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Green to Black: Massive Turnout for Day of Mourning in Tehran
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According to my friend and colleague, Afshin Molavi, Mir-Hossein Mousavi's decision to call for a massive "mourning" day honoring those who have died during the election protests sends a powerful political message to Iran's citizens linking back to the Iranian Revolution 30 years ago.
As Molavi told me, in Shia culture, martyrs are honored on the third day, the seventh day, and the fortieth day after their death. This 3-7-40 tribute to fallen martyrs killed by the Shah's forces was in part how the Iranian Revolution of 1978-79 grew.
Mousavi is now deploying symbols and techniques of Iran's Islamic Revolution to undermine the legitimacy of the institutions of government that have engaged in election fraud.
Today, the green scarves have been replaced by black, the color of mourning, and a former Iranian diplomat in Tehran has just reported to me that those out on the streets supporting Mousavi are now greater today than in any of the other protest marches this past week.
-- Steve Clemons
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Reader Comments (7) - post a comment
Hmmm. Gee, maybe the Palestinians oughta take a lesson here, and have weekly "days of mourning" foir those killed in protest. Think the press would cover it? Sure, yeah, right.
And Tristan Anderson? Hows he stack up in the media roster of the notable tragedies of peaceful protest? Tristan who?
And, uh, maybe its about time we started worrying about our own electoral process. Or is election fraud only notable when it occurs in nations we want to puppetize? Funny, Mousavi is becoming a highly recognized name here in the states, but how many people have heard of Bev Harris?
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7237
CA GOP Voter Registration Firm Head Pleads Guilty to Voter Registration Fraud
certain traditions would appear to hold a lot of value... good for the iranians for having such a vehicle for moving forward, if indeed they are able to move forward in all of this...
How massive was the rally, exactly? Tens of thousands? How does that compare to some of the earlier rallies?
Actually, the press would cover it. They should try it.
Here we see the beginning of the neo-Stalinist attempt to downplay
Iranian dissatisfaction with their government. Why? Because Israel
is also unhappy with the Iranian government. To these fellow
travelers, Khameni was just a "good guy" and Ahmad was trying to
do his job and was a man of the people.
Sad...
On John Kerry's comments: Thank you, Steve, for the post, and thank you John Kerry for being the honest, insightful commentator we first saw in full force when you came back from Viet Nam and addressed the United States Senate (and when you did such first-rate work investigating BCCI). Had America not been suffering from such a widespread case of cephalo-rectal thrustitis, and had Ohio '04 not been Florida '00, we could well already be well on the road to wiser US foreign policy.
There is more than a dime's worth of difference between the Republican and Democratic Parties, maddening as Southern Democrats can often be, but that is a function of the widespread ignorance and narrowness of view of my beloved South. We do great literature and pathetic foreign and domestic policies. We are not the only region of the country with advanced cephalo-rectal thrustitis, however.
Yes, David, we Southerners do Gothic quite well.
That we do, John, that we do.
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