppression and harassment by the government's Basij thugs.

The mass mobilization for this July’s protest was carried out despite seemingly impossible restrictions on communication. The government severely restricted text messaging, cell phone service, and the Internet. Virtually all journalists have been cleared off the streets of Iran, leaving the reporting to those who participate in the protests. Carrying cameras and mobile phones is prohibited. Such items, if found, are confiscated and severe punishments ensue.

Despite all such threats by the authorities, participants in recent rallies have managed to document their actions and send their message for the rest of the world to hear. “We don’t want war,” said one 27-year-old man, “We just want freedoms.”

This is a world where international solidarity is scarce, where many can be fooled into believing democracy can be installed by illegal occupations. The U.S. tells us that an imposed “democracy” ought to be endured by the occupied. Today, dignity is denied to millions of occupied Palestinians, Iraqis, and Afghans. The occupied populations' inability to establish self-rule has severe consequences. Iranians know this well, and they are fighting for democracy come hell or high water.

Iranians can only be harmed by foreign interference, by foreign sabotage, and by Israeli bombardment, which Vice President Biden is practically endorsing.

Iranians' unbreakable resolution, to win their own democracy, is apparent in their chant: “We are standing to the end”.

Real democracy, people’s participation in decision making on all aspects of social life, is what Iran wants and needs. An Iranian physician recently said: “Everything has a price. Many bad things are happening but the trend is toward the light.” Light is a commonly used metaphor for Iranians, whose roots are in Zoroastrianism (the religion of fire and light).

As Iran protests and resists dictatorship, as we join our Arab neighbors in opposing occupations and U.S. puppet rulers, the American and Israeli leadership is contemplating an attack on Iran. Such an attack, by the U.S. and Israel, on the only country in the Middle East where people have forced an opening for democracy, would mean total devastation for any democratic change in the Middle East. Unfortunately, the U.S. and Israel see democracy as a direct threat to their continued occupations across the Middle East. It is.

There is a reason why Iranians believe that war is a way of life for Israel. Israel has always been a violent settler state, with endlessly expandable borders.

While struggling to resist U.S.-imposed sanctions, which have tightened their grip on all aspects of Iranian life, for 30 years, Iranians have nevertheless found the strength to march in the streets. They are telling the U.S. and Israel, the main war-mongers of our times, that Iranians do NOT want wars and that they WILL stand for democracy “...to the end”.


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For 25 years, the Shah, "with his Israeli-trained SAVAK torturers, murdered and tortured the nation into silence."

"Real democracy is the only path for Iranians"

ANN ARBOR NEWS (Ann Arbor, Michigan)

Sunday, July 5, 2009

On the Web at:

http://www.mlive.com/opinion/ann-arbor/index.ssf/2009/07/other_voices_real_democracy_is.html

By Mozhgan Savabieasfahani

In a wounded and burning Middle East, aching under U.S. and Israeli military boots, with constantly expanding invasions by Israel (Lebanon, 2006; Gaza, 2009), with close to 2 million dead Iraqis just next door, with millions more Iraqis wounded, made homeless and poisoned by uranium, with daily Israeli threats of nuclear bombing of Iran and Iranians; in an Iran where U.S. sanctions constantly tighten its grip on all aspects of life, making it impossible to get necessities to treat and maintain close to 80 million people, where food prices are on a par with the U.S. while the average income of an Iranian family is a small fraction of that of an American family; at a time when unemployment and drug abuse are at unimaginable heights; when prostitution is destroying the fabric of an ancient society, Iranians are demanding dignity and freedom, and a new Iran is being born.

A new Iran shines in the faces of those marching peaceably with their daughters on their shoulders, and with their grandparents using wheelchairs. To attribute this monumental nonviolent popular movement to Western instigation is to dishonor those millions who showed up on the streets for two weeks - despite the threat of government-backed "Basiji" hooligans beating them mercilessly, despite the threat of being expelled from their jobs and universities, despite having their homes attacked at night by the Basiji, despite their family members being kidnapped by the various security personnel.

The 2009 coup d'etat, against more than 40 million Iranian voters, was an inside job.

The day after the election results were announced I talked to a friend in Iran who told me "if they (President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's camp) won fair and square, why aren't they celebrating on the streets?" The streets of Isfahan (and all other big cities in Iran) were desolate after the announcement.

People were dumbfounded.

The very next day, people organized and took to the streets again, carrying their children on their shoulders and pushing wheelchairs for the elderly.

Iranians know what a foreign coup d'etat looks like, and feels like. One of the most humiliating instances in our history was the 1953 CIA coup that removed the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mosadegh from office and installed the shah.

For the next 25 years, the shah, with his Israeli-trained SAVAK torturers, murdered and tortured the nation into silence. Iranians still remember "the hired help," the U.S. and Israeli collaborators who got paid only pennies to roam the streets of Tehran (and other large cities); the vigilantes who swung metal chains in the air; metal chains that had bashed many young skulls and ripped through soft tissue of people's stomach. No, Iranians have not forgotten the shah's "Shaboon-Bi-Mokh" (brainless Shaboon) and his other brutal gangs.

That was a revolution ago, many political fights back, and long before many large and small civil victories.

Iranians of 2009 expect more from life and demand more of their government. After all, the most significant popular revolution of this century succeeded in Iran. We survived a brutal U.S.-instigated war, between Iran and Iraq, for eight years. Over a million died, throughout the 1980s.

Every Iranian knows that, were it not for the U.S.-fueled war with Iraq, a million Iranian and Iraqi youths would have been spared. Every Iranian knows that, were it not for the war with Iraq, democratic forces in Iran would have survived. Every Iranian knows that the new bullies, of the new regime, were strengthened by that war (this is admitted by current leaders of the regime itself).

Every Iranian knows that democracy was the real casualty of war inflicted on them by the U.S.

And Iranians know, in their bones, that what has already happened to Iraq and Afghanistan could easily have happened to them.

Real democracy (the people's ability to install social mechanisms to protect freedom of speech, freedom of writing, freedom of gathering, etc.) is now the only path that Iranians will accept, if we are to protect ourselves against further U.S. and Israeli wars. Knowing this in our bones, Iranians poured onto the streets in the millions, to cry for freedom.

May all people of the Middle East hear our call and answer with similar nonviolent rallies. Resistance to occupation, to invasion; to undemocratic regimes is our only hope for a safe Middle East where our children can grow to become painters and poets and mathematicians.

Remember your Iranian sisters and brothers who overcame their fear of bullets and tanks by chanting, "Don't be afraid, don't be afraid, we are all together"; and remember the revolution's 1979 chants, which also echoed in Iran after the 2009 elections: "Bullets, tanks and machine guns will not work anymore."

Nothing but solidarity between Iran and its neighbors will protect us from U.S. and Israeli drones, and from uranium bombs. May all the people of the region hear Iran's call and answer with comparable nonviolent rallies, especially in the occupied nations.

Iran is calling you: "Don't be afraid, don't be afraid, we are all together."

Dr. Mozhgan Savabieasfahani, a native of Iran, is an environmental toxicologist based in Ann Arbor. Her new book is "Pollution and Reproductive Damage: Pollution Induced Cell-death and Reproductive Damage in Fish and Mammals" published by DVM publishers (Germany). She has written on the effects of plasticizers and pesticides on the female reproductive cycle, and on pollution related to wars and invasions in the Middle East.

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