I am a Persian woman living in United State of America. For the last year or so I was supporting Barak Obama and now that US election is over and Obama is heading to the White House I am planning to campaign for Ahmadinejad.
I believe Ahmadinejad is a very radical and insane person thus a perfect last nail in the coffin of these unelected mullahs.
I will try to keep this blog as simple as I can so ordinary people especially Iranians youth can participate. I will not censor any comment good or bad. Since I don't live in Iran and it would be very hard for any of these unelected mullahs to send anyone after me, go ahead and say whatever you want about them or about me.
Since one of my hubbies is to collect guns (I am a card carrying Liberal) and have a couple loud mouth dogs, I intend to exercise the right to eliminate any Mullahs or their thugs that step on my property.
4 comments:
Dear Holly, Congratulations on this new weblog! and thank you for the comments you have left on mine! I appreciate and respect your opinions, but you know I differ with you a bit on some of your assessments about the situation in Iran. For example:
As much as I deplore fundamentalism and backward reactionary, sexist, extremist, nonsensical, and a 1400 year old interpretation of Islam and the Holy Quran, as advocated and practiced by those Iranian clerics you call "mullah", and I refer to as "Mafatih reading" anti-revolutionary betrayers of 1979 martyrs, ... BUT ...
call me naive, overly optimistic, or even stupid, but you know what I think about Ayatollah Khamenei????!!!! I think he is NOT one of them!!!!
now, now, don't get shocked or angry or disappointed in me, just hear me out:
You mentioned the "Castro Marginalizing Campaign", but let me tell you what I think happened to Iran's Islamic Revolution of 1979 which wasn't a revolution done by the so-called "mullah" and thugs as L.A. loyalists to the Pahlavi monarchy would have you believe!!!!
It really WAS a popular revolution, with the HOPE of creating a brand new REPUBLIC in the land of a 2537 year old kingdom!!!!
In those first few months after the victory of the 1979 revolution, there was a TRULY palpable sense of FREEDOM in the air, it was not just a meaningless terminology that the Spring of 1979 (1358 Iranian calendar) was dobbed as the "Spring of Freedom", it was REALLY something that even a 9 year old kid from a Godless liberal family, who grew up listening to BEEGEES and ABBA songs in the 70s and went to a school run by American nuns (Soheil), could feel it and be very much affected by it!!!
This revolution wasn't just a little "uprising by thugs and mullahs" as Farah Diba would have you believe!!! It took almost 70 years to finally achieve its aim of toppling a despotic regime of (excuse of my language) Western-***-licking traitors who would sell their nation's rights and dignity, their country's resources and standing in the world, and would torture their own people for standing up to them, for ONE and only one reason: the kings' own selfish, self-serving, ego maniacal benefits!!!!
Now, what do I think happened to that once so promising "Spring of Freedom" in Iran??????
Have you heard of "Operation Phoenix"?! ... you should google it if you haven't ...
Within the first year of the 1979 February 11th victory of the revolution, Iran's revolutionary leaders and heroes, those who could be considered as the Thomas Jeffersons and the Benjamin Franklins of Iran's revolution, i.e., Dr. Shariati, Mohandess Bazargan, Ostad Motahhari, Dr. Beheshti, Ayatollah Taleghani and many many more theoreticians of that revolution and original drafters of Iran's first ever Democratic Constitution, were ALL mysteriously assassinated!!!! (in the case of Dr. Shariati, it even happened before the victory of the revolution)
Iran soon found itself with ONE leader and one alone, and that was a very old yet quite charismatic high priest (Grand Ayatollah "Faghih") who had been able to mobilize the masses with his revolutionary rhetoric and his masterful leadership, his boldness of character and courage, having been an outspoken fierce opposition to the king for decades, someone who had been the inspiration and moral guide to all those Founding Fathers I named above, his name was Ruhollah Khomeini.
I know you think of ALL Iranian clerics as fundamentalist mullahs, and what I say to you is: maybe he was, maybe he wasn't! That depends entirely on one's definition of "Fundamentalism" and one's own ideological leanings!
