Oppenheim Arts & Letters

Iranian Regime Sentenced to Saberi-ah

I have a friend who lies to impress and to entertain himself and others.  The forms are exaggeration and yarning.  For example, this morning, he told me about a thunderhead beating up toward his work location from the south, and while he described the wind picking up and the air smelling like rain, I was checking my favorite realtime weather radar.

"Radar says the skies are clear north to Pittsburgh and south to Raleigh," I told him.

He either could not or would not hear that truth, choosing at some emotional and psychological level to block all but his "own private Idaho" of an unfolding drama.  He believed or wanted me to believe that storm clouds were gathering and closing in above his head, and the wind was rising.

He wanted my approval, buy-in, indulgence, and obedience in light of the willow-o-whisps that bind cooperative, friendly (so far) relationships.

About twenty minutes later at the tying off of the call, I reminded him that the skies looked clear down to Norfolk, and he responded in line with his threatening cloud story, "Yeah, it looks like they're clearing off."

No harm done.

I got in a little observation about the man and about closed and open communication systems.

The yarn spinner wanted to wrap my perception of his reality in his invention, a bid for heightened attention, interest, and sympathy--also a bid for power.

Fortunately, I had Internet-borne weather radar.

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All well know that bullies are cowards and cowards as often as not liers, and altogether bullies, cowards, and liers become collectively thugs. 

Few among the articulate may know as much better than Roxana Saberi, an American beauty queen, also an American-Iranian reporter once based in Tehran, the daughter of an American-Iranian father and a Japanese mother, in all, as Dickens might put it, the very picture of a cosmopolitan, well educated, and thoroughly modern--broadly Judeo-Christianized, Greco-Romanized--woman of the world whose life, in all of fifteen minutes, was turned upside down by the scrabbling and vainglorious nincompoops who, considering themselves the defenders of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, seem to have prized for their sadism a young women eager, at first, to prove herself innocent beneath their gaze.

Browbeaten, cajoled, isolated, threatened by threats of harm to herself and loved others, Saberi's kangaroo trials have her at first seeking to placate her tormenters, who managed to keep her in the infamous Evin Prison for three months, January 31 to May 11, 2009, on charges of espionage every bit as imaginary as my friend's impending early morning thunderstorm. 

Now that I had been deprived of freedom, I valued it more than ever.  Freedom to interview people and to write a book about them without being thrown in jail.  Freedom to tell my parents my whereabouts.  Freedom to use the bathroom when I wanted, to read a book, to have a pen and paper.  Freedom to walk without a blindfold and to shut off the lights at night.  Freedom from coercion to make a false confession and to spy in exchange for my release.  The right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, to remain silent, to have a lawyer. [1, p. 113]

How those privileged to live in the open societies take the fundamentals for granted!

Moreover, the same seldom delve into the horror attending the development and imposition of truly isolated and sealed communicating environments. 

In Iran's Kafkaesque atmosphere, officers of the state hide their names, guards do not give theirs, the prosecution whips up charges to strut across the stage of a political theater it hopes to sustain with "white torture" or psychological illusion, intimidation, and leverage.

I have found the best and most simple template for much of what goes on within the Islamic Small Wars to be the child's tale known as "The Emperor's New Clothes." 

In the Islamic civil psychoses, from Pakistan to Somalia and points Middling East, perhaps too few children dare to speak up and too many cowed adults conveniently nod their heads, resigned not merely  going along with the cascading lies of lost and needy men armored in black leather as well as clerical robes, but also "cooperating" and becoming themselves the instruments of the devils from which they would otherwise flee.

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What a difference a year makes!

What the critic has said: "The film is careful to avoid explicit political statement, but its reticence makes its critique of the Iranian regime all the more devastating." [2]

The trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gLq3E4pRuU

The recently released film by Bahman Ghobadi, Roxana Saberi's boyfriend (also, the two share screenwriting credit on the property), No One Knows About Persian Cats, hits two marks for existing: 1) the atmosphere of the story is current, not comfortably historic, romanticized, fondly remembered in those old cabaret, footloose, and happy days ways; 2) the release, as with Saberi's book, comes out just ahead of the anniversary of Saberi's liberation.

