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A post from DoubleX writer Meredith Simons:
Haleh Esfandiari, who was a citizen of both the United States and Iran, was arrested while visiting Tehran and accused of plotting to overthrow the regime. She was put in jail for four months, at the age of 67, and survived thanks to her amazing discipline. But her book My Prison, My Home is far more than a prison thriller ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel memoir, Persepolis—released
in the United States in 2003—was a clear-eyed, sensitive portrayal of
the Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq war, seen through the eyes of
a young girl. Now Satrapi’s stark, inky images have been “remixed” with new text to tell the story of the recent disputed elections in Iran—ending with the death of Neda Agha-Soltan ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Anne Applebaum puts the Neda video in context,
by forcefully arguing that women's rights advocates—not Bush or Obama
or Twitter—are behind the incredible energy in the Iranian vote and the
protests: "The truth is that the high turnout was the result of many
years of organizational work carried out by small groups of civil
rights activists and, above all, women's groups, working largely
unnoticed and without much outside help." She also explains why the
presence of so many women on the streets matters:
For at the heart of the ideology of the Islamic republic is...(To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Dana, Susannah: Like many Americans, I watched the “Neda video”
yesterday. This is, of course, a horribly shorthand way of saying that
I opened a video clip that captures a young Iranian woman dying after
being shot. The movie is short. It is “graphic,” if by graphic we mean
that we see blood, and the violence that can be done to a body. More
subtly, and entirely fascinatingly (in the old, sober sense of the
world), it captures the moment a person’s life drains out of her body.
I have, in the past, always decided not to watch videos like this
(Danny Pearl’s execution, say). This time I changed my mind, and it
haunted me all last night.
Why has Neda become a symbol of Iranian freedom? Because we witness
the sight of her death. That sight, even at a remove (or perhaps
because at a remove), is so difficult to hold in mind that we have to
transform it. Ironically...(To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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According to the social media analytics company Sysomos, there were 19,235 Twitter users in Iran on Sunday;
this in a country of 70 million. Some 93 percent of those accounts were
in Tehran. Presumably those users are young, wealthy, and worldly. As
Elizabeth Lazar implies in her solid Double X piece on Guatemala, reading the world off Twitter is like peeking into a Connecticut prep school and claiming to have seen America.
I happen to be in Guatemala at the moment, so it’s pretty easy for
me to imagine a place in which the vast majority of people live lives
untouched by Google or Facebook. But in general it's pretty hard to
imagine one’s way into a different social and technological context;
far easier to conjure the college kid texting from Tehran than the
family of Ahmadinejad supporters who lack indoor plumbing. From here
the discussion over the Twitter Revolution, and the perhaps more
fervent discussion over the fact that there is no such thing as the
Twitter Revolution, looks to have little to do with actual events in
Iran. (Add this post to that pile, I suppose.) Yet even those who
acknowledge the conversation to be insular... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Yes, Dana,
you're absolutely right that the Neda video, in which a young Iranian
woman is shot and killed during the post-election protests, is a snuff
movie. "And the fact that 'Neda' is a young and pretty woman" has
absolutely played a part in the YouTube clip's rise to infamy. This
isn't to diminish the content of it. It is a horrifying, saddening,
frantic look at a woman dying in the street.
But I don't think that's exactly what we're talking about here.
We're talking about the something else the video becomes when its focus
and attendant narrative take on the qualities of martyr and myth. The video becomes something else altogether...(To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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A video of the death of a young Iranian protester named Neda has been traveling incredibly quickly around the Twittersphere and the rest of the Internet (first link contains disturbing images). She has become an instant symbol of Iranian opposition... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com.)
