Posted on 05/29/2006 5:09:15 AM PDT by nuconvert
Iranian students need solidarity
Jordan Michael Smith
May 29, 2006
Most political activity on campus consists of organizing and demonstrating against capitalism, the U.S., and student tuition. The latter is a noble cause, of benefit to both students and society at large.
Tuition should be within financial reach for anyone who is academically able to grasp it, and societies with the better-skilled and educated workforces dominate the international workplace.
At the same time though, students seem to feel they should bear no cost for being educated. No matter how low tuition is, they always want it be lower. Moreover, lowering tuition is the most self-interested of causes. Idealistic students say they want to give selflessly to a socialist paradise, but they recoil at the thought of having to paying even for their own education.
Counterproductive
But the first two causes -- rebelling against capitalism and against U.S. foreign policy -- are actually counter-productive, seeing as how the two most likely alternatives to this arrangement -- socialism and a muscular Chinese foreign policy -- would produce a world immeasurably less just, free and equal. That students manage to ignore this is a tribute to the never-ending seductiveness of youthful rebellion, no matter how illusory such rebellion may be.
Still, it is impossible not to admire student idealism and energy. Indeed, these qualities, when harnessed for good, have the power to change the world. Think of them helping to end the Vietnam War (a wise limitation of American power), furthering the Civil Rights movement, or sparking the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. In all these cases, students around the world acted in solidarity with their brethren internationally.
That's why it is so disappointing to see how little attention is being paid to the student movement in Iran. Since about 1997, students in Iran have been bravely fighting for their freedom.
Georgetown expert Mehrdad Mashayekhi calls student participation in reform candidate Mohammad Khatami's election process in early 1997 "the first meaningful sign of the student movement." Since then, thousands of students have been murdered by the ruling Islamist regime. Student leader Abdollah Momeni told Reuters two years ago that students "paid a heavy price for supporting Khatami, but in return they got nothing." That price was rivers of blood.
In early 1999, about 200 Tehran University students protested the closure of a left-Islamic daily publication, Salaam. In response, regime security forces attacked them, shooting and brutally beating them. Over 200 students were injured, and several were killed. (The exact number is unknown since the figures were never released). In other cities, particularly Tabriz, students were also ruthlessly suppressed.
In the following days, thousands of students confronted the system -- and actually raged against the machine. The six-day protest was only ended by the massive deployment of anti-riot cops. Even the Ayatollah Khamenei (the Islamic Supreme Leader) got involved. More than 1,500 students were arrested and jailed, some for years.
Nineteen ninety-seven was only the beginning of the student movement. Iran has such a young population, an entire generation has participated in it -- thousands of people, maybe millions, quite literally fighting for their liberty. And sometimes paying with their lives.
This movement should be what Western students are focused on. Not carrying unfunny signs comparing Bush to Hitler, or following around trade organizations like they're the Grateful Dead (to use one of Naomi Klein's unusually apt phrasings), gestures that reek of moral narcissism and matter only to the protesters themselves. The current Iranian regime, horrible as it is, has proved itself to be worried about its international popularity.
Think of what students living in freedom could accomplish for their kin in Iran, simply by holding up a bunch of signs. Millions of students across the liberal democracies, in Japan and in Sweden, in Australia and in South Africa, demanding that all student leaders be freed from the prisons they languish anonymously in.
It's almost enough to take your mind of a tuition freeze for a second.
He's absolutely right.
I'll be sending him feedback.
Here's his email address if you'd like to also.
"Smith is a graduate student in political science at Carleton University; his e-mail address is jordans75@hotmail.com"
Letters to the editor should be sent to feedback@ott.sunpub.com.
I don't expect a groundswell of support for the Iranian students at any US universities because to do so would be politically incorrect. After all every problem in the world is Bush's fault and besides there are so many "repressed and oppressed" minorities in the US like gays and the transgendered whose causes are so much more important than free speech. (sarcasm)
Believe it or not, there was a show of support at Harvard and a few other schools (mostly Ivy League) a couple months back, in the form of an "Iran Freedom Concert"......
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1596223/posts
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