On this day a year ago, close enough, one love bug languished in prison, and the other, figuratively at least, possibly literally as well, walked in anguish outside its walls.

Roxana Saberi's father, Reza, also bears mention in what looks like a coterie of honest to God--truly, honest and to God--freedom fighters. 

While the father plays a noble role in the daughter's book, little mention--perhaps I missed it--is made of his vocation in living, which turns out that of an intellectual's writer in his own right [3]:

"Throughout history, humankind has been working, often subconsciously, toward discovering unity behind diversity and order behind apparent chaos. Somehow the universal consciousness, which is Existence itself, informs human beings, whether savage, children, uneducated or learned, that beneath the differences there are similarities, and behind the many there hides the One. Human beings have made this advancement toward unity through mythology, religion, philosophy, science, humanities, and also through mystical experiences."

Source: http://saberibooks.com/non-fiction.html

I'll gamble that the William James, Joseph Campbell, Abraham Maslow and other authors represented on my shelves are the same James, Campbell, and Maslow (I'll throw in the rare name drop of Ahmad Tafazzoli [4] too, so long as true Persian culture seems the thing and global associating helpful) on Reza Saberi's shelves.

While its gadflies and goads operate best elsewhere, the Islamic Revolution in Iran, toodling along in its own bipolar theonukedom, continues to maintain its pitiful yarn about Saberi's role in its dismal life.  Chances are good, however, that the regime has chosen not to notice (officially) its role in Saberi's now colorful, real, and truthful handiwork, which recently published and distributed by Harper Collins will sit high on bookshelves worldwide for decades to come, witness to a regime proven dependent on lying most of all to itself.

Cited Reference

1. Saberi, Roxana.  Between Two Worlds: My Life and Captivity in Iran.  New York: Harper, 2010.

2. Scott, A. O.  "No One Knows About Persian Cats (2009)".  Review.  The New York Times, April 16, 2010: http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/04/16/movies/16noone.html

3. Saberi, Reza: http://saberibooks.com/

4. Daryaee, Touraj and Mahmoud Omidsalar.  The Spirit of Wisdom (Menog i Xrad): Essays in Memory of Ahmad Tafazzoli.  Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2004.

Also Recommended

Moaveni, Azadeh.  Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran.  New York: Random House, 2009.

Nafisi, Azar.  Things I've Been Silent About.  New York: Random House, 2008.

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Perfect Harmony -- Workin' On It

 

Source: YouTube poster "michend2003" (for http://www.childhoodmemorykeeper.blogspot.com). "70's 'I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke' Commercial." Posted December 30, 2008: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfU17niXOG8.

Some work on harmony, e.g., http://harmonynetworks.webs.com/.

Would that more would engage the principle.

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Goldstoned II

The Goldstone Report largely neglects the context within which Israeli actions took place. Why is that context so vital, and why is the report so empty without it? Because, for years, Israel has been the target of asymmetrical warfare—of terrorists who hide behind civilians and aim to kill civilians. For eight years before Operation ‘Cast Lead,’ Hamas—aided by Iran and others—launched deadly rockets and mortars into Israel, even after Israel dismantled its Gaza settlements, even after it withdrew its military. More than 6,000 rockets have fallen, indiscriminately, on southern Israel’s cities and towns. Each intended to kill the maximum number of civilians; each was a war crime, by definition. And I have seen the effects first-hand: in the Israeli town of Sderot, I saw children who had lost the ability to speak, who no longer had control over their bodily functions, who were condemned to play in an armored playground for fear of the rockets that could kill with only seconds’ warning. That is the context of which the Goldstone report make such short shrift.

