Archive - May 16, 2010 - Article

Moving appeal

This year, two great figures are absent at the International Film Festival of Cannes. The first is Roman Polanski, and the readers of Huffington Post know that I have spared no effort to plead and defend his cause over the past seven months. (Moreover, the pathetic declarations of Ms. Charlotte Lewis haven't made the slightest dent in my determination.) But the name of the second is Jafar Panahi; he is Iranian. Tim Burton chose him to be a member of his jury, and if he is unable to be there, it is because he is incarcerated in the terrible Evin prison, near Tehran, where he was thrown by the obtuse and criminal fanaticism of Ahmadinejad's police>>>

Back to the past

Five young Iranian Kurds were executed last Sunday in summary trials reminiscent of the era that immediately followed the fall of the Shah and the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. Even according to government-backed press, the victims had been kept incommunicado for most of their imprisonment and had little or no access to lawyers — a violation of Iran’s own laws. Gone are the regime’s efforts at keeping up pretenses, at casting itself as the authentic but misunderstood regional democracy. The evolutionary clock, which the West briefly believed to have been ticking in Tehran, positively wound down last week>>>

اصلاح طلبی؟

با اين نگاه می توانيم به روشنی ببينيم که بنيادگرايان و اصلاح طلب های اسلامی، بر خلاف آنچه بنظر می آيد، مشترکاً و بصورتی مشابه به لزوم «حکومت اسلامی» معتقد هستند، هر دو از چيزی به نام جدايي دين از حکومت هراس دارند، و هر دو اسلام و قوانين آن را راه نجات می دانند و ـ در عين حال ـ هر دو در پی «جهانی کردن اسلام» اند. اما تفاوت اين دو در اين است که بنيادگرايان در واقع نوعی از همان حکومت خلافتی عثمانی ها هستند به معنی يک ديکتاتوری مذهبی، زدن و کشتن و تا گلو در خرافات غوطه خوردن>>>

Adolescent dream

Anytime but now.
Anywhere but here.
Give me the red soaked floor
of the coloseum.
A night at the palace
with a drunk Baudelaire.
>>>