The "Islamist" Montazeri

If you pay much attention to the news, you would know that Grand Ayatollah Hoseyn Ali Montazeri passed away on Sunday. As an outspoken critic of the Khamenei regime and the dubious re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Montazeri had been getting a lot of favourable coverage from Western news outlets.

What's interesting is that no story that I have read or heard on the subject in print, online, or radio journalism has ever referred to Montazeri as an "Islamist." This is odd, given that Montazeri was himself one of the architects of the Islamic Revolution and very much one of Khomeini's fellow travellers. If Khomeini was the archetypal Islamist, then why not Montazeri?

The answer is that this week, we like Montazeri, and so he cannot, therefore, be an Islamist, no matter how religiously-motivated his political activism was.

Did the Pasdaran kill Michael Jackson?

Since the disputed Iranian election on June 12th, every major English and French news network available in Canada has been dominated by the story, with hourly, if not quarter-hourly updates on the protests and the government's responses.

If you've been wondering why I haven't weighed in on the subject (and I assume that you have been wondering exactly that), it's partly because I have little to say that isn't already being said. That fantastic British journalist Robert Fisk has been in Iran, and I recommend his columns in the Independent for some analysis that cuts through the jungle of Twitters and the forest of TV news coverage.

Thursday night, however, something happened that pushed the Iranian story from the main headline to the second or third story on the news - Michael Jackson had died. Ever since, it's all that English broadcasters seem interested in (although, as usual, French media seem to offer just a bit more depth).

Rather convenient for the Iranians, eh? In fact, suspiciously convenient . . .

Seriously speaking, it really says something about our culture, when an ongoing crisis with profound implications for the geopolitics of the Middle East and the fates of millions of people is displaced in our consciousness by a man who was famous for singing some catchy tunes, dressing up in funny clothes, building a small theme park, molesting some children, and having a heart attack at the age of 50.

Stupid, stupid, stupid

Well, it looks like the Iranians, along with Hamas, are sending their sympathies to Sudanese president Omar El-Bashir, whose arrest warrant was issued earlier this year, following his indictment in July 2008.

This is a stupid, stupid, stupid move. Iran, a country rich with its own oil wealth, with no need for standing amongst the Arabs, and no reason to spite the ICC (and plenty of reasons to cheer for it), is behaving in an unfathomably stupid manner. Hamas, whose power is confined to the beaten and bloodied Gaza strip, has nothing to gain from relations with El-Bashir's government either, besides a bad reputation.

If El-Bashir had really done nothing wrong, his response to the ICC arrest warrant should have been simple: Send a representative to the ICC, and plead innocent, while keeping himself as far away from the Hague as possible. If the court refused to hear the case in the presence of his surrogate, the situation would have been defused, and he could have blamed the court for the failure of the process. If he were found guilty, he still could have stayed away. If he were acquitted, he could trumpet his victory.

In this last case, the cause of a functioning system of public international law, with an enforcement mechanism, would also have been served as the fairness of the process, having reached its first acquittal, would have been proven.

Unfortunately, El-Bashir is not concerned about a functioning system of public international law, except in the very limited sense that he himself is, almost without a doubt, a war criminal, if not for Darfur, then for the civil war in southern Sudan.

It is sad that any other international actor would even consider taking his side.

Captives

In 2003, Newsweek published this story, full of mistakes and/or lies.

Today, Aafia Siddiqui has been confirmed to be in American custody, and may have spent the last 5 years as the mysterious and mentally disturbed "Grey Lady of Bagram." The whereabouts of her 3 children, who disappeared on the same day as her, are still unknown.

Some actual journalism (consisting of more than taking dictation from government officials) was done by Katherine Osment of Boston Magazine.

What happened to Aafia Siddiqui and her children that day is anyone's guess. Siddiqui's mother, Ismet, claims that a few days after Siddiqui's disappearance, a man on a motorcycle arrived at her house in a leather suit and helmet and told her Aafia was being held and that she should keep quiet if she ever wanted to see her daughter and grandchildren again.

