The Portable Roya A Selection of Favorite Essays

Commentary: An Iranian refugee on becoming American – legally, then in spirit Reuters Aug. 24, 2016

It’s lucky that my mother and I were admitted as refugees to America before the topic of immigration became so contentious. If the current laws were to change to add skills or financial requirements, we could have never gotten in. Hell, I myself, a bitter teenager then, thought us perfectly useless and was stunned that anybody wanted us at all. We came empty-handed in 1985, without even suitcases to declare at Customs. And without any English, for that matter. On my first outing with a young man I dearly wanted to impress, I did not understand the waitress when she asked if I preferred Coke to Pepsi.

What I had a lot of was anger. Anger at having been ejected from my homeland, Iran. Anger at having lost not only the people and places I loved, but, above all, the language I adored and had hoped to make a career writing in. Anger at the elite who had promised that the 1979 revolution would bring us freedom and democracy. Anger at America because I was the product of the post-revolutionary education system that blared “Death to America” every morning in the schoolyard. Having objected to America for so long to now be at its mercy was no picnic.

That anger hardly subsided because curious, kind-hearted folks would readily, unknowingly, summon it: “Where are you from?”

Hearing my answer, they would gasp and offer this in sympathy: “You must be delighted to be here!”

1

Back then, I felt as delighted as a chickadee would in a fox’s grip. When I passed through the revolving doors at New York’s JFK airport, the size of all that I saw – people, SUVs, highways crisscrossing overhead – dwarfed me. I have forgotten a great many things about those early days, but my desultoriness is not among them.

In between my expired maroon Iranian passport and the blue American one came a white booklet, not a passport, but a travel document. White was symbolically apt for that bleached out state between arrival and citizenship, that existential no-man’s-land. A twilight space where one loosens her hold on the old identity, while not having yet earned the new.

I introduced myself as a “nowhereian” in those days, when bygone fears still haunted me. The sight of the lowliest government employees, uniformed guards at any gate, unnerved me. Trusting the advice of officials, from immigration to resettlement workers, did not come easily for it required a complete suspension of all the knowledge I had arrived with.

Over time, incremental changes accrued, tiny deposits into an account of belonging. They came through small but essential encounters. The oath of allegiance, however significant, is often only a ceremonious hour, not one of reckoning. But watershed events and crises offer shortcuts through that journey to belonging. September 11 for instance. By 10 a.m. on that day, my 75-year-old father who until then had been composing poem after poem about his yearning for Tehran had hung an American flag from the railings of the fourth- floor balcony of my parents’ Queens apartment. It remains the only illicit act he has ever committed here, for he knew well the co-op board did not approve of exterior displays. It was what he was compelled to do as he was overpowered by an unexpected tide of grief for the adopted country which had thus far seemed invulnerable to him. As we silently stared at Manhattan’s smoldering skyline, we wept for the dead, but also for the surge of a love we had not packed at departure. We were overcome, too, by the clear sense we had as to on which side of that sinister smoke we stood.

By then, the anger had subsided. This happened not merely because time moderates all passions, but because the joyful experiences which had once been denied me tilted the balance of the spirit. A pivotal shift came with those joys: A second arrival of sorts, this time not at a country, but at an insight. I saw that unlike what I was once led to believe, life’s purpose was not to give oneself up through sacrifice but to live – fully, richly, curiously.

2

When I left Iran, music was banned, and hijab was mandatory. Years later, when I finally jogged barefoot on a beach, hair bouncing in the wind, music blasting in my ears, I knew I had been bestowed a splendid gift – one I could never again live without.

A few months ago, my children’s fourth grade class was studying the subject of immigration and I was invited to address the group. Standing before dozens of 10-year-olds, I was just the living moral show-and-tell the teachers needed to drive home their lesson. One child asked how I had been able to make such a big adjustment. I said, “Because at my poorest, America embraced me unconditionally like families accept each other regardless of any flaws or strengths.”

For their rapt lot, I animated the narrative of the American melting pot and why it melts better than the rest. At moments like these, I marvel at my own keen sense of duty and citizenship. It is among those who are born American that I realize I am here to remind them of their rare gift.

So many revolutions fail. But few succeed, fewer still succeed as well as the American revolution of 1776. Those generations who are born in the relative comfort and security of its legacy are prone to forget that original covenant. Which is where we, the formerly useless, once empty-handed, now full-hearted, naturalized citizens come in.

POLITICO LETTER FROM AMERICA Lady Liberty’s dimming light A savage stroke of the pen makes America into the country we were told to fear. 3/6/17

NEW YORK — If a debate, and the sentiments it subsequently evokes, can ever undo a nation’s character, the debate over “the wall,” the banning of immigrants from seven Muslim-majority nations and the refusal to take in refugees, is doing so to the United States.

3

In recent weeks, the U.S., the promised land for the persecuted everywhere, has seen its Jewish cemeteries vandalized, brown-skinned immigrants assaulted and several mosques and Muslim establishments attacked. Refugees are being rejected by a public that hardly has any knowledge of who they are and what they bring to our communities. Thirty years ago, I was one such refugee. I arrived in the U.S. just as Lady Liberty knows: Tired and poor, with only a backpack on my back and a few words of English in my lexicon. In me, the adolescent angst and anger stirred more than the average teenager, perhaps because of an ugly year in transit and an uprooting from my homeland Iran, to which, despite the bleakest of circumstances, I felt profoundly attached. My affluent compatriots, whose extravagant lifestyles are the stuff of reality shows like the “Shahs of Sunset,” made up the first wave of arrivals in the tumultuous days before or immediately after the 1979 revolution. They fled, in great part, to bring their wealth to safety. Choosing America, the Supreme Leader’s arch enemy, was the greatest gamble of our lives. For most of the rest of us, those who left long after the revolution, especially in the aftermath of several waves of arrests leading up to the 2009 Green Movement, the sale of everything we ever owned carried us only as far as a third country, an in-between location with a U.S. embassy. The one in Tehran had been shut down on November 4, 1979, in the aftermath of the ignominious hostage crisis. By the time travel costs, room and board and various legal and visa processing fees were paid for, we had used up the last of our scarce dollars. Those of us who came to the U.S. in this second and third wave of immigration had already been intensely “vetted” by Tehran — and we had failed the test. Under the clergy’s dogmatic reign, we had been relegated to the margins of society and fled to bring ourselves to safety.

