I know it’s not really a laughing matter, but I couldn’t help noticing that two of the Iranian “students” who stormed the British embassy in Tehran made off with pictures of Her Majesty and a scene from the movie “Pulp Fiction.”
What a blow against imperialism!
At Tehran Bureau, Setareh Sabety writes:
Unlike the seizure of the U.S. Embassy by Iranian students more than three decades ago, this embassy invasion looked plainly staged and failed to resonate with anyone. It appeared to involve thugs hired to take part in a play, akin to a ritual reenactment of the martyrdom of Hussein, replete with symbolism that has lost its meaning over time and carries only nostalgic value in certain Islamist circles. None in the crowd looked like they were students and not one person in Iran whom I was able to contact believed that they were. By all accounts, this was the same despised bunch that attacked the real students who protested the disputed presidential elections in 2009.
The image of the mob storming and looting the British Embassy, as police officers stood idly by, highlighted the regime’s hypocrisy and failed to stir any of the nationalist or anti-imperialist sentiments evoked by the events of 1979. That year, we toppled the U.S.-backed Shah, overran the embassy, and took Americans hostage. Then we ran our own country for more than three decades. But our own Islamist leaders ruled over us with such a heavy hand, engaged in such blatant nepotism and thievery, and displayed such arrogance that the “American puppet” we so valiantly ran off now seems like the better option. In my opinion, many of the opposition, if not the majority of Iranians, share this post-Islamist frame of mind. We tried Islamic governance and have come deeply to despise it.
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You see, when we got rid of the imperialists and their puppets, we also got rid of many of our freedoms too. This was much more acutely felt by us women. Out with “imperialism” went our rights to full citizenship. We could still vote and hold office, but we had to cover our heads under the newly enforced sharia, or Islamic law. We got rid of the so-called imperialists, but we were not allowed to sing, or drink a beer, or have a boyfriend. We literally got a whipping for any transgressions.Maybe you have to be a woman to really feel it. You really have to be forced to put something on your hair every day before going out in public to comprehend how humiliating and degrading it is. But it was not just that: We also had to witness our children being murdered, first in a war with Iraq that could have ended much earlier, then in the mass executions of leftists in the 1980s, and finally after the disputed 2009 elections.
What sovereignty did we gain? At what price? And for whom? Certainly not for us women, or minorities, or homosexuals, or atheists. Through the agony of three decades, we have come to realize that the biggest demon is not the West, but our own extremists, and especially our own Islamist men.
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We know all about Western intervention and imperialism and we frankly prefer it to our own Islamist rulers. Call me what you want — or worse, call me a neocon — but I am expressing the pent-up anger of many Iranians who are fed up with the empty rhetoric of the fashionable left, which refuses to come up with a new grammar for the post-imperialist world and has no clue how to digest our post-Islamist embrace of the West.