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A post from Double X writer Vanessa M. Gezari:
I experienced yet another burst of joy on behalf of Iranians today as I read this dispatch
about the meaning—and more importantly, the feeling—of the
post-election demonstrations. The piece, by an Iranian student named
Shane M., is very good until the last four paragraphs, when it becomes
astonishing. The writer paints an image of a country surprised by
itself—by its own spirit and audacity and modernity and
intellectualism—and by the dramatic pace of change that was supposed to
unfold slowly, almost imperceptibly, until it snowballed... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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A friend urges me to tell you that you might want to check out this weekend's call to stand with the people of Iran. Groups are gathering on Sunday at 3 p.m. in select cities to show support for protesters in Tehran... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Yes, Vanessa, you are right that the Iranian elections are an argument against "U.S. interference" as a tool of democratization—if, by that, you mean U.S. military intervention. However, they are an excellent argument in favor of more peaceful forms U.S. democracy promotion, by which I mean radio programs like Radio Free Europe's Radio Farda, support for human rights websites (such as the excellent iranrights.org) based outside the country and training and other kinds of support and training organized by the National Endowment for Democracy and similar groups. The point of such exercises is ... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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So Iran's Guardian Council has agreed to do a partial recount of the votes, according to the New York Times
and other sites, in response to street riots and protests larger than
any in the country since 1979. If you haven't yet seen pictures of
what's taking place, you have to check out this gallery
from The Big Picture. (The image of the protestor helping the injured
riot officer is amazing.) As everyone else has already noted, too, it's
fascinating that social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and blogs have
helped fuel protests and fervor. It's become a cliche that ... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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A guest post from Double X intern Meredith Simons:
If you're wondering why there isn't reliable polling data to help
settle the question of whether the Iranian election was a farce, the Washington Post offers all sorts of (contradictory) opinions:
Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty argue that reliable polling is possible, that they did it, and that the results were strongly in Ahmadinejad's favor. But Jon Cohen points out
that their poll was completed in May, before the contest got really
heated, and that even then more than half of the respondents said they
hadn't made up their mind yet (so the 2:1 number Ballen and Doherty
cite was only among people who had decided who they were voting for).
Meanwhile, Mehdi Khalaji says ... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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A post from Double X writer Vanessa M. Gezari:
TV images of street protests following Iran’s disputed election offer
perhaps the strongest argument against U.S. interference as a tool for
democratization. The footage
shows vibrant, vigorous dissent of a kind not seen in Iran since the
revolution: protesters moving through the streets like a human wave,
ignoring the batons of riot police and shouting their support for
opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, the loser according to official tallies
that give Mahmoud Ahmadinejad 63 percent of the vote. Whether the
election was rigged, whether the protesters succeed in reversing the
results, they have already won a huge victory by disrupting on their own the political status quo in a nation that Anne Applebaum rightly calls “a classic example of managed democracy.” This is the kind of organic democratic movement that is ... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Because of the economic and political news, not much attention was paid to the speech by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the United Nations. The representatives of the United States and Israel left the room, but Ahmadinejad was embraced and applauded by other member nations for an anti-Semitic rant right out of Der Sturmer. This Holocaust denier who weekly predicts a second Holocaust for the state of Israel, warned the assembled delegates of the powers of sly, manipulative Jews: “The dignity, integrity and rights of the American and European people are being played with by a small but deceitful number of people called Zionists. Although they are a minuscule minority, they have been dominating an important portion of the financial and monetary centers as well as the political decision-making centers of some European countries and the U.S. in a deceitful, complex and furtive manner.”
There is much, much more. Here are three good pieces by Bret Stephens, Eve Epstein, and Anne Bayefsky on how such Nazi-style speech has become terrifyingly acceptable. I looked for a liberal commentator who might mention how chilling it is that a leader of a country seeking to become a nuclear power would so boldly speak of his desires for the elimination of a sovereign state and a people, but couldn’t find one. I did, however, see a defense of Ahmadinejad in Salon by Juan Cole, whose only critical words were for Barack Obama for condemning the speech. Cole finds the Iranian leader to be “quirky” and “colorful,” and says, by way of illustrating Ahmadinejad’s benign intentions, that if he really had genocidal fantasies, the Iranian regime would already have murdered the Jews still living in that country. In case that leaves you with any doubt about the regime’s desires, here’s an article about a march today in Iran in which tens of thousands chanted “Death to Israel” and a book was released mocking the Holocaust with illustrations of hook-nosed Jews.
(Photo of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of the Islamic Republic of Iran by TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/Getty Images)
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