The U.S. and much of the Western world have been engaged in an undeclared war with Iran for nearly 40 years. We, the post-revolutionary order’s bonafide misfits — gays, Jews, artists, Baha’is, secular intellectuals and scientists, Iranian Sunnis, new converts to Christianity, Kurdish liberation activists, women’s rights advocates, prisoners of conscience — have been the real warriors. Choosing America, the Supreme Leader’s arch enemy, was the greatest gamble of our lives. It was comforting to discover that, contrary to all the propaganda we had once been subjected to, Americans did not bare their teeth or graze us with their claws (metaphors courtesy of the Islamic Republic of Iran, not mine). The America we experienced — vast,

4 open, free, and generous — was not the America we had been told to fear. Our encounters with our new home stood in sharp contrast to the official narrative and opened another front in the undeclared war between Iran and America. In the decades since 1979, diplomats and policymakers looked for ways to undo what residual distrust may have lingered among Iranians from the CIA’s misadventures in 1953 and thereafter. Still, nothing has been as effective as the wistful narrative that the diaspora passed along to those still on the inside. Indeed, in the past decade, every reporter who visited Iran returned with the same story: Iranians loved America. If the tired proverb “absence makes the heart grow fonder” ever needed foolproof evidence, the fond heart of Iranians in the absence of America since 1979 would be just that. American industry and business institutions lost out to their European rivals when the ties between the U.S. and Iran were severed. However, the U.S. has since attained a great deal more in regaining the trust of Iranians and providing a refuge to those turned away by Tehran. This new America is taking the very cruel shape the clerics had always portrayed: one of an unfeeling, morally corrupt bogeyman who cares for nothing other than lining his own pockets. If such intangible claims are often hard to support, consider the Anti-Defamation League’s 2015 survey, in which it found that Iran — a nation under severe censorship and without any U.S. or Israeli presence — was the least anti-Semitic in the Middle East and North Africa. We, the educated immigrants formerly branded as wretched refuse, can claim some credit for making that happen. Now, this hard-earned seismic shift is about to be undermined with the savage stroke of a pen. The very messengers who were the catalysts of that historic shift, who gambled their all on America, are about to lose their cherished sanctuary. Into the effigy of Uncle Sam raised up to the sky at Friday prayer, a terrible life has been breathed. This new America is taking the very cruel shape the clerics had always portrayed: one of an unfeeling, morally corrupt bogeyman who cares for nothing other than lining his own pockets. Lady Liberty’s light is dimming — and so could the outline of hope for those who once followed it to these shores.

Misreading Iran’s Elections: Iranian Infighting and American Narcissism World Affairs Journal: September 2013

5

Iran’s presidential election of June 14th is being hailed as a political opening. The landslide victory of Hassan Rouhani, who had called for moderation in foreign and domestic policies, for a more open state news media, and for engagement with the West regarding Tehran’s nuclear program, is being seen as something unique in the history of Iran’s Islamic Republic. Biographical details about the new president abound, as evidence of his distinctness. But the relevance or significance of these facts, and that of his office of the president altogether, is entirely suspect given the thirty-four-year history of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Take the 1989 rise of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani to his first term as president. That election, too, spurred a great deal of enthusiasm, and for good reason. Ayatollah Khomeini had just died. The seemingly endless war with Iraq had finally ended. And Rafsanjani was promising “renewal”—an allusion to the postwar reconstruction Iran needed and also to the bonds between the motherland and the diaspora whom he was inviting to return home to help get the job done. For many exiles languishing at menial jobs in the West, Rafsanjani’s call rekindled the hope of repatriation. The call, in fact, marked a moment when the once united opposition, now lured by the possibility of homecoming, became divided. That year, Hans-Dietrich Genscher of Germany became the first foreign minister of a European nation to travel to Iran in many years. Buoyed by the visit, he spoke of the end of religious radicalism and the dawn of a new era in Iran at a press conference upon the conclusion of the visit. In Genscher’s view, and that of many other leaders, Iran’s new leadership was ready to embrace Europe and Europe could help strengthen the forces of change by helping the new moderate-in-chief rebuild his country. In her painstaking new book, Roya Hakakian recounts the Tehran-backed 1992 assassination of Iranian exiles in Berlin—and the legal and diplomatic complications it spawned. German businesses cheered the idea. By 1992, trade figures between the two nations had reached five billion dollars, making Germany Iran’s dominant Western economic partner. Iran’s shares in German stocks exceeded two hundred million dollars. In those years, the two countries exchanged more than three hundred political, economic, cultural, and legal delegations, half of them parliamentary members from both sides. In every international summit, Germany rejected, or at least tempered, the tone of American proposals against Iran. Germany also initiated a continental effort to recast the “new” Iran as an authentic, albeit imperfect, regional democracy. In a campaign widely trumpeted as the “critical dialogue,” a diplomatic roundtable with senior Iranian and European officials was launched in July 1992. In closed-door meetings, a handful of top German officials warned Iran against continuing to carry out its trademark assassinations against dissidents in Europe, for

6 it could put an end to all the business and diplomatic progress that had been made. The Iranians reassured their German counterparts that such actions belonged to a bygone era.

On September 17, 1992, two months after the start of the “critical dialogue,” the three highest-ranking members of Iran’s Democratic Party of Kurdistan, along with another key opposition figure, were gunned down at the Mykonos restaurant in Berlin. The incident remains among the most devastating blows the Kurds and the opposition have ever suffered. Three months later, determined German officials went ahead with the second round of “critical dialogue” meetings between Iran and other EU members even as Germany’s own chief federal prosecutor was pointing to Tehran as the mastermind of the killings. Although the bygone had proven anything but, the “dialogue” continued. For the nearly four years that the trial of the accused lasted, the case was in the headlines and was fervently discussed among German policy elite. “Whodunit?” was less of a question than how high up the leadership the orders for assassination went and whether those who had done it had intended to weaken Rafsanjani and the forces of moderation. By 1997, when the trial finally concluded, Rafsanjani’s second term was nearing its end and Iran was in the throes of another presidential election season. Two months before the vote, on April 10th, the court’s judgment came forth and it was historic. For the first time since World War II, a German court implicated a country’s entire political leadership in a crime—Iran’s top leaders, “moderate” and “hard-line” alike, including Supreme Leader Khamenei and President Rafsanjani, were named among the masterminds of the assassinations. The condemnation was not merely symbolic. The EU itself took action. Every member nation recalled its ambassador from Tehran. With only a few weeks till the vote, Iran fell under a complete diplomatic blackout with Europe. When this process began, reformist candidate Mohammad Khatami was lagging in the polls. By election day in June 1997, the unparalleled international pressure, much like the 2013 sanctions on the regime today, catapulted him to victory. The era of reform officially began and Khatami rolled out his own dialogue, the Dialogue of Civilizations, at the in the following meeting of the UN General Assembly. The smiling Khatami gave hope even to the Americans. A decade after the fact, the Clinton administration began to restage the German efforts. Diplomacy was in full swing. Disillusioned diplomats and advisers from the Carter administration got back into the Iran game, if only to reclaim their careers. What could be exchanged was exchanged— from wrestlers and librarians to handshakes between the former hostages and those who had seized the American embassy in Tehran in November 1979. Some sanctions were

