Standing Up to Ahmadinejad

The most haunting image I came across at the anti-Ahmadinejad rally at Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza on Monday was also the most encouraging. A series of photographs depicted a young Iranian man being hanged by a regime that prefers to strangulate its victims with slow-rising construction cranes rather than allow the gravity of the gallows to break their necks quickly. In one still, the man has been fitted with the noose and he is smiling. The adjacent caption explains that this was the expression he chose to wear for his mother, present in the crowd of onlookers, moments before his own death.

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Nothing terrifies Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his clerical masters more than such outward displays of defiance and bravery by those trying to escape from under the jackboot of fascism.   I quit the scene in midtown Manhattan this afternoon thinking that no amount of street theater can ever rival what the man on the street in Tehran has accomplished, and what the 120,000 men, women and children who have been executed since 1979 have symbolized for their totalitarian murderers. “The clock is ticking,” said Rabbi Charles Klein to the 2,000 assembled souls of all denominations and none. He was referring to the regime’s imminent nuclear capability, but the metaphor might have just as easily applied to the mullahs’ own mutually assured destruction.

The rally was coordinated by the National Coalition to Stop Iran Now, an umbrella group consisting mainly of Jewish organizations and supporters of Israel. Black hats and yarmulkes abounded, but I was pleased to see that tribalism was nowhere on the agenda. National self-interest fused with selfless internationalism in a manner not usually seen at these types of assemblies. (To counterbalance the cliché picture of a burning U.S. flag should be the one I glimpsed of the Israeli flag intertwined with an Iranian one in a show of solidarity. Put that on Al-Jazeera.)

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The organizers may have invited ridicule for their inability to decide which of the two women candidates for high office they’d rather see in attendance but they were wise and decent to turn the mic over to those worried about Shiite fundamentalism not as a regional menace but as a domestic one.

The unbelievably stunning Nazanin Afshin-Jan, a former Miss World Canada, who really has used her mantle to promulgate world peace, recommend moral and diplomatic pressure, rather than military action, as the saner means of stopping the ayatollahs from becoming atomic. Surely Knesset Speaker Dalia Itzik, also present on stage, felt otherwise. It was that kind of rally.

Still, street theater has its drawbacks. I’m not sure whose idea it was to invite the post-pubescent Hebrew folk band to warm up the crowd, but given the serious business at hand, live music lent the affair a kitsch quality that old hands of the anti-Communist struggle – or reader of Milan Kundera – will have recognized at once. But don’t take my historical equivalence for it. Natan Sharansky, refusenik par excellence, and one of the headlining speakers, knew what he was doing when he spoke of the new “evil empire” that had to be stopped before it was too late. (The term empire, at least, no one can legitimately quibble over: Ahmadinejad invokes it longingly, always preceded by the term Islamic.) Elie Wiesel asked what books the Iranian president has read, offering a plural noun in lieu of the more obvious singular. But the Nobel laureate was more assertive in calling the squinty-eyed one, a former interrogator and executioner in the notorious Evin prison, a follower in Hitler’s footsteps, “an arch-criminal” who “one day will be apprehended.”

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The most interesting and instructive conversation I had was with a friendly Iranian-American called Ali Miahamdost. He is a representative of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, an outspoken opposition group with a global contingent and the ears of several sympathetic U.S. Congressmen. (Ali was the one holding the chilling photo series I mentioned earlier.)

He came to America in 1978, earned a graduate degree in urban planning, returned home after the revolution to make sure the Shah was good and gone, and then came back. Now he spends the bulk of his time trying to get our government to do one simple thing: remove his organization from our terrorist watch list.

What’s it doing on there?

The Clinton administration added it in the 90’s as a “goodwill gesture” to appease President Khatami, who implied he’d be willing to drop some of the Great Satan bluster if Washington would help him scandalize and demoralize the true democrats within his country. Yes, well, we’re well acquainted with the prices and vices of realist foreign policy, and it’s safe to say that this lame quid pro quo strategy is hostage to the pre-9/11 mindset. Those who think every politically conscious exile from the Middle East is another Ahmed Chalabi in waiting would do well to talk to Ali and his comrades.

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They’ve been clamoring for our attention for years.

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