Check out this tasty nugget from Google Video created by former FOR peace delegate and civilian diplomat and filmmaker Margot Smith, Videomaker www.offcentervideo.com. OffCenterVideo@aol.com

An excellent idea of what the trip is like and what the mission is all about.

it is called Listen to Iran’s People: A Call for Peace

Dear friends,
Below you will find a recording of Alicia, Lily and Lynn on KCLU Crosstalk. We had two call in listeners, one of whom just returned from Iran, and another who had been part of civilian diplomacy to the USSR. It was great.
KCLU “Crosstalk” Link
Here is a recording of our interview: http://www.aliciacattoni.com/kclu.mp3

Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb

Hi New York friends!
I’m sending you all an email to a few of my New York friends because many of you were sponsors of my peace delegation trip to Iran last month and/or were awesome email/phone supporters. So I wanted to let you know the details of the official presentation I will be giving about it here in NYC.

The last two months have indeed been insane with almost more work post-trip than the trip itself. A lot of interviews and articles and yes even the obligatory appearance on Muslim TV — (which was quite “candid cameraish I must say).

My official presentation about the trip in New York City will be this coming Sunday. I pasted the details below for you in case you have the time to come – and are interested in this subject. It was quite the experience and we learned a lot. More than anything, we were brought there specifically by the Iranian government to bring back a message to the American people…

So that is why we do these interviews and presentations. It isn’t necessarily a “perfect message.” But it is a real message – as opposed to what we hear on the news here in the States… which is just ‘the White House said…” So, that will be the aim of the presentation. To show some pictures, tell some stories, and answer as many questions as possible about the subject.

Read the rest of this entry »

Responding to a question about the legal status of the Bahaiis,
Ayatollah Hassan-Ali Montazeri, the deposed heir apparent of the late
Ayatollah Khomeini, has issued a historical fatwa which may prove to be
the most important statement in support of the Bahaiis thus far. The man
who established his career by his anti-Bahaii struggles before the 1979
revolution wrote: “The Bahaii sect does not have a revealed book like the
followers of Judaism, Christianity, or Zoroastrianism, and are not
considered a religious minority in the Constitution; but because they are
the residents of this country, they have territorial rights, and benefit
from the rights of citizenship, and they should benefit from the Islamic
gentleness which is so much emphasized by the Quran and our religious
leaders.”

This is the most favorable fatwa on Bahaiis. Lebanon’s Ayatollah Mohammad
Hussein Fadllollah also has issued a sympathetic fatwa. Two other fatwas
by the late Ayatollahs Broujerdi and Golapyegani just prevented Muslims
from mingling with the Bahaiis, although Broujerdi advised against hurting
them.

Ayatollah Montazeri’s fatwa is a watershed because it establishes a new
source of legitimacy for the religious minorities and those out of Islam:
territorial right. Considering that Iran acknowledges blood ties only as
the basis for nationality, to say that Bahaiis need to be protected by the
government because of their territoriality right is a landmark edict.
Moreover, it is quite a new approach in Shi’ite fight to recognize the
right of a group outside religious conviction.

To introduce the concept of citizenship as a new source of legitimacy is a
major step taken by a prominent Shi’ite leader. One may argue that this
is just the confirmation of the rights of “dhemmi” infidels. However,
Ayatollah Montazeri does not mention the rights of dhemmis in his fatwa,
rather, Bahaiis’ rights as citizens. This edict could potentially become a
new source of legitimacy for free thinking and secular Muslims, and
replacement of fate based rights with human rights.

Rasool Nafisi

by Charley Reese

President George Bush and his tag-along buddy John McCain are repeating almost word for word about Iran the pattern of lies and threats they used to justify the war against Iraq.

Our intelligence agencies have said that Iran gave up the pursuit of a nuclear weapon three years ago. President Bush makes speeches as if he’s never heard of any intelligence agencies. That’s what worries me about President Bush. His words very often defy and contradict reality.