7 lifted. An official apology was even delivered by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright for the CIA-sponsored coup of 1953, though the significance of the CIA’s role in that coup was never as great as the agency and its enemies had led everyone to believe. As all of these promising events warmed the hearts of Western policymakers, the most brutal and ambitious assault ever on dissidents and oppositions members, known as the Chain Murders, was taking place inside Iran. A dozen leading writers and political leaders were systematically murdered in the first two years of Khatami’s presidency. In 1999, when his young supporters staged the largest and most widespread demonstrations across the country since the 1979 revolution, the once beloved candidate they had worked to bring to power abandoned them to thugs who beat and imprisoned them. By the end of Khatami’s second term in 2005, the press that had briefly flourished was banned once again, and leading journalists and reformists were either languishing in prisons or taking refuge in Europe or the US. And candidate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had begun campaigning for president.

By revisiting this history, I do not intend to call Iran’s recent election meaningless, though given the historical precedents, the “moderate” Rouhani probably has about the same chances at bringing reform to Iran’s civil society or brokering a nuclear deal as the other two “moderates” who came before him. My intention is to show that looking at Iran through the Manichaean prism of “moderate” and “hard-line” has never served Western policymakers or Iran’s own opposition very well. What is seen in this looking glass is not what is, but what the observer wants to see. Bifurcating the regime in this way has, in fact, robbed the West’s Iran policy of clarity and creativity. Rather than seeing a ubiquitous dictatorship with deeply entrenched interests, Americans have wrongly equated the “hard-line/moderate” split with other familiar dualities, such as liberal and conservative, or the quintessential good and evil. For US administrations, this simplistic view has led to policies as whimsical and incoherent as those of Tehran itself. Both Republican and Democratic administrations have declared themselves on the side of the “moderates” through State of the Union speeches and New Year messages to Iranians that look only to offer what Americans presume moderates want: apologies, a cake and a key, a good game of soccer, or respect and acknowledgment of Iranian pride, dignity, and culture. The hard job of thinking policy through in all of its complexity has been reduced to mere tweaking: If only President Obama had supported the Green Movement sooner in 2009, the protesters would have toppled the regime. If only George W. Bush had responded to the alleged letter that Tehran sent via the Swiss ambassador, US-Iran relations would have been normalized by now. If only Jimmy Carter had not admitted the ailing Shah into the US in 1979, the embassy in Tehran would not

8 have been seized. If only the CIA had not staged a coup d’etat against Prime Minister Mossadegh in 1953, Iran would have been a democracy today. Such beliefs—and indeed, much of America’s policy toward Iran—are guided more by narcissism than wisdom. The US has wholeheartedly believed in its own centrality in precisely the way that Tehran’s propagandists have painted it: America is at the root of all that’s bad or wrong in Iran and the world. The sooner America dismisses this national egocentricity vis-à-vis Iran, the faster a sound and lasting policy toward Iran can be formed. Political maturity begins with getting beyond “moderates” and “hard-liners.” While rifts and power struggles, some of them profound, do exist within the regime, they are far better understood in mafia terms, as distinct groups warring over economic and political interests, rather than in the familiar and reassuring political terms of the West. Once policymakers have adjusted to this view, then policy will no longer hinge on siding with moderates against hard-liners, but in seeing all the existing divisions realistically and acting on that knowledge. Driven by their penchant for deal making and negotiating, the US diplomats will continue to pursue talks with Tehran. But there will exist no illusion that those short-term pursuits serve a long-term vision.

A Revolution On The Page: Finding Identity In Poetry

NPR: All Things Considered

January 9, 2012

An immigrant's arrival in America has a distinct physical beginning marked by the landing of one's plane. But there's another arrival, the cultural one, that's incremental, perpetual.

Of these latter sort of arrivals, the most memorable for me occurred nearly 20 years ago. I was still a new refugee, my heart's gaze fixed upon all that I'd left behind — upon Iran and the beloved language which, to the fledgling poet in me, meant everything at the time.

My encounter with America, from the moment we drove away from the airport and I saw layer after layer of bridge and road piled vast and high, had dwarfed me through and though. The currency of everything I knew or had was of no value in the American bazaar. Everything here was bigger, better or, as displayed on every shampoo bottle, at least 20 percent more.

9

Except, and this was my sole consolation, for the treasury of poetry I carried in my head. Persian literature with its ancient tradition of verse was how I cured homesickness and soothed the melancholic byproducts of displacement.

When feelings of insecurity or inadequacy arose, I fought them, knowing that America, however great, could not match my country's peerless poetry.

Rumi, Omar Khayyam, Hafez were no longer simply writers but the pillars of my reconfigured identity. And when has identity ever been reconfigured without a note of superiority? No verse in this towering new land could outdo the love, passion, devotion and yearning, the beauty in the ones I knew.

I'd rested in that certainty when a poem by Theodore Roethke unsettled me. It was called "My Papa's Waltz."

It's a short poem, all of four stanzas. The verses spare and simple as if the urgency of their meaning makes the use of every trope and device a hindrance. It is the absence of the ornate that lets the presence of the tragedy at the core of the poem shine so brilliantly.

The effect of a great work of literature is often to unhinge its reader, to strip her of all previously cherished beliefs down to discomfiting nakedness. Roethke's "Waltz" did just that. It abruptly unveiled to me everything that centuries of Persian poetry had not — to shift the focus from the outward life to the life at home. To portray the father, the most revered figure in the culture I knew, in a negative light — in essence, to question his credibility and authority. Roethke had pulled the pedestal from beneath the taboo.

To me, someone whose most formative adolescent experience had been the of 1979, what Roethke had done was to conduct a revolution on the page. Upend, truly end, the ubiquity, the sanctity of the household "king." Something that generations of Persian poets, who had elegantly written against the tyranny of political rulers, had never challenged.

Once, I arrived in America on an airplane. Later, I arrived deeper yet on the wings of Roethke's verse. Here, no one was too sacred to be spared critical examination. Suddenly I had access to a whole new reservoir of writing material, and I knew freedom in its most tangible and consequential way.