Tragically, civilians in Gaza suffered and continue to suffer. They suffer in major part from the determination of their imposed leaders to pursue indiscriminate terror. When terrorists turn civilians into shields, it is they who bear the ultimate responsibility for the inadvertent, unwanted, and tragic results. Hamas—like its state sponsors—is notorious for using innocent men, women, and children as human shields and political props. As Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice put it early this year: ‘Hamas has held the people of Gaza hostage.’ And Hamas continues to hold them hostage, likely subjecting the Goldstone report’s Palestinian witnesses to intimidation and threats, a possibility that the report does not take into account. [1]

So whose story are you buying?

In the chaos and fog of war, which has never yet been the completely controlled machine its critics feel should exist, Israel may look the tyrant, but only in an investigative atmosphere that makes it the more easily researched of the adversaries involved.  Unless Hamas should wish to come forth and chat about its (still ongoing, possibly distributed, certainly enabled and allowed) Qassam rocket launching program, the report remains an unbalanced and inadequately "contextualized" indictment.

The United States House of Representatives condemned the report this past Tuesday, November 3, 2009.

In a video produced in the aftermath of the assault on Gaza, a child quite clearly (also without emotion) explains what has happened to her family, capping her lesson with this one: "They do this because they don't want us to live like them.  They don't want us to live a nice life with our mums and dads and our whole families.  They want us to live in despair.  They want us to live as orphans." [2]

Well out of the mouths of adults and into those of children, there is no truth to the little girl's stated conclusions, but whether she will live to grow up and understand that or not remains quite an open question. 

Whether she will grow up comprehending Islamist rhetoric, its threats, and the effects of thousands of rockets launched against her neighbors may depend less on her access to information, which element one may expect to expand, then on how she comes to receive it.

In her book, Londonistan, Melanie Phillips has characterized a sort of reasoning passed through portions of Muslim-majority cultures as "back-to-front": one starts with an end state and makes up stories that stand half a chance of explaining them--one could ask for no finer lesson in the conjuring of wild conspiracies.  If an American-Zionist alliance could take down the World Trade Center, just one of those persistent alternative popular notions, then how much more easily swallowed the accusation that the Jews "want us to live as orphans."

Speaking as a Jew to any innocents, old or young, placed in harm's way by Hamas or any other organization as vicious, we want you to live well, in peace, and with security provided we may be left to do the same through shared mutual good will and grace.

There is no compulsion in religion, so be not at war with the whole world, the People of the Book, the kafir, even the polytheists and unbelievers, for we are all full of the same and better and far healthier possibilities.

Cited Reference

1. Hoyer, Steny (D-Md.).  Speech before the U.S. House of Representatives, November 3, 2009.  Excerpt sourced through Ron Kompeas' "Hoyer on Goldstone," Jewish and Israel News, November 5, 2009: http://blogs.jta.org/politics/article/2009/11/05/1008959/hoyer-on-goldstone; speech also available through Congressman Hoyer's web portal: http://www.majorityleader.gov/in_the_news/press_releases/index.cfm?pressReleaseID=3539

2. Grandjean, Guy and Mustafa Khalili.  "Gaza survivor describes day 48 members of family were killed in attack."  Video.  Guardian.Uk, January 30, 2009: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2009/jan/30/gaza-samouni

3. Phillips, Melanie.  Londonistan.  New York: Encounter Books, 2006.

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Middle East Murk

J Street policies are even more extreme than the most radical Israeli leftwing groups. The fighting with Hamas in Gaza, which was endorsed by all Jewish political parties in the Knesset, was criticised by J Street as "counterproductive" and "disproportionate". This, of itself, is no issue. What is unacceptable is the moral equivalency made by J Street between the policies of Israel and Hamas and its difficulty in distinguishing "between who is right and who is wrong".

It was recently disclosed that Arab and pro-Iranian elements were providing approximately 10% of J Street funding, a somewhat bizarre situation for a genuinely "pro-Israel" organisation. One donor and member of the organisation's finance committee, Genevieve Lynch, participated in the National Iranian American Council, the unofficial lobby group for the Iranian government. Judith Barnett, a former registered agent for Saudi Arabia, is a donor and serves on the J Street advisory council. Nancy Dutton, until 2008 an attorney for the Saudi Arabian embassy, donates to J Street's political action committees, which actively finance anti-Israeli congressional candidates. [1]

Aye, it's a weird world alright.

