This led to this:
Which inexorably led to this:
Posted on 07/22/2006 6:10:48 AM PDT by Clive
Shirin Ebadi's valiant struggle to obtain justice for her clients in grossly unfair Iranian courts won her the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize. She's proud that she's stayed behind in her country to fight the theocratic dictators while so many others have emigrated.
Even so, she admits that in a small way she's responsible for the Islamic Republican government that has afflicted her country since 1979. She's watched the mullahs and their friends arbitrarily execute, for political purposes, thousands of innocent citizens. (One was her brother-in-law.) This week, she must know that the Lebanon-Israel war was incited by Iran's surrogate, Hezbollah.
And she can't escape her share of the guilt. Her melancholy story might be called The Bitter Lesson of a Revolutionist: Be careful what you wish for.
In the 1970s she rightly disliked the shah, Reza Pahlavi, and favoured overthrowing him. When the Ayatollah Khomeini took power, Ebadi cheered from her rooftop, literally: Following his instructions, she and her neighbours went to the tops of their apartment buildings at nine every night and screamed "God is greatest" until they were hoarse.
"What was I thinking of?" is one of many painful sentences in Ebadi's poignant and absorbing book, Iran Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope, written with a talented journalist named Azadeh Moaven. Ebadi wasn't ignorant. She knew about the terror that followed the French and Russian revolutions. She just couldn't imagine anything like that happening in Iran. She was a minor player in the Iranian revolution and, she believed, understood it.
"What idiots we were," she writes now.
She still believes in a just future for Iranians, she doesn't want the U.S. to enforce regime change and she has enough spirit to keep fighting cases in court, even when the chances of justice are slim. (Her clients include the family of Zahra Kazemi, the Iranian-Canadian journalist killed in custody.)
Ebadi has been briefly jailed, often insulted, sometimes threatened with death. After the government admitted that perhaps a rogue death squad existed within the intelligence department, she and other lawyers were allowed to read the dossier. There she came upon a sentence to chill the blood: "The next person to be killed is Shirin Ebadi."
In that document, her would-be assassin was asking cabinet permission to murder her. She went home, stood in the shower for an hour, had dinner with her family, and then, with her daughters in bed, finally said to her husband, "So, something interesting happened to me at work today."
The Nobel hasn't helped her. It embarrassed the authorities, so they have made three attempts to build a criminal case against her. This spring they tried to prove she had taken money from the Americans to help a jailed journalist.
Some Iranian exiles refuse to forgive her earlier mistakes. A pro-shah party still exists, and when Ebadi spoke in Los Angeles in 2004, angry royalists shouted that she was an agent of the mullahs. Ejected from the hall, they waited outside to tell anyone who would listen about their contempt for her.
They had a point. The shah, one of Washington's more obnoxious puppets, maintained a notorious army of brutal secret police while wasting public money on self-glorification; he celebrated 2,500 years of imperial Persia with a party for 25,000 that cost US$300-million and involved tents with marble bathrooms in the ruins of Persepolis. Still, he looks like Thomas Jefferson beside his successors. He gave women the vote in 1963, over the vehement opposition of the mullahs. Ebadi writes, "I did not consciously credit the shah with running an Iran in which I could be a judge, in the same way that ... I did not imagine Ayatollah Khomeini heralding an Iran in which I could not."
Within a month after the revolution, she realized that she had eagerly participated in the destruction of her career and her freedom. "I was a woman, and this revolution's victory demanded my defeat." She was a much-admired judge, but her position began eroding as soon as Khomeini took over. First, her supervisor told her she had to wear a head scarf. Not long after, she learned that the Islamic Republic considered the mere idea of a woman judge outlandish, intolerable and possibly immoral. She was reduced to clerk.
Eventually she retired and became a heroically independent lawyer. Perhaps someday, after much hard work by people like Ebadi, Iranian society will be as free as it was when she and her friends set out to improve it.
-
This led to this:
Which inexorably led to this:
Her misguided support for the Ayatollah can perhaps be better forgiven by considering the fact that millions in this country were similarly behind James Earl Carter.
The path to mature wisdom often travels through the folly of youth.
From themiddleeastnow.com website:
Iran's axis with the Third Reich began during the prewar years, when it welcomed Nazi Gestapo agents and other operatives to Tehran, allowing them to use the city as a base for Middle East agitation against the British and the region's Jews.
So intense was the shah's identification with the Third Reich that in 1935 he renamed his ancient country "Iran," which in Farsi means Aryan and refers to the Proto-Indo-European lineage that Nazi racial theorists and Persian ethnologists cherished. End quote.
Iran/Persia was rotten from day one--sorry, but the Shah was as homicidal as any Persian Dictator before or after--plus he was a Nazi and was filled, as were the leading intellectuals of the day with Jew hatred on the one hand, and fawning admiration for Hitler on the other.
If Iran is utterly devastated by War with Israel and the West it will be a long overdue righteous judgment on an evil, sick society.
That's true enought but my question to you is would it be better to have the Shah's regime in power or the spawn of the satanic Khomeini?
Not the same shah. The Allies deposed Reza Shah in 1941 and replaced him with his more cooperative son, Mohammer Reza Pahlavi, who reigned until 1979.
Ok, so she was on a death squad list, "realizes" that the revolution completely destroyed her right to be treated like a human being, and yet she feels this way.
I personally think she just doesn't get it.
Good point, BUT, the shah might have been a bastard but he was our bastard.
Jimmy Carter's inability to understand "real politics" and innate cowardice made matters much worse and gave us this World War III.
So instead of.... "the Shah who was as homicidal as any Persian Dictator before or after--plus he was a Nazi and was filled, as were the leading intellectuals of the day with Jew hatred "
...we now have Mr.Amadinnerjacket who is ...as homicidal as any Persian Dictator but with a nuke and a few million crazies...