A Personal Miracle on 55th Street

NPR Holiday Favorites: December 2010

10

"Stand clear of the closing doors!" The words, tinny and unfeeling, blared through the station. Then what nineteen years had not done, the shutting of the subway doors did at last --my mother and I separated.

She waved and tried to smile reassuringly as her train took off. I stood wondering, her face still in sight, if I had done the right thing to let her go on her own, when a voice on the intercom announced: This B train is now running on the R Line. Attention: the Brooklyn bound B will be running on the R Queens line.

It was December 1985. My mother and I, after spending nearly a year in Europe waiting for our asylum applications to be approved, had arrived weeks earlier in the US –two brand new refugees. The first few months were the hardest for the obvious reasons, but above all for the misperceptions we seemed to encounter where-ever we went. So much of my energies in those days were spent subduing the fury that readily rose in me each time a stranger, often an American, asked where I was from.

“Iran,” I’d say prepared for all the unimaginative responses that routinely followed. The most common among them was: “You must thrilled to be here!” My English was too poor back then to say that even the Garden of Eden would be a gloomy place if the circumstances that had driven one into it had been involuntary, as our reasons for leaving Iran had been.

What fury strangers didn’t summon in me, my relatives did. Those who had come before us assumed themselves authorities on all matters. First there was the barrage of metaphors to set you on the right track with the help of apt imagery: "You're a bird now. You migrated to where the weather is better." Or, "You're a plant and this is good earth for your roots at last." Being perfectly disoriented, my mother and I were convinced that if only we dress our minds in the right metaphor, our dizziness would end. We wished to walk on. We had to walk on. In the new country, we had to begin anew. To make myself do so, for a while I invented my own metaphor. Not a beautiful metaphor, but a practical one to propel me. I imagined myself a secondhand car whose odometer had been reset to zero by exile, that craftiest of dealers. With all the old parts, I was recast as a brand new human engine. Within me was all the clanking, hissing, and racket of past rides. But I had to learn to muffle them and press on.

11

There was also a slew of unsolicited advice, mostly contradictory, that the relatives dispensed to us. Some insisted "Mind your own business!" Others said: "If you don't know everyone's business, you're being cheated." But they were all unanimous about one thing: "Beware of the blacks!"

Standing at the station, knowing that my mother was on the wrong train, I knew then we were neither birds nor plants for they would never be lost as my mother was at that moment.

I took the next train home. At the local police station, I stopped to report, in my broken English, that my mother missing, but was told nothing would be done sooner than 48 hours. So I rushed home to call my brothers. Our first holiday in America was on the verge of becoming a disaster.

The sun had nearly set and my brothers and I were about to leave home to look for our mother, when the doorbell rang. There at the threshold, my mother stood, jubilant, her arm looped around the arm of an African American woman in a New York Transit Authority uniform. When Mother stepped into the house, tears began rolling down her cheeks.

Following the stream of tears were the words: After more than an hour, all passengers had got off and there she was the only one still on the train. Then turning her wet face to her companion, she said in Persian: "This woman, right here, saved me!"

"Hey, I was just doing my job!" the woman, surmising my mother's meaning through the tears, told her in English. Then she said to us that seeing how anxious my mother was and how little English she spoke, she thought it was best to bring her home after her shift had ended.

That night in our living-room, my mother lit the Hannukah candles, shut her eyes and prayed for the safety and well being of Gloria, her new found friend, and all her family on the eve of Christmas and would not let poor Gloria go home to tend to her baked ham unless she had tried my mother's tarragon veal balls first.

12

Watching Gloria try my mother's cooking, and ooh and aah to every bite, I realized that as new immigrants, we were not birds or plants but used cars that had to reset their odometers to zero and discover the American road, without anyone's instructions, all on our own.

“What Two Enemies Share,” February 25, 2012 “IF a war were to break out between Iran and Israel, whose side would you be on?” someone asked me on Facebook a few weeks ago, when an Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities was reportedly imminent. From early adolescence, at the start of Iran’s 1979 revolution, my loyalties have so often been questioned that I’ve come to think of such suspicions as my Iranian-Jewish inheritance. In the early 1980s in Tehran, a small group of socialist intellectuals who clandestinely gathered in an apartment every Thursday evening let me into their circle. Those were dangerous years. The government was new to power and violently insecure. Opposition groups were under assault. A war was raging with Iraq, and the United States had imposed sanctions. Our days were spent in queues, as the most basic staples were rationed. Every member of the group was assigned to follow one of these pressing issues. I, however, was to give weekly updates on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Though much younger than the rest, I knew exactly what kind of sympathies I was expected to express. The land had to be returned to the Palestinians, I would declare at the conclusion of each summary. I never mentioned that among the Jews living on that land were my penniless relatives who moved to Israel from Iran after their home and store were torched by an angry mob during the mayhem that preceded the revolution. Silence and submissiveness were and are the cornerstones of the character of the Iranian Jew. We walked past and away from confrontation. We burrowed in oblivion while living alongside Muslim friends and neighbors. Security and success came to those who blended in best, to those who did not allow any part of their Jewish identity to bleed into the Iranian. Today, it’s that oblivion that threatens to engulf both peoples. No two nations have ever been so deeply shaped by each other and yet so unaware of their debt to each other. At the dawn of the 20th century, Iran was racked by the lawlessness and tribalism that were endemic to the region. By about midcentury, under Reza Shah Pahlavi, Iran had