Recently, he almost repeated word for word a theme he often used in the buildup to the Iraq aggression. It was, he said, unthinkable to allow “the most dangerous regime to acquire the most dangerous weapons.” This guy might actually launch an attack on Iran before his term expires. If he does, you can kiss the world economy goodbye. You don’t like $4-a-gallon gas? How about $10 a gallon?

In the first place, Iran is far from the most dangerous regime in the world. I would say it is not dangerous at all, so far as the United States is concerned. Except for idiots, sane people assess threats based on capability, not on political rhetoric, intentions or imagination. Read the rest of this entry »

Rabbi Lynn’s Trail Guide To Jewish Nonviolence

Wednesday, May 28, 7:30 pm

JCC of the East Bay, 1414 Walnut Street in Berkeley

$10-$20 sliding scale, to benefit the Aquarian Minyan

by Mark Hare • May 20, 2008 Originally published in the Democrat Chronicle, Rochester, New York

When Hillary Clinton suggested recently that, were she president, an attack on Israel by Iran would result in the “total obliteration” of Iran, some recent visitors to that country cringed. As they did when President George W. Bush likened talking to Iran or Hamas with “appeasement.” Lynda Howland, Tom Moore and Judy Bello have all visited Iran within the last year — Howland, in March — under the auspices of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, one of the country’s oldest peace groups. “A lot of the American public sees Iran as primitive, terrorist and uncivilized,” says Howland, of Pittsford. But that’s not what visitors find in Iran, she says. Iranians are increasingly well-educated, respectful and eager to speak to Americans, she says. She showed me a photo of some soldiers smiling and flashing a peace sign when they learned the group in front of them were Americans. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the most popular videos about Iran floating around YouTube and the internet for years. Insightful, informative, and sometimes surprising.

Some Famous Iranians you might know

 

 

Check out this very cool new video by Agit Pop and funded by the Lee & Gund Foundation. It is now available on YouTube. Please feel free to use and circulate for any organizing and outreach efforts.

by Samaneh Maddah | Tehran | 15 May 2008

Turning away from the TV screen, nine-year-old Alireza makes a grave pronouncement, “We shouldn’t let the Americans kill us like they kill the Iraqis.”

Alireza has been watching old footage of the moment a group of British sailors was released last year, following their detention by Iranian border guards. He cannot tell the difference between British and Americans, but the fair complexion of the faces he sees gives him reason enough to understand they are the enemy. Yet Alireza’s world view has been formed less by images of this kind than by the latest western cartoons, which he watches on his favourite kids’ channel, MBC 3, available via the illicit satellite dish owned by his family.

He finds it hard to reconcile what he watches on the satellite channels with the knowledge that this kind of thing is disapproved of and even discouraged by the school he goes to.

His mother is one of the many Iranian parents who find it hard to explain to their young children how to reconciles these clashing views of the world.

The gulf between what is taught at school – overtly and implicitly – and what people practice at home, away from prying eyes, is a difficult one to navigate for many adults, let alone children.

Alireza has come to understand that there are some things about school that you just have to take at face value. The message he gets at home is, “You’re too young to understand”, and “When you grow up, you’ll find out for yourself.”

A foreigner walking around in Iran would be shocked at the number of anti-western slogans adorning the walls of public institutions like offices and schools, and at the rhetoric in similar vein delivered by the state-run monopoly broadcaster IRIB.

To people on the inside, it all seems perfectly normal.

For nearly 30 years, Iranian children as young as six have begun their day by chanting slogans against the Great Satan (the United States), the Occupying Regime of Israel, and, depending on the political mood of the day, a number of other countries such as Britain. This is now so commonplace that few Iranians passing a school in the morning will be irritated to hear the chanting of hate-filled slogans.

PE classes at school are usually accompanied by the same resentful slogans. It is quite a paradox to see young smiling children imitating their trainer and punctuating their agile moves with vows to wreak revenge on a country they’d be hard put to find on a map.

On Qods Day (Jerusalem Day) last October, Iranian state television broadcast a cartoon in praise of suicide bombings targeting Israelis – or “martyrdom-seeking operations”, as they are called in Iran. The cartoon showed a young boy blowing himself up “to show the Zionists how brave Palestinian children are”.

