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| Syria-Lebanon-Iran | |
| Editor's Notes: The second Islamic Revolution | |
| 2009-06-27 | |
Way back in the days of the Shah, Sabina Amidi tells me down the phone in one of the few lighter moments of our conversation, it was easier for Iranians to get visas to Tel Aviv than to Mecca. So lots of Iranian Muslims came to visit the Jewish state. "This friend of our family, a middle-aged woman, was telling me last week about how she'd come to Jerusalem in the mid-1970s, gone to the Western Wall, and seen all the Jews there praying to God and leaving messages between the stones," Amidi went on. "She felt left out. She also wanted to leave a message for God. So she told me she too went up to the Wall, and wrote a plea: that she would find a good husband. Six months later she met the love of her life, they've been deliriously happily married for more than 30 years, they have three children... and she - this very conservative Muslim lady - still talks excitedly about that trip to Israel, and about how God answered her prayers at the Western Wall." And this lady too, Amidi continued, in serious mode now, this devout Muslim friend who lives in fealty to Islam and its laws, today shares the widespread sense of betrayal that so many Iranians feel with regard to the regime of the ayatollahs. She's not been out on the streets, risking her life to scream "Down with the dictator." But she's watched the brutally suppressed protests from her apartment window, and she hopes, sooner or later, that they'll have their effect. THE AMERICAN-based Amidi is a courageous young reporter who flew to Teheran a few weeks ago to cover the presidential elections for The Jerusalem Post. She had anticipated a fascinating but thoroughly nonrevolutionary sequence of events - expecting that she would reconnect with friends and family there, report on an expertly manipulated exercise in mullah-style democracy, and leave the country much as she entered it: increasingly frustrated by the government's stifling of freedoms, but quietly seething rather than openly defiant. Instead, by the time she got out of Teheran midway through last week, Iran was in turmoil, the regime had resorted to shooting its own people in the streets and branding its own former prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi "a criminal" for daring to challenge it, and Amidi was understandably fearful that the fact of her writing for the Post was putting her own life in real danger. | |
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