13 an army and an effective central government, which made subsequent industrialization possible. The credit for a surprising amount of that industrialization goes to the efforts of leading Iranian Jews. Among them were the Nazarian brothers, who left Iran for Israel in the late 1940s, fought in Israel’s 1948 war of independence, went on to work in construction and, when they had mastered those skills, committed the unthinkable: they returned to their birthplace to begin building there. They became manufacturers of loaders, dumpers, cranes and cement mixers, and made these modern tools of urbanization available and affordable for the first time in Iran. The city of Isfahan, one of Iran’s greatest tourist destinations, whose proverbial grandeur equals “half the world,” became so only when the brothers, in collaboration with top Israeli engineers, built its underground sewer system and rid the city of disease and noxious air. Another group of brothers, the Elghanians, erected high-rise buildings and highways that inoculated the country against tribal isolation. They also founded Iran’s first advanced plastic factory, which paved the way for other socioeconomic and scientific advances. But soon after the fall of the shah, the chief of the Revolutionary Courts, Sadegh Khalkhali, executed hundreds of democratic-minded youths who had turned against the new regime. He also executed one Elghanian brother, Habib, on the charges of sowing “corruption on earth” and “espionage for Israel.” Mr. Elghanian’s execution set fire to the Jewish community. Many of Iran’s 100,000 Jews fled, mostly for Israel or the United States, and today only around 20,000 remain. Just as the majority of Iranians are unaware of this history, so too are Jews unaware of the contributions of Iranians to Jewish survival. All too often, I’ve witnessed American Jews’ look of surprise when, upon meeting me, they learn of the existence of Jews in Iran for the first time, despite the fact that Iran still remains the largest home to Jews in the Middle East outside of Turkey and Israel. As early as the sixth century B.C., Jews, exiled in Babylonia, found a savior in Persia’s Cyrus the Great, who helped them return to Israel. In the early 1940s, Iran became a refuge to Jews, who were this time fleeing Hitler’s army. Thousands owed their lives to the valorous conduct of Abdol-Hossein Sardari, the head of Iran’s diplomatic mission in France, who defied Nazi orders by issuing thousands of passports and travel documents to Jews. Even when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was in top Holocaust- denying form, the descendants of the Polish survivors who chose to settle in Iran were laying flowers upon the graves of their loved ones in what’s known as the Polish Cemetery in Tehran. Would the two nations allow their rulers to begin a war if they were aware of their depth of indebtedness to each other? By bombing Iran, Israel would be bombing a portion of Jewish history. If that happens, which side I would choose will not be a question. I will be twice destroyed by the two imperfect yet beloved cultures that each make up half of the woman I a

14

“How Blaming the West Hides a War on Women,” Washington Post October 21, 2012 The targeting of Malala Yousafzai, the 15 -year-old girl shot nearly two weeks ago by a Pakistani Taliban assassin, brought back memories of my teenage years in Tehran, where theocratic zealots were similarly in control. The words of the Taliban's chief spokesman, Ehsanullah Ehsan, had a chillingly familiar echo in my ears. A bullet had Malala's name on it, he explained to the news media, because "she has become a symbol of Western culture in the area; she was openly propagating it." He also called her "the symbol of the infidels and obscenity." The zealots of my era, circa 1982, prowled Tehran's streets in khaki-colored Toyota SUVs and stopped girls and women of all stripes, ages and ethnicities, warning them if their scarves had slipped back. On good days, rather than arrest and haul us away, they would only scold: "Our men are being martyred by Saddam to protect your virtue." Iran's war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq was then in its second year; it was begun by the ambitious Iraqi dictator, who harbored expansionist dreams. But in the course of daily life in Iran, where harassment of women was reaching a fever pitch, the war was not over land or resources, but the honor of the nation's women. The war with Iraq was not even the one the country was told to gird itself against. The bigger, bloodier but ultimately triumphant jihad was yet to come, Ayatollah Khomeini reminded us daily. It would be against "world-devouring" U.S. imperialism and its proxies, the "blood-sucking Zionists," he said; they were at the root of all the world's evil. That all-out war, forever looming, has never come. But the war on women has been raging ever since. At the school gates every morning, we were greeted by our own Taliban, members of the the morality unit, in charge of "preventing vice and promoting virtue." They rubbed the face of my rosy-cheeked classmate to the point of bleeding to make sure she was not wearing rouge and pulled at the long eyelashes of another to see if they were real. We missed months of math that year because schools were newly segregated by gender and there were not enough trained female instructors in the country to teach in the girls-only classrooms. Two months before the end of the year, a few of us signed up for private lessons given by a man who stared at the ceiling while teaching, lest he violate segregation laws by looking at us. The burning effigies of Uncle Sam, and the inflammatory rhetoric against modernity and the West, had done their work. The world cringed and turned away from Iran. Just then, the age of marriage was lowered to 9; the weight of a woman's testimony in a criminal

15 trial was halved against a man's; divorce, abortion, inheritance and custody rights were slashed; several academic fields and careers were banned to women; and the Islamic dress code was reinstituted. Public spaces in Tehran, including buses, were segregated by gender, and the faithful's fists pumped into the air, punctuating Friday prayers with "death to America" chants. Credit for the discovery of this wicked double helix - the pairing of dramatic acts of anti-Americanism with an insidious assault on women, which subsequently infiltrated the DNA of fundamentalists throughout the region - goes to Ayatollah Khomeini. Early in his long career, he gave speech after speech about the "toxic" influence of the Pahlavi monarchy on the nation's family values - the ayatollah's euphemism for the growing freedoms of women under the shah. But Khomeini's anti-feminist diatribe did not catch the public's imagination. What catapulted him to national stature began with his fiery criticism of a 1964 decree, known as the "capitulation law," that gave diplomatic immunity to non-diplomatic U.S. personnel working in Iran. "They have reduced the Iranian people to a level lower than that of an American dog," went one of the ayatollah's most memorable lines from the first of a series of speeches in which his anti-imperialist tenor steadily grew. By 1978, when his journeys through exile landed him in France, he no longer sounded like his misogynist self of a decade earlier. Now Khomeini cast himself as a nationalist in the image of Mahatma Gandhi, fighting the foreign powers that were plundering his motherland. His anti-Americanism lifted him to nationwide leadership, and he set to work on his earlier agenda. Days after his arrival in Tehran in February 1979, he issued an order to abolish women's freedom in dress and to bring back the mandatory hijab. After protests broke out and were widely reported by the international media, he retreated. Nine months later, the U.S. Embassy was seized in Tehran. As the news media became consumed by the fate of the 52 American hostages there, the ayatollah again ordered the dress code. This time, when all eyes were averted, he succeeded. Two factors have since veiled the U.S. perspective on the region: The first is the expression of anti-Americanism, which sends the rejected American psyche into a downward spiral of introspection over feckless U.S. policies and leads to inaction. The second is the use of Islam as a wall of privacy, behind which oppressors act with impunity. Both factors function, in great part, as a disguise. Behind them, where women are concerned, all the seemingly unbridgeable divides merge seamlessly to connect Sunni Saudi Arabia to Shiite Iran. Thus far, the Arab Spring has brought a severe frost to women's rights. In Libya, women are grossly underrepresented in the new government. In Egypt, the image of a female protester, her blue bra exposed as she was dragged through the streets of Cairo in December 2011, has become a new symbol of brutality against women. The March 2012

16 acquittal of a military doctor accused of carrying out virginity tests on female detainees attests to the prevalence of state-sponsored violence toward women. In Tunisia, the rise of the Islamist Ennahda party has come with alarming public displays of intolerance for freedom of speech. In the new draft constitution - unlike its 1959 predecessor, which held men and women as equals - a woman is defined as the "complement with the man in the family and an associate to the man in the development of the country." These pressures will inevitably lead to acts of rebellion. In the Semnan region of Iran a few weeks ago, a cleric passing two women, and told one to cover her head better, according to an Iranian news agency report. The woman, punching him to the ground, told him to cover his eyes. Western politicians can apologize for crooked policies and retreat into passivity for fear of committing new errors, which are bound to be deemed as new sins by future generations. Yet none will change the elemental facts. The notion of an Islamic democracy is merely another euphemism for turning women into lesser citizens, and it ought to be deemed as unjust and anti-democratic as America before the end of racial segregation. "Terrorism" is only one manifestation of the evil that the world hopes to root out from the region where part-time terrorists have always been full-time chauvinists. The real enemy is misogyny. Malala Yousafzai is not just a teenager in Pakistan's Swat Valley but a victim of the greatest apartheid of our time, and a wounded warrior in feminism's newest front line.

