The situation with the protests over the election results in Iran have been fascinating. And captivating. Not necessarily in a good way, but like car crash, you can’t look way. And you’re hopeful that things will turn out okay.
I work with a Persian woman. A few days ago, re: the situation in her home country, she asked me, “Doesn’t this shock you?”
I said, “No. I’m from California.”
from here.
“It is up to Iranians to make decisions about who Iran’s leaders will be. We respect Iranian sovereignty and want to avoid the United States being the issue inside of Iran, which sometimes – the United States can be a handy political football, or discussions witht he United States [can be]. Having said all that, I am deeply toubled by the violence I have seen on television. I think that the democratic process, free speech, the ability of people to peacefully dissent, all of those are universal values, and need to be respected. And whenever I see violence perpetrated on people who are peacefully dissenting, and whenever the American people see that, they are rightfully troubled.”
-President Obama, with some real talk. People are criticizing him for not getting more involved, but he’s got a hell of a point.
One of the green party supporters of Mir Hossen Mousavi helping an injured Iranian police officer out of danger during the escalated violence of the riots.
I saw this floating around on tumblr yesterday:
Change your twitter settings t say you are in the Tehran timezone, and chng your location to Tehran.
Iranian censor are filtering by these settings to find dissidents, by doing this you can make things bit more difficult for them.
Some further reading:
State Dept. to Twitter: keep site up in Iran.
Observing social unrest online at 32,000 feet.
Andrew Sullivan over at The Atlantic.
Revolutionary guards arrested in Iran.
An amazing collection of photos from the riots on flickr and from here.
The candidates in this past election:
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (top left), the current president who claimed victory in the recent election, though many people believe that the challenger, former prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi, is the actual winner with Ahmadinejad actually coming in third. The sad thing is: It probably doesn’t matter since, despite what the people want, the Ayatollah is going to decide everything.
One of the people who feel that Ahmadinejad lost was Persepolis author Marjane Satrapi. And here’s an interesting picture:
How does your vote count go down as the votes being counted?
The saddest part is that our best, our most realisic hope, is that the violence stops soon and that people aren’t hurt too bad by whatever comes from the outcome. A massive regime change in Iran? Not likely.
Reading the latest updates on the protests yesterday, my co-worker held back tears and mentioned that she has a sister living in Iran, and that while she knows that her sister is currently safe and is avoiding this danger at all costs, she’s still understandably terrified for her.
Then she got a phone call from her family: the son of a friend of a friend of the family had been killed in one of the protests in Tehran. She didn’t know him, but the connection had just gotten that much more serious to her, housed even deeper inside her. Her homeland, her family, even people she had only heard of before. Everything was connected in this.
After a while of not saying anything, she finally said, “but maybe some good will come of this.”
I asked her what she meant and she told me that of course she didn’t want anyone to die, or to suffer, like people were doing now, but she didn’t want people to be in this situation again. You never want to have to need a revolution, but maybe some good will come out of it. I don’t want to use a cliche about breaking a few eggs to make an omelette, so I’ll leave it at something even simpler and perhaps more cliched: It’s never wrong to hope for a better tomorrow.
Dear Iranians:
The Ayatollah controls your country, not the President. Sound and fury, kids.
–Benji
And they know that. I get the impression that there’s a majority in the country that, as appalled as they may be by the violence, they’re secretly hoping it’ll turn into a serious revolution that will shake up everything and take them away from the theocracy.
They’re just pissed & fed up. This very country was born out of a war.
At the twitter conference today, some of the ethics about changing your location to Tehran were discussed; how it makes people who’s stories need to be heard harder to find.
I think there’s a little too much of a feeling in the well-to-do tech community (i.e. the kids on tumblr, for the most part) that they’re in this with the Iranians on the ground, that they’re fighting good fight alongside them. And that couldn’t be farther from the truth. They’re spectators, pure and simple. They want to help out, which is really great, and they have convinced themselves that they are by doing something as asinine as changing their location on Twitter to Tehran, but howz about instead they just send off a donation to an organization offering actual aid to the people on the stomping boots? No, that won’t happen. Instead, we all sit back and we analyze and we make snide comments and talk about whether or not HuffPo or the Atlantic is offering better commentary on the whole situation.
I’m thinking that if I ever do a post on hidden indicators of bad political taste, Avid Reading of HuffPo is going on the list.
That twitter bit is the most retarded thing I’ve ever heard. Makes me hate the internets.
It’s a show of solidarity. Maybe it’s “a
sinine” and pointless, but it shows them were listening and that they have allies. Kind of like this post.
Wow…I am from Iraq so I know how they feel…