I personally wish our Founding Fathers had stayed alive and if they had (I mean all of them, including some who had been assassinated by the Shah long before the revolution), the revolution would not have ended up in such a sorry state of affairs as it is today, but the fault lies mostly with the "Project Phoenix" mentality that was still prevalent in the late 70s!!!!
OK, back to why I think Ayatollah Khamenei may NOT be one of those "fundamentalists" we deplore so much, and why I think he is in fact scared of these fundamentalists to whom he owes his own ascendancy to Supreme Leadership!
Along with those tens of revolutionary leaders (secular and cleric alike) who were assassinated in 1979, the then young 40 year old mid-ranking cleric Ali Khamenei also had an assassination attempt on his life which was botched and left him with injuries, and I think gave him the "message" that some people were trying to convey to him:
"Side with us, or you will be next!"
Another reason I don't see in him an inherent ideological alignment with the far right extremists, is that I remember him being actually quite respectful of the late Dr. Shariati (find him in the 7th picture from the top on this page, which is the anniversary of Dr. Shariati's martyrdom):
http://www.nehzateazadi.net/gallery/shariati/dargozasht.htm
and I think he was quite a close friend of the late Dr. Chamran who was one of Iran's most selfless and heroic martyrs of the Iran-Iraq war, a genius physicist, a spiritual mystic and a true revolutionary leader!
I also have a rather personal knowledge of one of his closest friends and advisers, one of his cabinet members at the time of the Iran-Iraq war when he was the president of Iran, who still sees him regularly. ... and if this man (my aunt's brother-in-law) believes in Ayatollah Khamenei as a good revolutionary hero who has Iran's best interest in heart (no matter how much more conservative his views are about social issues, than mine), I think I'm inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, and say he's NOT one of them, in the face of ALL his support for the likes of Ahmadinejad and Jannati!!! (which I think he feels obligated to show)
This relative of mine and his brother (ie, my aunt's husband) were basically the ONLY two people in my entire family who ACTUALLY participated in the revolution, they risked their lives in front of the bullets of the Imperial Guards on 17th Shahrivar (the black Friday of the revolution), they had the moral fortitude to put their own lives on the line for what they believed in, and they happened to be quite pious devout Muslims (the only ones in our entire family who believed in the Hejab) and actually his family forced my aunt to wear that "black cloak of invisibility", so nobody in my mom's side of the family originally liked them!!!!! but over the years, everybody, from the most Godless sinners and infidels to the the most clueless westernized kids, to the most intellectual thinkers and sophisticates, have come to respect this man (and my own cousins who are his kids don't even wear the hejab, but they love and respect their dad and their uncle enormously)!!!!
As a 9 year old kid though, I looked up to my aunt's husband (my dad died when I was 2, so all my uncles and all my aunt's husbands were like father figures to me), and I would go to the Friday prayers of Ayatollah Taleghani with him, and experiment with the Hejab for a while! ... I say experimenting, as Obama experimented with drugs as a teenager! ;-)
I know , it may sound utterly irrelevant and irrational that I use the friendship of my aunt's brother-in-law with Ayatollah Khamenei as an argument for why I think he is not as bad as you think, but sometimes you just have to go with some instinctive feelings and try to take what you hear about people with a grain of salt!
Another point I wanted to make about Ayatollah Khamenei is this:
Look at who is the father of his own daughter-in-law?!!! ... google Dr. Haddad-Adel, and I think you'd agree that this man cannot be considered a "Fundamentalist", right?!!! His PhD supervisor was Seyyed Hossein Nasr (the father of Tuft University's, Naval Postgraduate School's, Stanford University's, Council on Foreign Relation's own Vali Nasr)!!!!
I know, these arguments I made are not very RATIONALLY strong, but it's just a "gut feeling" that I have, which can be totally wrong, just as George W. Bush's gut feeling about Vladimir Putin may have been wrong!!!
so, dear Holly, do you think I'm being too naive to have these rosy pictures? let me know, thanks!
:-)
hi!
i just left you another response in my own weblog.
bye!
Great blog! Please keep on posting. Very interesting to read from first hand experience.
here's more "first hand experience":
http://mrs-immanuel-kant.blogspot.com/2008/12/my-memories-of-irans-1979-revolution.html
:-)
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