“The Ayatollah’s Disarming Wit,” The New York Times January 13, 2014

Every tourist who visits Iran has three common observations: The women are stunning, the traffic is maddening, and, after oil, humor is the major industry. On the streets and in taxicabs, political jokes abound. No one, especially the leadership, is spared, and no perspective is more telling or reliable than the anonymous satirist’s. A popular joke during the last presidential election invited Syrians also to vote: “After all, our president will be your finance minister, too!” Even Ayatollah , whose dour and scowling face is what many associate with the Islamic Revolution, was said to be a connoisseur of satire. In a recent interview with the website Jamaran, one of Ayatollah Khomeini’s close confidants,

17

Mahmoud Doayee, revealed that the leader demanded to hear the jokes about him, even laughing heartily at times. To him, they were the sociocultural weather vane of all that needed “correcting,” which at times meant “eliminating.” Long before there was a fatwa against the British novelist Salman Rushdie, there was an official death threat against Iran’s best-known satirist, Hadi Khorsandi, who had allegedly insulted Muhammad. Mr. Khorsandi, who fled Iran in 1980 and resettled in Britain, told of the day the police in London called to warn of a plot against him: “Their best advice was to never be on time for any appointments! I laughed and said, ‘A half-hour delay is in the makeup of the Iranian character.’ The detective sighed and said, ‘Then God help you, because your killers are Iranian, too!”’ As early as the mid-1970s, the ayatollah began to methodically undermine the regime of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi by following the advice of the philosopher Jean Paul, who said, “Freedom begets wit, and wit begets freedom.” He first set out to weaken the shah with words before actually driving him from the palace in January 1979. The shah had been the muse of the poets, but his impeccable wardrobe and fine manners provided little material for the satirists. Irreverence was the ayatollah’s main weapon in his war against elitism. Ayatollah Khomeini never referred to the shah by his royal titles, addressing him by his first name, or worse yet, as “little man.” Soon, the nation ceased to call the shah “the king of kings,” or “the shadow of God on earth.” In revolutionary slogans, the shah was reduced to “Mohammed the nose,” a reference that shattered the sanctity of the royal family. The monarchy had symbolized civility and beauty, but the new theocratic order embraced all that was drab as a way to honor the masses. The ayatollah banned music and chess and relegated contemporary art to storage. He stated the same trite ideas so many times that he inspired a new genre of jokes — lampooning the obvious passed off as pearls of wisdom — that found its way into Iran’s graffiti: “A minibus is smaller than a bus! — Ayatollah Khomeini.” While, at one time, the shah had placed himself a class above the rest and was deemed “the other,” the clerics remain in power in part because they are deemed the nation’s “errant children,” whom, as a visiting friend once said to me, “one can’t disown.” The common touch of the revolutionary regime, its ability to appear good-humored and down to earth, is one secret of its survival. Former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a lifelong Shiite seminarian, has been ranked among the richest people in Iran. Yet Iranians’ reaction to his mysteriously amassed wealth is only occasionally one of outrage. Instead, they joke about Mr. Rafsanjani’s hairlessness, a sign of femininity, calling him “the shark” — by way of alluding to his sleek pate. Had he not punctuated every speech and interview with an anecdote or a

18 joke, as well as wearing a robe and turban, it is unlikely that Iranians would have been so tolerant. Other leaders, to prove and maintain “revolutionary” credentials, have acted like fools publicly. In 1980, Iran’s representative at the United Nations took his sock and shoe off during a speech to the assembly. And former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s declaration that a 16-year-old girl had invented the atomic bomb in her basement inspired this line: “The plan to issue a stamp to honor Ahmadinejad has been canceled because no one knows which side of the stamp to spit on!” When asking why Iranians tolerate a regime more brutal than the one they overthrew in 1979, humor may explain a great deal. Tyrants need to dress, behave and speak in tyrannical ways to inspire a rebellion. It’s possible to feel heroic when opposing an evil regime headed by a self-serious monarch, but not so easy to do so when confronted by one run by a band of clowns.

“A Cappuccino With the C.I.A.,” The New York Times

March 25, 2014

The invitation came in an email, written in the ingratiating tone of the Nigerian prince looking to wire his millions into my checking account, and delivered the same jolt of giddy disbelief: Officers of the Near East Affinity Group at the Central Intelligence Agency wanted me to address them on a variety of topics, including Persian poetry and literature. My day with them would be as long or as short as I wished it to be, and could include a tour of the C.I.A. museum, a luncheon and a visit to the gift shop. This detail made it clear the email was not spam: “Due to the budget constraints we are unable to pay a speaker’s fee, however we can reimburse the cost of travel, lodging and meals.” For some 17 years, I’d been an editor for a Persian magazine whose chief was accused by Tehran of running it with $20 million from the C.I.A. Now the agency had truly come knocking, but destitute; and the Persian magazine had gone under 10 years earlier. To be a guest at the very place I had been taught to revile as a teenager in post- revolutionary Iran, to walk the halls of the universally feared agency seemed revolutionary indeed. I accepted the invitation. In the hotel lobby on the morning of the talk, I anticipated that a Pierce Brosnan type would materialize out of thin air. Instead, some minutes passed before I spotted a

