The flickering images of Neda Agha-Soltan’s last moments in a Tehran street on June 20 before she died from gunshot wounds gripped the world, galvanized the nation and made the 26-year-old music student the face of Iran’s recent protest movement. Five months after an unknown assailant took her life at a demonstration in the Iranian capital staged by pro-reform activists, supporters across the world have spearheaded a grassroots initiative in a move to immortalize her. Through the use of various social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter, they are pushing to make Agha-Soltan Time magazine’s Person of the Year 2009. Each year, the U.S.-based magazine grants the title to one or several persons who “most affected the news and our lives, for good or ill, and embodied what was important about the year.” Administrators of the more than 1,000-member strong Facebook group “Nominate Neda Agha-Soltan as the Time Woman of the Year” say she deserves the title because she has become “the symbol of the recent Iranian movement towards democracy and freedom” through her tragic death that shocked the world. Members of the group are encouraged to send letters to Time magazine to vote for Agha-Soltan and spread the word to their friends. The campaign i…
