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Jewish World Review March 18, 2002 / 5 Nisan, 5762
Michael Ledeen
Where's the press?
March 21st is the traditional Persian New Year, a Zoroastrian festival that long antedates the arrival of Shiism, and against
which the mullahs have been protesting ever since the Khomeini counterrevolution of 1979. It's a traditional Mediterranean
sort of celebration, revolving around fire, which is supposed to destroy the bad things of the past year. People dance around
fire, jump over fire, and use the fire to light firecrackers and other fireworks. This year, as luck would have it, New Year's
coincides with the Shia period of mourning, and therefore the country's Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Khamenei,
pronounced his learned opinion that there should be no New Year's celebration. This did not go down well with the public,
and the regime relented, permitting celebration of the New Year a week earlier, on the evening of the 12th of March.
The people took advantage of this permission to stage celebrations and demonstrations, which quickly turned into political
protest. As in the past, thousands of people chanted "Death to the Taliban in Kabul and Tehran," referring to the
fundamentalists in power in the Islamic Republic of Iran. The police and secret police responded with their now customary
brutality. In Tehran alone more than 1,600 were arrested, and 86 were injured and carried off to hospitals, 13 of whom are
in critical condition.
But something far more ominous occurred on Tuesday night: for the first time, anti-regime suicide bombers made their
appearance in Iran. Two young men in different parts of Tehran walked into a group of security forces and blew themselves
up.
Odd, isn't it, that you won't find this in our major media, when it was a headline story in the hardliner's press in Iran? And
odd, too, that no major publication deigned to cover the very tough speech delivered by the National Security Council's
Zalmay Khalilzhad to a banquet organized by pro-regime Iranian-Americans? Khalilzhad carefully and forcefully itemized
the evils of the Iranian regime to an audience that had hoped to hear calls for resumption of dialogue, as they had in the past
from the likes of the shameful appeaser Madeleine Albright. The only news coverage of the banquet referred to the
Democratic party's very own Sen. Joseph Biden, who apparently still thinks that Albright is in charge of American foreign
policy, and who had drooled out some friendly words and a vague invitation to "Iranian parliamentarians," in exchange for
$30,000 in campaign contributions.
If there's a real news editor left in this country, why don't you send a clear-eyed reporter to Iran to cover next Tuesday
night's events? And tell him not to accept any government handouts or crowd estimates,
03/05/02: We can't lose any more ground in Iran
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