19 round, flustered, middle-aged man, bearing an uncanny resemblance to my balding beloved uncle, pacing at the entrance. We shook hands and walked to the most unremarkable beige sedan on the lot, one that opened with a key. I glanced at the tight row of teddy bears in the back seat and wondered what had become of the Aston Martin. In the heavy beltway traffic, as my avuncular companion regaled me with tales of his childhood in New York, then his marriage to a brilliant scientist, we quickly developed a warm rapport. His easy nature struck me as being unsuited for the business of secrecy and intrigue. But I quickly realized that the spy of my imagination was very different from the one before me. At the gates, I was received as bureaucracies always receive — with official befuddlement. Several weeks of planning and yet my name did not appear on the roster of the day’s visitors. Getting in required several minutes and the surrender of all of my electronics: cellphone, iPad and the laptop on which I had saved my talking points. After we stepped across the famous seal, my host offered me coffee before the talk. As he ushered me through the lobby, the sight of the familiar Starbucks sign momentarily stunned me. While we hovered at the bar, chatting amid the gurgle of frothing milk, folks were queuing up at other fast-food places; the headquarters at Langley reminded me of a suburban mall. The officers had come with books in hand and behaved as all enthusiastic audiences do — smiling sympathetically, full of questions and compliments, quoting my own sentences back to me, meticulously spelling their names while I autographed copies of my books. A few native Iranians among them came to greet me, but then parted without extending the usual invitations for a future meal or to stay in touch. As I read my prose aloud, laughter burst forth on cue and tears glistened in the eyes of the agents, most of whom were in their late 20s and 30s. They were genuinely curious and asked about what had happened to the characters since my books were published. But the usual hard questions — about Iran’s nuclear ambitions and the possibility of war — never came. We never drifted into the dark thicket that conversations about Iran always seem to lead to. I did my best to offer a portrait of the “other”: that Iranians resembled them and aspired to the same things in life they did. In our third and final hour, the Persian speakers, fluent and not-so-fluent, reached into their pockets and unfolded papers on which they had painstakingly copied some verses. We did our best to extract what intelligence we could from their metaphors and similes. It occurred to me that I had never asked my host how or why he had come upon me. “Google!” he exclaimed. “We had heard an earful from too many men on the same exhausted topics. I went looking for something completely different than the usual.” As I said goodbye, the usual exchange of the business cards did not take place. My host, the likable anti-Bond, offered all his contact information. He left ample time for a

20 stop at the gift shop, where, from the heaps of agency memorabilia, I bought a set of salt and pepper shakers from the sale shelf. Months have passed since that purchase, and the set reminds me of the day that I met the great and powerful Oz of my adolescence and had a glimpse of his human face.

“How Iran Kept Its Jews,” Tablet December 30, 2014 It was with a murder that the most critical moment in the modern history of Iranian Jewry took shape. And in what followed, Tehran’s policy toward the local Jewish community, still precariously in effect, came into being. The day was May 9, 1979, nearly three months after the victory of the Iranian revolution in the previous February. In those early days, dread filled the hearts of readers as they glanced at the morning papers. Every day, the image of a newly executed corpse accompanied the lede. Nothing like a visual cocktail of brutality and indignity to remind the citizenry of the new order of things—bare torsos of ministers and army generals riddled with bullets, splayed on stone slabs in unzipped pants. On May 9, there was the corpse of a leading Jewish figure, the industrialist Habib Elghanian. His crime: friendship with Israel, Zionists, and the enemies of God, and sowing corruption on earth. What made Elghanian’s execution particularly shocking was that he had been profoundly loyal to and grounded in Iran. His strength strengthened the community for he had much influence among Jews and non-Jews alike. His confidence was not his alone. It was the confidence of a people. One of a handful of visionaries, he had helped modernize the country. Above all, he had introduced plastic to Iran’s manufacturing. Because of all of this and many more such contributions, he assumed that the nation’s gratitude rendered him immune against any malice. On the morning of Elghanian’s execution, ripples of fear shook the foundation of the community as a whole. Everyone was wondering who would be next. Everyone worried that Elghanian’s fate, like his confidence, belonged to all. Within hours, the community’s leaders took the most serious measure they knew. They resolved to face their fears by paying a visit to Ayatollah Khomeini in the hopes of receiving his personal guarantee about their safety. In those days, the ayatollah had yet to move to Tehran and still resided in Qom, Shiite Iran’s equivalent of the Vatican. An ad- hoc assembly, consisting of two rabbis and four young intellectuals sympathetic to the revolutionary cause, was selected for the task. The four young Jews intended to tell the ayatollah that they were not political Zionists and saw no other homeland for themselves other than Iran. The rabbis, on the other hand, merely wanted to plead with him to be

21 good to the community and to tell him of one of the lesser-known pillars of Judaism: “True Jews are ones who share in the wishes of the society in which they live.” And now that Iranian society wished to establish an Islamic republic, so did every good Jew. On May 10, before sunrise, the group piled into a station wagon and headed for Qom. They vowed, no matter what transpired, not to leave the ayatollah until they had heard words of assurance: a statement with which to hearten the community of their security under the new regime. They arrived late in the afternoon, delayed only by a stop to purchase fresh socks as they realized they had to remove their shoes to enter the ayatollah’s quarters. The residence was empty of the usual throng of disciples and pilgrims. The delegates soon learned that the quiet was in honor of their visit. Waiting was unnecessary. They were immediately guided into the press room and had yet to seat themselves on the rug when the ayatollah entered. Stunned in his presence, the envoys began to fumble. The rabbis rose to their feet. In a gesture of deference, the ayatollah insisted on remaining standing as long as his counterparts had not sat first. The rabbis, in return, refused to sit, following Persian etiquette, before a man of such stature. So was that afternoon’s spirit of civility. And solemnity. It was, after all, a dead man who had brought them all together. When they had at last arranged themselves in a circle on the floor, one of the rabbis addressed the ayatollah. He congratulated him on his victory against the shah and expressed the community’s joy in the new order. As Persian speeches usually conclude with a poem, so did the rabbi end his with a verse. In it, the prophets were likened to the sun and the moon, and the wise clergy to the brightest of the stars. Then the ayatollah spoke: “All three prophets were sent by God to guide mankind. All those heretical religions on earth never tended to the soul of mankind. But the three monotheistic religions do. They are the only religions to descend directly from heaven. They have an instruction about every aspect of human life. That’s what they have in common.” He went on for a while, at times seeming to perfectly derail from the theme the visitors had hoped he would focus on, until he finally came to it: “In the holy Quran, Moses, salutations upon him and all his kin, has been mentioned more than any other prophet. Prophet Moses was a mere shepherd when he stood up to the might of pharaoh and destroyed him. Moses, the Speaker-to-Allah, represented pharaoh’s slaves, the downtrodden, the mostazafeen of his time.” The moment the ayatollah used the celebrated term mostazafeen, the equivalent of the Marxist “proletariat” to refer to the enslaved Israelites, the men became confident that their long journey had not been in vain. That day, the ayatollah ended his remarks with these words: “Moses would have nothing to do with these pharaoh-like Zionists who run Israel. And our Jews, the descendants of Moses, have nothing to do with them either. We recognize our Jews as separate from those godless, bloodsucking Zionists.” The prize at last! We recognize our Jews as separate from those godless Zionists! — Imam Khomeini was painted on the walls of every synagogue, Hebrew school, and kosher butcheries by nightfall.

