arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)

The real crushing of dissent

From National Review Online, an Iranian student protester speaks of the brutal way the protests in Iran are being handled:

It has become almost routine for us to go out at night, chant slogans, get beaten, lose some of our friends, see our sisters beaten, and then return home.

Each night we set to the streets only to be swept away the next dawn by agents of the regime. Two nights ago, on Amirabad Street, we wrote "Down with Khomeini" on the ground. Before long, the mullah's vigilantes attacked us on their motorcycles. They struck a female student before my eyes so harshly that she was no longer able to walk. As she fell to the ground, four members of Ansaar-e-Hezbollah surrounded her, kicking her. When I and two other students threw stones at them so that they would leave her alone, they threatened us. We escaped into a lane and hid in a house whose owner, an old lady, had left the door open for us. A few minutes later, we saw the young lady being carried away by riot police, her feet dragging on the ground, her shattered teeth hanging out of her still-bleeding mouth.

At least three of my best friends have been detained; nobody knows anything about their fate.

Yesterday I heard that the prosecutor of Tehran has announced that most of the detainees are hooligans with criminal records. What sort of criminal record does he mean? Perhaps the crime of walking with a person of the opposite sex? Of wearing Western clothes or playing a cassette in the car?

This is true protest and dissent. This, I thought, must be covered on Indymedia. So I check the main site. Nothing. New York? Nope. DC? Nada. Seattle? Nuh-uh.

Okay, then, San Francisco. There must be at least one article about Iran in the birthplace of modern American protest. No, there isn't. But there are articles against the war in Iraq, and a benefit concert by former rock star Patti Smith (who was so drunk and/or stoned at her concert at my college that she literally could not remember how to spell "Gloria" during her attempt to sing that song), with a follow-up article titled "Why Patti Smith Mattered." And of course, there are the usual anti-Semitic spews about Israel. But not a word on the Iranian students protesting against the tyrannical rule of the Mullahs, and being beaten and killed for it.