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last we heard from our intrepid investigative journalists, "millions"
of rabidly anti-American Persians had filled the streets of Iran's
major cities to denounce the Great American Satan and rally round
their beloved mullahs. It was a massive hoax, and one might have
hoped that at least one major editor in this country would insist
that, henceforth, the real Iranian story be covered. NOT.
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, please.
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