22

This quotation has yet to be recognized as one of the most life-sparing in modern history. But it is. The fledgling regime’s position on the Jews was determined in that speech, and it has remained in effect 35 years since it was first spoken. In light of it, Iranian Jewry remain physically safe. But that is about all. The sea change of laws that swept through the country since 1979 has made it impossible for Jews, or any non-Shiite people, including Iranian Sunnis, to thrive. There were some 100,000-plus Jews living in Iran in the 1970s. They were, for the most part, visible as Jews, proud as Iranians, and lived throughout the country. Today, despite the bloated governmental statistics of 25,000, no more than 10,000 continue to live there. They are no longer visible. And they have retreated into only two or three major cities. By Western standards, Iranian Jews are an endangered species on the verge of extinction. But you will not see any bumper stickers or lapel buttons about their plight.

***

Why revisit this bygone tale now? It is not the first time in history that a population has been uprooted from its original land, much less so in the history of the Middle Eastern Jewry. But as the biblical tradition of retelling and reexamining mandates, the question must be asked: Why is this community different from all the rest? After all, despite the most vehement, vociferous, and steadfast support Iran has given to lethal anti-Israeli groups, such as Hezbollah, and despite the denials of the Holocaust that various officials have spewed, Iran remains one of two remaining strongholds for Jews in the Middle East outside of Israel. Jews live in Iran because they nearly always have. Their historical claim to the land is far greater than that of Muslims. Iran was home to the Jews who escaped the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E., long before Islam had come into being. This history makes Iran a most longstanding home for them. The regime, too, prefers to keep Iran home for the Jews. It needs to substantiate its claim to “Islamic civility.” It needs to prove itself a leader in the region, in part by way of differentiating itself from its predominantly Arab neighbors. To stand in contrast against the rest of the Arab nations in the region, Tehran reaches for what it is not entitled to or has even been known to shun. When necessary, it has oddly invoked the glory and power of the Persian Empire and emphasized the Persian- ness of Iran, its uniqueness, its capacity to exercise benevolent tolerance, to debunk unsavory accusations, including anti-Semitism. To do all that, the existence of Jews makes an excellent piece of evidence, a living political “citation.” We recognize our Jews as separate from those godless Zionists! —Imam Khomeini Iran is a nation of nearly 70 million, among whom the Jews make up .01 percent of the population. Looking at Iran through this tiny opening, a new perspective appears upon

23 the tired landscape. Hardly any other case is more telling about Tehran than the history of its dealing with the Jewish community since 1979, for yellowcake can take the quest only so far. Through the lens of religious minority, any non-Shiite community really, the hypocrisy of a regime that touts itself as the champion of the downtrodden of the world is entirely exposed. And Iran, which is repeatedly referred to as enigmatic, is enigmatic no more. The fact that the Jewish community has shrunk to quarter of its original size speaks to the overall grim, mostly economic, realities of life not only for Jews or religious minorities, but for all Iranians who are not on the side of “them.” (“They” and “them” are the insiders’ reference to the regime.) The fact that the community, unlike most others in the region, did not vanish and continues to exist attests to a unique truth: Iranian Jews recognized that they had not been singled out to suffer in the aftermath of the fall of the Pahlavi dynasty in 1979. And, in many complex ways, they have sometimes fared better than, say, secular Iranians of Shiite descent, who stood in opposition to the regime. The destiny of Iranian Jews was not politically retailed. Rather, in a socially wholesale fashion, the stocks of Jewish existence plummeted alongside with those of millions of other Iranians, with some particularly distinct features, of course. The post-revolutionary laws and constitution were written in such a way as to give the greatest advantage to Shiites. And non-Shiites—including Muslim Sunnis—are, by default, relegated to second-class citizenry. So, the Jews stayed because the cliché applied here too: Misery loved company. And, because Jews recognized that they were not alone in their post-revolutionary misery, they continue to keep the company of their compatriots This tragic camaraderie is backed by statistics. In a region where hostilities against Israel have been steadily growing, in a country that has an official holiday called Qods Day set against Israel’s Independence Day, where people are encouraged to take to the streets and protest Israel’s existence, the Anti-Defamation League’s 2014 Global Index of anti- Semitism places Iran as the least anti-Semitic nation in the Middle East and North Africa region. The suggestion that Iranians reject what their government recommends came in an extensive report by Timothy Garton Ash in the New York Review of Books more than 10 years ago. In his travels to Iran, Ash had found a highly sexualized society, despite the official attempts at modesty and self-control, been invited to an orgy, and, among others, made an unusual observation: “The regime has spent twenty-five years trying to make these young Iranians deeply pro-Islamic, anti-American, anti-Western, and anti-Israeli. As a result, most of them are resentful of Islam (at least in its current, state-imposed form), rather pro-American, and have a friendly curiosity about Israel.” In 2006, when the war between Hezbollah and Israel broke out and people throughout the Middle East were conducting violent protests against Israel, a New York Times front-page story reported that there were no such protests in Iran. Later, Iranian protesters were heard chanting an unprecedented and politically costly slogan: “Neither Gaza, nor Lebanon. I give my life only for Iran.” The ADL report confirms this watershed shift of public opinion in Iran. The disenchantment of the nation in its ruling elite translates into choosing the exact opposite of what the official propaganda advises the nation to believe, think, and do. The lower the

24 popularity of the regime plummets, the higher goes the esteem of the people in everything the leadership shuns and is against. This can be a mere reflexive reactionary response and nothing more or deeper. But it’s a start. And at the very least it paves the way for an unprecedented moment for Iranians to hear something other than the usual official propaganda, something resembling the truth.

The Joy of Mastering Clichés in English April 24, 200512:00 AM ET Commentary heard on NPR All Things Considered ROYA HAKAKIAN Iranian-born commentator Roya Hakakian remembers the daunting goal she set for herself — becoming a writer in English. Although nervous about her command of our language, Hakakian signed up for a poetry class with beat generation poet at . Hakakian was delighted when Ginsberg trashed her first writing sample as riddled with "clichés" and "overused adjectives." She was thrilled to have mastered the trite phrase: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4617873

25