I'm a co-administrator for the Israel-Palestine Peace Group (IPPG) of the Georgetown University-based International Peace and Collaborative Development Network, a "Ning" software driven chat and friendship fest that has its own peculiar and surreal character with flocks of doves flying over some of the most egregious anti-Semitic spew (and stew) in English on the planet.

http://internationalpeaceandconflict.ning.com/

It's all quite polite, except that, um, the so-called "right of return" (of those who were sided with Hitler) should be fully accepted and the Jews, err, Israel, should, by one writer's estimate, be charged with reconstructing Gaza because, you know, they (mysteriously, for no good reason--anyone know why?) bombed the hell out of it last winter.

My latest appearance: http://www.mepeace.org where all dance together, sort of, which I think sweet, but the group's founder, Eyal Raviv, recently attended J Street's conference in Washington, D.C., October 24-28, 2009 with an it's-all-good attitude, and one may hope it is, even while harboring doubts.

I'm not so sure that peace (any price?) is all so good for either Israelis or their so far discombobulated neighboring pseudo governments, one of them a designated terrorist organization whose charter calls for the destruction of Israel, and whose backers would just as soon pick up where the SS had to leave off, the other itself a largely opaque and multi-sided kleptopawn, admittedly appearing to try to shed its skin and molt into something more accountable, respectable, and responsible to its own.  Isi Leibler's recent piece appearing in the Guardian UK supports that not-so-great feeling.

Still, in cybersapce, wherever political adversaries may gather, there one's own small voice may go and chime with or against the smaller wind(bags) of war.

I'm quite the windbag myself--I admit it.

Those who most want peace have the challenge of turning a broad, continuous, and hot light on the multivariate drivers of conflicts--arms deals, banking and charity arrangements, political leadership, ideological and religious excuses of every sort, language habits and habits of culture, etc.--and laying them out for clear, dead honest, and progressive analysis.

Cant and rhetoric, unfortunately, prove generally more easily indulged than care in study.

The result: looks good on the web!

In realspace, the politics may remain confused and "peace organizations" a fair mix of intermixed,  cross-wired, and bi-directional infiltration.

Perhaps that's the idea.

How is that working out?

Of the 58 members in the group I monitor (IPPG), fewer than half-a-dozen of us seem to be typing for the forums, and what to make of those, click on the first URL offered, find the group, and define it your way.

In either direction, however directions may be defined, don't the let the numbers fool you: one old man in a library and a comparative handful of disenchanted fans can and do change worlds, not necessarily for the better, but the judgment of that lays always in the future and future hindsight.

In any case, for this space, however peacenicky I may feel this afternoon, I don't think I am "J Street" by sensibility or temperament--not close.

Reference

1. Leibler, Isi.  "J Street's 'Pro Israel' Stance is Phoney."  Guardian.co.uk, October 26, 2009: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/26/j-street-lobby-israel

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Shah's Early Memoir and the Nerve of Some Women . . . .

Outside our sealed bubble of tolerant Muslim culture, the Islamic world was changing.  Some years before the Iranian revolution, our Qur'an teacher became fascinated by the ideas of Ayatollah Khomeini.  He was hurriedly dismissed, and he eventually returned to Iran to study in a religious seminary.  When the thirst for Islamic revolution had stirred his heart sufficiently, he decided he had been brought to our household for a purpose: to witness the depravity and error into which our branch of the family of the Prophet had sunk.  For a while, we children were hurried past the thick laurel bushes in the driveway, in case our erstwhile Qur'an instructor was lurking there, ready to attack us.

What unacceptable religous ideas had he encountered in our home?  What teachings did he find so detrimental to the hearts of the faithful?  Perhaps Baghawi of Herat's sayings of the Prophet, which adjured one to think for oneself rather than conform to externals without question:

"One hour's teaching is better than a whole night of prayer."

"Trust in God, but tie your camel first."

