Reading Jefferson in Tehran

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.

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.

Interesting reading. General Draza Mihailovich.

"Do what is right. Let the consequence follow."

41 posted on 07/22/2006 12:58:33 PM PDT by NicknamedBob (Mom said to call a spade a spade. Dad taught me what to call it when you trip over it in the shed.)

42 posted on 07/22/2006 1:06:32 PM PDT by AdvisorB (For a terrorist bodycount in hamistan, let the smoke clear then count the ears and divide by 2.)

Now that's the real gang of 4. One only wishes the Chicoms had the ability to arrest this gang of dirtbags, as it did it's gang of 4 Maoists.

Thanks for the post and the pic.

43 posted on 07/22/2006 7:25:57 PM PDT by AdvisorB (For a terrorist bodycount in hamistan, let the smoke clear then count the ears and divide by 2.)

I believe that the Shah you are ranting about is the founder of the late Pahlavi dynasty. The British gave him the boot in 1941. His son Reza Pahlavi is the Shah that died in 1979.
Compared to Saddam Hussein, Assad of Syria the Shah (the alst one!) wasn't much of a dictator. In fact he was no more oppressive then Mubarak & some of our other MidEast friends.
The Shah couldn't decide whether to be a standard MidEast dictator or a liberal. He tried to be both and ended up being looking weak & contemptible.

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.