Which begs the question: Do we leave him alone or do we take him out???
It really doesn't matter now does it? It is a what if Kennedy had not been assassinated parlor discussion.
I will say that it is apparent that "secular" Baath Socialist ruled Syria is in this up to their neck. I suspect the Peacock Throne would have evolved in the same direction. They all take your money (foreign aid) they stab you in the back at the UN, and eventually, they fund and/or direct terror, employing their resources either in your face or or covertly, utilizing plausible deniability (when they fear consequences).
This is Islam and the Shah merely was a secularist Nazi rahter than an Islamo-Nazi. There is no exception to the rule. Egypt and Jordan take the money, stab the back of the donor, and then use the funds to militarily and politically back the utter destruction of Israel and the defeat of the West. Only out of fear do they occasionally more or less pretend not to be so motivated as their actions clearly prove. Which is not difficult because our media refuses to accuse them by re-printing their state run media which is thoroughly anti-Israeli and anti-West and consistently, virulently anti-US.
The only sources provided to Americans in the MSM of Islamic "journalism" are the islamic authored articles and sources that pay lip service to some blandly moderate impulse as in, well Hezbollah is adventurous--not consulting with the community--acting on its own--HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
Take that Iran!!! Take that Syria!!! While the Arab street dances and cheers for every dead Irraeli.
We will either devastate Islam or Islam will devastate us. All else is parlor talk.
This is a good book with lots of good information about the Pahlavi dynasty. ReignOfTerror is correct, anti-mahdi was referring to Reza Shah who was an Iranian military officer created by the Brits in order to stop bolshevik penetration into Iran in the early 1920's.
Reza Shah renamed Persia to the current Iran because he said that Persia was a name given to his country by the Greeks.
Muhammed Reza Shah, the son of Reza Shah was no boyscout, but he was a staunch supporter of America. When the Arabs embargoed oil to the West in the 1970's because of Israel, the Shah kept the oil flowing to the West. When the bumbling carter greased the skids for the Shah, America lost a stalwart ally in this unstable area. As a matter of fact, Israel would not have to be doing what it has to do in South Lebanon, if the leftist American government would have stood behind the Shah in his moment of need.
We will either devastate Islam or Islam will devastate us.
We will either devastate Islam or Islam will devastate us.
We will either devastate Islam or Islam will devastate us.
We will either devastate Islam or Islam will devastate us.
Indeed!!! Now track the White Revolution the son imposed in an attempt to modernize Iran.
He even used the tried and true, five year plan soviet style central planning; re-locations of villagers, state funded (still in existence) and owned industries, giant and mostly useless state projects.
The Shah was a despot. He was our despot, but he still was as unreliable an ally over the long term as any despot can be. Once he was gone another rose to take his place.
This is why Islamo-Nazism (national socialism imposed in a dictatorship in an Islamic country is indistinguishable in effect from the Islamic paradise of the Ayatollah. The people at the top own everything, the villagers and the bazaars cower in fear and uncertainty.
The Supreme Council of Iran contains the richest mullahs you will likely find anywhere. They own and run everything.
This last fact is the only restraint they may have to delay the descent into the Abyss they are looking into (the mullahs). It is nice to be rich and own everythng. It is not nice to be devastated and reduced to garbage dump gleaning because you went to war with the wrong people.
"It really doesn't matter now does it?"
It doesn't matter for America whether it's the fanatical shia clergy running Iran or a nationalist pro-American Pahlavi regime! That's absurd and utterly ridiculous on its face.
That was a biased little piece
Don't be confused by the different shah's being discussed
The newbie seems to be a 'destroy the entire country of Iran" proponent.
America should step up it's support for the anti-clerical forces in Iran, and constantly paint the shia entity as a shia version of the taliban. However, if the "negotiations" over Iran's quest for nuclear weapons fail, we have no choice but to take out the Iranian nuclear sights.
This "newbie" spent twenty years as a naval intelligence officer and from 1988 until retirement from the US Navy worked counter and anti-terrorism in many assignments, followed by a career in the operations directorate of DIA retiring in 2005. Upon retirement, this newbie spent a year tour in Afghanistan (third tour in country) as a private security director through 2006.
I have been home now for several months and will discuss any aspect of Islam to include every sect, terror groups, methodology, ideology, and cultural-political realities of the Worldwide Islamic community.
One fact I may offer is that while an agnostic or back-slidden Jew or Christian is just one "sale" away from a commitment to the faith by an earnest proselytizer of the faith. Once the sale is made the newly minted believer will become a person more engaged in charity, striving for patience, immersed in prayer for others, forgiveness of those who offend, introspection, and earnest effort to become guided in all things by principles of love and humility.
Good muslims are, by definition, in every authorized Islamic text you may examine, Quran, Hadith, Sunnah, or school of Isalmic Jurisprudence, exhorted to aggressively seek out and target the unbeliever and backslidden, to murder, rape, and conquer same in the furtherance of a violent, corrosive, and undeniably evil death cult.
Bad muslims--the agnostic, the backslidden, are just one sale away from joining the good muslims in murder and mayhem. The ones who resist are targeted for death by their "good" co-religionists.
Other than my background, I remain humbly a newbie.
BTW in the course of my professional life I employed and directed many muslims and depended on them in many instances to watch my back and to faithfully discharge their duties.
The death of one human is regrettable and tragic. War kills people and breaks things beyond repair.
In a war I must choose between my people dying or the enemy dying. In this war they made the rules, (there are no rules) they started the war, they are commited to destroy our civilization and imlement their own on our ashes. We need to finish it before they finish us.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.