"The ink of the learned is holier than the blood of the martyr."

"You ask me to curse unbelievers, but I was not sent to curse."

"I order you to help an oppressed person, whether they are Muslim or not."

"Women are the twin halves of men."

These were the values I grew up with.  This was the Islam I bought into. [1, pp. 11-12]

Men write books too, and I would slight the courage of none for that, but for the brassiest of the big balls, credit on occasion the nerve of some women.

Saira Shah's book, The Storyteller's Daughter, from which I have quoted for the above teaser, tells both the memories and the contemporary experience, including experience in the Taliban presence, of the progeny to a kind of a royalty and post-colonial dispossession.

Early on in her adventure in memoir, Shah asks "Does the Afghanistan of our myths really exist?  Are we still Afghans? And if Iam not an Afghan, what am I?"

While Shah finds evidence to support the family's mythos, her question posed in 2003, the year of her book's publication, remains cutting edge: if I am not Jewish, if you are not Christian, if he is not Lakota, or she not Sunni--and relate that back to a patch on the Big Blue Marble--what are we?

"Modern" would be my suggestion.

Should that feel vague or discomfitting--it would seem to be a recycling historical state of self-assessment--try "cosmopolitan".

Or that old Jewish, multi-monotheist. and way out of copyright standby puzzled about worldwide: "good."

Much of the world, this to the misfortune of the cosmopolitan, good, and modern Mister or Ms. of the World, hasn't the cultural or intellectual breadth granted either by affluence and education, mindful pluck and education, or public education (and educated discipline) associated with secular educations to shatter the suggestion of a limited and sharply drawn caricature of the self confined by its lack of access to new language metonymy and behavior. 

Worse, many who do have such access to foreign thought may hew nonetheless to the most chauvanist perception of their role among their own, denying the spirit of, say, the accumulation of several American pedigrees in education and returning straight to the comforts of a familiar hate or prejudice, a bent from which they may then seek to lead their more impressionable and less armored "street".

The movie Amelia Earhart has recently opened (to smaller than expected box office too), but as long as that pioneer's name, if not ghost, is in the air, one may suggest that in Shah and others, whom I will mention shortly, the spirit for flying beyond fixed horizons remains strong.  It is a good thing, for the times in Islam and all around its edges demand it--may the men among Islamic Moderns rise for a match.

We carry our myths--I like to say the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves--with us all our lives, but while they may inform our sensibilities, they are inevitably too packaged, small, and fixed to define them: inevitably, for better sometimes, for worse too often, we diverge.

I don't know how the next two-thirds of Saira Shah's book will be for cogent insight and vicarious experience, but I'm enjoying the writing and the spirit of courage, curiosity, and introspective inquiry evident in the voice.

In my library, The Storyteller's Daughter will have for company work by Sarah Chayes, a Pashto-speaking Jewish American woman who has entrepreneured in small manufacturing for the good of the economy serving Muslims south of Kabul; Anne Jones, an American on a post-Taliban story (still on it too); Azadeh Moaveni, now an Iranian Muslim reporting from London for Time magazine ; Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Muslim Somali liberated through Danish hospitality and living today a most secular and modern post-modern life among security guards in the west; and Nafisi Azar, an Iranian national whose combined literary, personal, and political experiences have made Baltimore a more suitable home for her spirit than Tehran under the current regime.

Cited Reference

1. Shah, Saira.  The Storyteller's Daughter.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.

Other Reference

Chayes, Sarah.  The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban.  New York: The Penguin Press, 2006.

Hirsi Ali, Ayaan.  Infidel.  New York: Free Press, Simon & Schuster, 2007.

Jones, Ann.  Web: http://www.annjonesonline.com/index.html

Jones, Ann.  Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan.  New York: Metropolitan Books (Henry Holt and Company), 2006.

Moaveni, Azadeh. Web: http://www.azadeh.info/

Moaveni, Azadeh.  Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran.  New York: Random House, 2009.

Nafisi, Azar.  Things I've Been Silent About.  New York: Random House, 2008.

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