The news from Iran
: The BlogIran newsletter proclaims:
Dear Blogging Compatriots –
This may be the beginning of something big.. Lets cross our fingers! Nobel Peace Prize winner and human rights activist Shirin Ebadi has returned to Tehran. It appears from the latest news reports that thousands of women and others have descended on Tehran’s Mehrabad airport for her homecoming. The masses have begun demonstrating in the face of the regimes killers (basiji) with slogans such as “Marg bar Estebdad” (Down with Dictatorship) “Rafsanjani boro gom sho” (Rafsanjani get lost) “Edalat, Azadi” (Justice, Freedom).
And Hoder says:
The huge crowd of Iranians who gathered in Tehran airport to cheer Shirin Ebadi, Nobel Peace Prize winner, has made me think of her as the best possible leader of the opposition who can even run for presidency next term.
She is extremely popular among ordinary as well as educated people, is a woman who can attract the strongest support of women, is an experienced academic, lawyer, and a human rights activist, is a genuine reformist who opposes to radical change in Iran, and finally she is now a widely known and backed activist in the world (even the US president who has always favored a regime-change over a behavior-change strategy towards Iran) which gives her a great deal of immunity against hardliners, backed by Ayatollah Khamenei, the Supreme Leader.
Although I personally think she is more or less a conservative person in her political framework, she is actually far more radical than Khatami, the current president. The bottom line is that she believes in a secular government and she is backed and advised by a group of secular intellectuals….
And, by the way, in those few weblog paragraphs, I learned more about the state of Iran post-Nobel than I’d learn in 30 column inches of the NY Times.
