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Monday Evidence Dear Sir, A Mr Babak Babaei has accused me of exaggeration and requested evidence for Makhmalbaf ["Limbs of no body"] being a fundamentalist Islamist. Here are my evidence: (1) for films on the subject (Islamic fundamentalism) by Mohsen Makhmalbaf I refer you to Iranian Film Archive in Tehran, and once you get there ask for films made by Mohssen Makhmalbaf prior to Dastfourush and BycicleRun. And if you have difficulty having access to Iranian Film Archive in that case I suggest you seek advise of Iranian filmbuffs who are knowledgeable about history of Iranian cinema after the Islamic Revolution. They will bear witness to the fact that M.M. used to be a fanatic Muslim man and demanded that all Iranians must be like him, i.e a fanatic Muslim. (2) What evidence for the fact that millions of children are either starving to death or being murdered by their own parents simply because parents cannot afford to meet costs of bringing them up, can be better than the fact that average wages for 99% of Iranians who are lucky enough to have a job and not be unemployed (70% of the people of working age in Iran are unemployed) is 1000 (one thousand) toumans or less per day (most employers including government agencies are reluctant to pay even this much,) while a kilogram of meat is £3000 toumans (3 days wages) and what is one kilogram of meat for a neucleous family of five or seven or nie people? A kilo of cherries is 500 toumans (half a day's wages), a kilo of water melon (any family of melons) is at least 300 toumons; bananas are 1200 toumans per kilogram (and bananas being heavy one kilogram would of them amount to nothing for an Iranian family which has at least six or nine members;) a kilo of potatoes are 2oo toumans; a kilo of noukhoud lubia (cheek peas and white beens) for meagrely Abghousht is 600 toumans; adass (brown lentiles) is 700 toumans per kilogram; bread is 100 touman per doneh (one sangak or one tuftoon or one barbary); rice is £3000 toumons and spagetti is £1500 touman per kilogram. Sabzy Khourdan (fresh green herbs) is 150 toumons per bunch / kilogram. Should I go on? Education alone for elementary schooling costs a fortune; during the late shah elementary and secondary education up until graduation from high school was relatively cheap and almost free (if we ignore minimum school fees and money for buying school books, uniform and writing material); but now, since the Islamic Revolution, a child can only attend school if his/her parents can afford to cough up 20,000 or 30,000 toumans per annum per child as fee for a state-owned school (privately owned schools have even higher annual fees and other costs), and then on top of all this they require money to purchase school books and uniforms, writing material, breakfast & lunch; and notwithstanding the fact that after parents are forced to pay all that money, the government via its education ministry is not able or capable of providing a decent education for children of Iran; for as you know all schools are half time (i.e. 4 hours per day or less) and class rooms consist of over 40 or 50 pupils each and at the same time are not equipped to any decent teaching facilities such as computers, pianos, laboratories, libraries, sports ground, gyms, theatres or arts workshop, public telephones for use by students and teachers/staff. In other words the islamic Republic is so busy milking Iranians that he does not have time to think about being or feeling obliged towards Iranian people who are being milked by the state officials day and night; in fact no government agencies in Iran feel any obligation towards Iranians inside Iran even though Iranians come out enmass to vote for them so as to make sure they will get in; not even president Khatami and his cabinet feel obliged that they should give back something in return of all that they are taking out of Iranians inside Iran. Accommodation: as we all know 99% of Iranian families do not own their own housing or place of residence, and so they are obliged to rent the accommodation they require; and price of renting a tiny apartment or flat is 60,000 toumans per month; the cheapest which are located in farflung places are £20,000 toumans per month; to this rent one must add cost of transport to and fro such farflung places of residence. And as we know too well public transport is almost non-existant in farflung places, and so poor and needy people who live in farflung places have to communte by expensive taxis, and as we again know hiring a cab or a taxi is far more expensive than riding on a state owned public bus. Even in big cities such as Tehran public transport is not available after 8 or 9 pm and people who have to be outside their homes at such hours must either walk home or pay dearly for hiring private cabs/taxis. Islamic Republic has plenty of money, earnings from the sale of our black oil, copper, gold, lead etc mines is astraunomical, plus income earned from taxing the little income majority of parents have by doing odd jobs (working people of Iran do not have permanent jobs; they are all hired on temporary basis or as Iranians inside Iran put it: they do contractual or contraty work, which means they have no employment security at all); plus income earned from raising the price of petrol, Naft or white oil, postal stamps, forcing people buy stamps and do their jobs through the post office so that they are forced to pay as much as 500 tomouns for delivering something which would have cost them on public transport 50 tomouns; at the same time price of stamps are constantly risen to 300 or 500 tomoun per envelop or per small package. As we all know public services are non-existent in Iran: there are no libraries, no sports or leisure centres, no government schemes for training the unemployed and the not-so-fortunate working classes of Iran, and so, as a result, there are no government-owned cultural or skill centres to learn to use computers or fax machines or mobile phones or any kind of modern technology. Even in big cities like Tehran you cannot find public phone boxes everywhere, let alone lesser cities such as Karaj, Ghazveen, Zanjan etc., let alone seeing any public phone boxes on road sides across the country; let alone seeing public phone boxes in farflug residential places any where in the country whether near Tehran or very far from Teharan. If you want to call another city from Tehran and you wish to do so from a public phone, there are no public phone boxes for doing so except a few which are located outside the Tehran's Telecommunication Office. Health Service is non-existent and people who are not already employed by the state/government and as a result are the most needy people of the country have no health insurance and must fend for themselves when they get sick or need medical attention. Only those who work, i.e. have a job and therefore have some money are entitled to medical care insurance or Beemeh. The unemployed are left be amon-e-khouda or stranded in the wilderness to do the best they can for taking care of themselves. As we all know there is no universal unemployment benefit or social security in Iran. Mind you there is a phoney one, whereby a person who has only just lost his job can receive unemployment benefit for three months and then he is off the dole queue evenif he has not yet been able to find a new job for himself/to provide for his family. In other words Islamic Republic does not give a damn as to how the poor, the unemployed, the underprevileged 99% population live or die. Need I go on? Does Mr Makhmalbaf who is supposed to be resident inside Iran not know these things? Or shall we say he does know them all, but he does not give a damn either, why should he? Is there any prestege attached to caring for the nobodies of Iran? No! And so, as a result, one has no choice but to believe that his (Mr Makhmalbaf's) concern for the plight of the Afghan people is a sham and phoney one; otherwise if he was/is a well meaning person, why can't he mean well for his own people? Why does he not take up arms against an uncaring government and uncaring mass media inside Iran? Why Mr Mahkhmalbaf does not question Islamic Republic of Iran respecting what it is doing for all that income it is having/is earning by milking the masses? Why does he not ask Iranian media to do something for the sake of uprooting suffering, starvation, poverty, homelessness, addiction to drugs which is on a mass scale inside Iran, poor heigyn and almost nonexistent health service and social security, absence of decent public transport and government housing for all. I stop and hope that Mr Babak Babaei is satisfied, otherwise he will have to take a discovery trip to Iran for the sake of seeing for himself.
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