Upon reaching Hell too, doubtless, Jimmy & his buddy Fidel won't be lonely.
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.
Upon reaching Hell too, doubtless, Jimmy & his buddy Fidel won't be lonely.
No doubt. One common thread during the Cold War was the US's whole-hearted support for authoritarian rulers for fear that anything less would drive them into the arms of the Soviets.
The best-case scenario would have been for the US to pressure the Shah into reform, to engineer a soft landing in the form of a constitutional monarchy. Was that a realistic goal? I don't know, and it's too easy to play Monday-Morning quarterback. But I've seen little evidence that it was seriously attempted.
This leads me to the military response doctrine that if we have to move militarily against Iran, that we should announce loud and clear that our intent will be to utterly destroy everything that they hold most dear! This would include palaces, airports, modern weapons factories and facilities, mosques, and all the appertenances of wealth and fine living.
Appalling and unusual as this may be to consider, think of what it would mean to the ruling elite. They would have no sanctuary, and no future regardless of the outcome. The average citizen would be little affected by such a cropping.
It would also allow us to be able to work to our strength, simply working down a target list. Ground occupation forces would be the last resort. Essentially, it would be a matter of instituting regime change either with or without internal forces.
I agree. What is happening now has little to do with the fate of the Shah, our complicity in his exile, or what may have been done differently. At the time I was horrified at Carter's actions in Iran, Panama, Rhodesia and South Africa. Carter and Clinton are hands down my favorite nominees for traitor of the century in both the 20th and the 21st.
This leads me to the military response doctrine that if we have to move militarily against Iran, that we should announce loud and clear that our intent will be to utterly destroy everything that they hold most dear! This would include palaces, airports, modern weapons factories and facilities, mosques, and all the appertenances of wealth and fine living.
Spot on. Thinking clearly and appreciating the mind-set of your enemies.
And then they are taught from birth to blame the Jews for their poor position.
<< 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. >>
Thank you. [The Truth will out]
Thank you for your service - welcome to FR!
Blessings - Brian
(A Keeper ping)
What does this have to do with Jefferson?
What a stupid headline.
Interesting. I never knew about the WWII history of Iran. Are you Persian?
Thanks for the info. Disregard the previous question, and welcome to FR!
While your military srvice is commendable,(and I thank you) your kill all muslims attitude, destroy the country of Iran attitude, and all muslims are ignorant attitude, are not.
Your comments have been over the top.
"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."
Then you should know better than to make the all inclusive comments you have made.
Your pictorial timeline is off to a good start.
I'd like to see more of it. Do you mind if I reproduce it and place it on my office door?
What if it had said, "Reading 'Lolita' in Tehran?" Would you have been more likely to have read it?
I would.
"Eyeless in Gaza," on the other hand ...
I appreciate your point of view--there were many Germans and Japanese, I am sure, who were horrified by the actions of their government. They paid dearly for a war they may have objected to.
Our WWII stance was total war until total victory and unconditional surrender followed by an unprecedented act of forgiveness and charity as America rebuilt the devastated nations.
I leave it to others to characterize whether what we did to win WWII was justified and leave my judgment simple: It worked and it provided a longer lasting peace than the armistice of 1918 and subsequent Versaille "peace" treaty.
BTW I have met some Muslims who do not openly hate us. They all however, do hate Jews and are quite vocal in saying so. I have worked cheek to jowl with literally hundreds of Muslims. I have grown fond of and relied on friendship with individual Muslims who looked to me for friendship and assistance in return. Tragically, in a war we will eventually wage with them, a war they may or may not support, they will suffer consequences along with the others who wish to kill us.
In the Civil War in America brother fought brother and both sides lost lives. The war ended slavery.
This war will end nothing if it is waged to the end of achieving a "cease-fire". The carnage will continue, this is unquestionable as the carnage has been non-stop since (and even before) 1948 as the Jews struggled for their exostence in Tel Aviv, Haifa and in Jerusalem. It did not stop after ceasefires imposed by the west and land giveaways extorted from Israel in return for "peace" in 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, 2000, 2003, 2005 (unilateral withdrawal from Gaza).
To borrow and paraphrase from Winston Churchill, the Muslim is either at your throat or groveling at your feet. I prefer the latter endstate--have seen enough death caused by the former.
Thanks for being civil...
I agree, Carter was our worst president in recent memory. But the world loved this appeaser and gave him the Nobel Peace price. Which to me says, the world categorizes the state of appeasement and weakness of the West as "peace".
I am all for taking the fight to the enemy. I wish we'd been tougher all along in Iraq. A WWII attitude when fighting is fine with me, though targeting civilians is not acceptable. (collateral damage is unavoidable, I know)
The majority of Iranians want freedom and an end to their oppressive regime, and what we need to end up with in Iran, is an ally, not an enemy. Calling for the destruction of the country is not only unnecessary, and inhumane, it's stupid. Bombing the crap out of their country isn't going to make them an ally.
Helping them get rid of their murdering regime, will.
That's where all our efforts need to be.
bttt
eW pretty much agree then? When the target is a refinery, or an airport, or a power station or a television station, or a government minstry, or government offices in general, or factories, or bridges, or dams, civilians will die.
But the target was the infrastructure. The rest is collateral damage.
Love your taglin, and by all means, have at it!
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