A report in the Pakistani Urdu press said that Siddiqui and her kids had been seen being picked up by Pakistani authorities and taken into custody. Even a spokesman for Pakistan's interior ministry and two unnamed U.S. officials confirmed this in the press. Several days later, however, Pakistani and American officials mysteriously backtracked, saying it was unlikely that Siddiqui was in custody.

Today she stands accused of shooting a US soldier with his own gun, having miraculously reappeared in Afghanistan.

The lies are maddening.

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On another note, I came across this from a friend who is currently attending the 17th International AIDS conference in Mexico City.

http://www.iranfreethedocs.org/

Since I am unfamiliar with the background, I cannot vouch for the content or the claims being made, except to say that I agree with this statement:

"The Iranian government must demonstrate that the current allegations are credible and ensure that the Alei brothers have access to legal counsel,” said Joe Amon, Director of the Health and Human Rights division at Human Rights Watch. “And they must recognize that these charges stifle the country’s efforts to effectively address AIDS and to serve as a model for the region."

. . . and that HRW (who have yet to steer me wrong) have also issued a statement to similar effect. For whatever good it might do, I signed the petition (and encourage you to consider it).

If you are the praying sort, please remember Dr. Siddiqui and the Alei brothers in your heart.

Bloody Hands

A few days ago someone sent me an e-mail about the sins of the Iranian government. The text of it, forwarded from a well-known "progressive" Muslim activist read:

To all those who are fascinated by the so-called anti-imperialist nature of the Iranian regime, here is evidence of its cold-hearted brutal nature as it conducts public hangings of four young Baloch men in a city square inside Iranian Balochistan.

I won't link to the video here - if you are desperate to see something like that, it is on YouTube under the name "Baloch." The video, under 4 minutes long, shows 5 Balochi men standing with nooses around their necks, standing atop barrels and boxes behind a line of police cars parked at an intersection. Soldiers and policemen surround them, and large crowds can be heard in the background. Whatever they have been accused of, a section of the crowd either believes in their innocence, or is not ashamed of the crime.

As the men in charge are checking the ropes, the man in the middle, a well-built, middle-aged man with a beard, whose hands are tied behind his back, speaks to the crowd, who are being held at a distance by a line of soldiers and police. The men in charge do nothing to stop him. A few seconds pass and the camera, probably a cell phone, shakes around a bit. I have struggled with the most respectful but realistic way to describe what happens next, or whether to describe it at all. In the end, the men are killed.

I have said before here that I am not against the death penalty in principle, although the practical likelihood that it will be misapplied is a grave danger when a punishment is so irreversible. Not everyone killed, either officially or unofficially, by the Iranian government since 1979 may have been innocent, but if HRW, Amnesty International, and the Iranian Human Rights Documentation Centre, are to be believed, people have been killed who did not commit a heinous crime.

No one is claiming that the Iranian government is particularly saintly. Proponents of the revolution pointed to the Shah's awful human rights record as well, but its hard to say that the people who have been in charge since then have been objectively better; they may indeed be worse, and they have in the meantime associated some of the brutality with the name of Islam.

The problem in our world today, as it has been since the dawn of recorded history, is that lots of people with power are murderers. Because they don't hurt the people close to them, we don't label them as psychopaths, but their ability to abide and abet cruelty without remorse is nevertheless astounding. We live in a world where half of the heads of state seem to have blood on their hands, and the ones who don't all have friendly relationships with ones who do. It would be great if we could find a neat line to draw a line somewhere on the globe and say "Good leaders over here, bad leaders over there." That is not reality.

What to do, though, when one group of psychopaths attempts paint another as the common enemy? If the United States and her remaining allies are going embark on a crusade against Iran, then let's be clear that it has nothing to do with concern for "human rights." And if some of us are booing as the drums of war beat, it isn't because we're fans of Ayatollah Khamenei. When two psychopaths go to war, and in doing so, send a lot of comparatively innocent people to their deaths, there isn't going to be a good side and a bad side. There just might be, however, one that started it.