As well as television, the theme has entered the booming electronic games market. A recent release called “Rescue the Nuclear Scientist” invites gamers to save an Iranian engineer kidnapped by American forces in Iraq while on pilgrimage with his wife to the holy city of Karbala.

As the Fars news agency explained, the game was conceived by its designers as a response to “Assault on Iran”, an American product. However, it does not appear to have taken off among young Iranians. Many of them have never even heard of it.

Iranian manufacturers have also tried to combat western culture by making a homegrown, Islamic version of the Barbie and Ken dolls, called them Sara and Dara. Sara wears a headscarf and a long dress, while Dara cuts a dowdy figure next to Ken.

Although heavily advertised on state TV, the figures never really stood a chance against their flashier foreign rivals.

For a consumer opinion, we asked five-year old Minoo about her preferences. Minoo spends hours changing Barbie’s fashionable clothes, applying the cosmetics that come with the doll, and making up stories about her and Ken.

She has never wanted to acquire Sara, a doll conceived as the image of Iranian cultural and religious values. Sara “isn’t beautiful”, she explains.

It is fairly easy to influence children as young as Alireza and Minoo, when their horizons are limited to cartoons, video games and toys, plus whatever else their various adult mentors – parents and teachers – want to instill in them.

Beyond a certain age, though, attempts to influence them are no longer so effective, and adolescents begin to exercise their own choices. Then it becomes more complicated to guide them towards one’s own preferred way of thinking.

As children grow up, the state has its work cut out trying to retain the upper hand. It fears losing a generation that was not even born when the Iranian revolution took place in 1979, and whose knowledge of the decade-long conflict with Iraq in the Eighties is limited to the stories their parents tell them, war films, and pictures of martyrs on street walls.

Young Iranians may not know much about why a particular street is named after a martyr, a war hero, or some other national figure like a poet or a scientist. But they are up to speed on James Blunt and the Spice Girls, their song lyrics, and all the celebrity gossip.

In recent years, the government has imposed strict filtering policies on websites and intensified its crackdown on “bad hijab” and privately-owned satellite dishes. But it can hardly claim victory in its campaign against the western cultural invasion.

To the dismay of the state, young people have figured out how to get round internet filters, and how to hide a satellite dish from nosy neighbours.

All this stems from a desire to be connected with the rest of the world. It would be quite naive to imagine that members of this, the third generation of the revolution, are cut off from the outside world, even if the image they acquire of the West is somewhat skewed.

The preference for western over Iranian culture may not be the result of a genuine curiosity about all things foreign, whether this is fed deliberately or by accident from outside. Instead, ignorance of what constitutes true Iranian culture has more to do with the poor and vulgar terms in which it is articulated – through indoctrination and the regime’s identification of selected values as the correct ones, with no attempt to win hearts and minds.

An unspoken struggle is taking place for the minds of this generation, whose members make their own choices between the two options whenever they can, and submit helplessly to whichever trend is prevalent when they cannot.

Young Iranians have made huge efforts to surmount the barriers and gain access to the outside world, often at some cost to themselves. Yet often it seems they end up caught between two worlds, knowing only a little about either. And that is a shame.

In Iran, a great deal of time and energy has been expended on keeping young people away from things they should not do, and very little on engaging their interest in what they should do.

There is a Persian proverb which goes, “The crow wanted to learn to walk like a partridge, but it forgot its own way of walking.”

Young Iranians did not themselves choose to forget how to walk in their own manner. It is their own government’s pursuit of its illusory “campaign against cultural invasion” that has alienated them, and left them somewhere between the worlds of the crow and the partridge.

Samaneh Maddah is a freelance journalist in Tehran.

This article is an abridged and translated version of the full original text published on the Farsi pages of Mianeh, with editorial adjustments agreed with the writer made to provide clarity for English-language readers.

Originally published here: www.mianeh.net/en/articles/?aid=120