Where is the News from Iran?

Iran is not Iraq. By now, I hope, we have learned that much.

In the months leading up to, and for years after, the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, I cannot estimate how many talking heads on television -- reporters, pundits, government officials – mixed up the two names.

No, Senator, Baghdad is not the capital of Iran.

Yes, the vast majority of Iraqi people are Arabs, but most Iranians are not.

Saddam Hussein was a tyrant, but he never had any nuclear weapons.

The Iranian rulers may be a bunch of pious buffoons, but they are probably closer to building an atomic bomb than the Iraqis ever were.

So, what does this topic have to do with The Picket? Good question.

Clearly, it would be unrealistic to expect a student newspaper to cover international affairs in competition with the professional press corps.

Not altogether incidentally, even leading news organizations have not had reporters on the ground in Iran since the disputed elections of last summer. Journalists disappeared, willingly or otherwise, during the popular uprising in the streets of Teheran and subsequent crackdown by the ruling theocracy.

Canadian/Iranian filmmaker and Newsweek correspondent Maziar Bahari has been held in solitary confinement in an Iranian dungeon for months.

The New York Times has been covering news from Iran with datelines from Beirut, Lebanon, and Toronto, Canada: as if reporting on Beijing from Paris.

Up-to-the minute news from Iran is, nevertheless, available from the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard online at http://tehranbureau.com/

From the Teheran Bureau, you can learn how “massively fraudulent” the election of June 12, 2009, seems to have been.

The “Supreme Leader” of Iran has commanded the populace to accept the election results re-electing the current president by a majority of about eleven million votes over his nearest rival.

Yeah, the Ayatollah-in-Chief told the faithful, maybe the powers-that-be could have stolen, say, even a million votes -- but not eleven million!

The actual tally seems to have been reversed so that the eleven million margin landed in the column of the status quo rather than the opposition.

As for the Iranian protestors who took to the streets: they have been jailed, beaten, and, allegedly sexually violated by official Islamic rape-squads.

The Teheran Bureau also informs its readers how the repression of the mullahs has backfired to such an extent that their ruling legitimacy is evidently shot for good.

Even many conservative Iranians are outraged by the outrages.

The government has indicted alleged agitators in Stalinist-style show-trials to cause shame and intimidation in the public at large, as well.

Yet that television show did not make it through the season, according to the Teheran Bureau, because the target audience received it with sheer derision.

Nor has the governing apparatus been able to squelch dissent. Brave citizens of Teheran are still going up to their roofs at night to cry out Allah-hu-akbar!

Their slogan, taken directly from the 1979 revolution, simply seems to declare the greatness of the deity. Thus, there would appear to be no legal justification for arresting these exalted souls for subversive activity.

But, of course, the protestors’ real meaning is Down with the Dictator!

The Teheran News Bureau has also called on its supporters to express their international protest against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad when he addresses the United Nations in New York City on Sept. 23, 2009.

Still, what does any of that have to do with The Picket and its readers?

Should The Picket be interviewing faculty and students on campus who may have traveled or lived or still have family in Iran?

Are there professors in the departments of history and social science who could be interviewed to add to our understanding of recent events?

Last year, the Common Reading program selected Persepolis as the book to be read and discussed. There were a lot of classes assigned to read the book and many informative forums offered to the public.

Does that mean that the topic of Iran has become old news?

Not at all.