Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is using the Gaza flotilla episode to distract attention from the anniversary of his rigged reelection — and from a fourth round of U.N. sanctions passed Wednesday to rein in Tehran’s nuclear program.
But the Iranian leader’s denunciations of the deaths in the botched Israeli raid can’t erase images of scores of dead Iranian civilians mowed down as they peacefully protested election fraud after the June 12, 2009, ballot. Those images have been preserved for posterity on YouTube.
None is more iconic than that of Neda Agha-Soltan, the beautiful young music student whose death from a militiaman’s bullet was captured in a cell-phone video clip that went viral. The undimmed power of that scene is demonstrated by Iran’s panicky efforts to jam domestic satellite transmissions this week as Voice of America’ broadcasted the Farsi version of a new HBO documentary, For Neda.
The film contains the first public interviews with Neda’s family and testimony from a doctor who tried to save her as she bled to death on the street. Go to YouTube, type in “This is For Neda,” watch the documentary and weep.
Neda’s death, along with Iran’s torture and murder of so many other protesters, makes a mockery of Ahmadinejad’s efforts to pontificate about the flotilla fiasco — and of reports that the Iranian Red Crescent Society will dispatch its own aid convoy to Gaza. Her indelible image reminds us that the Iranian regime’s claim … >>>
