Nobel Prize Ceremony - An
Opportunity Missed
By: Potkin
Azarmehr
Shirin Ebadi's Nobel Peace
Prize acceptance ceremony was a huge opportunity missed for all the
Iranians who have suffered human rights abuses in the last 24 years of
the Islamic dictatorship in Iran.
The reason for this is
non-other than what seems to be a genetic disease seen in a large number
of older generation Iranians who forget the plight of their own people
but prefer to take up the cause of others.
1400 years ago a dispute
broke up between two Arabs over a girl by the name of Orayneb. One Arab
was the ruling Khalif and the other was the grandson of the Arab
prophet. The two sides met each other in Karbala and in the usual Arab
custom, killed as many of each other as they could, including the women
and the children. Now most of the Arab world has forgotten the incident
but many Iranians still mourn the event by beating themselves and
cutting their foreheads open with daggers. Yet there is no such ceremony
for any of our own heroes throughout 2500 years of history, which has
produced many heroic figures. We have no national days to honour them,
we have no ceremonies to commemorate them and to teach posterity about
the values of putting Iran first and foremost. To give an analogy to a
non-Iranian it is as if the Jewish people forgot the victims of
holocaust and their own heroes and instead mourned the death of 72
German generals and soldiers at some insignificant battle. Laughable
wouldn't you say?
And so it was in the same
tradition that Shirin Ebadi, forgot about the plight of our own people,
the massacre of political prisoners in September 1988, the virgin girls
who were raped before facing Islamic execution squads to prevent them
from entering heaven, the imprisoned students and activists, the
forgotten war veterans who gave all they had to defend the motherland,
the poverty of Iran's street children, the youth who have been publicly
flogged, and instead what did she talk about? The Palestinians, and
those incarcerated in Guantanamo bay! As if there aren’t enough people
already who are signed up to their cause.
The older generation who
got us in this mess with their extra strong revolutionary zeal is once
again keeping us trapped in this Islamic dictatorship by putting our own
people and our own future at the end of the queue.
Perhaps one day they will
learn that charity begins at home. Lets free our own people first then
worry about the terror suspects incarcerated at Guantanamo. Or as
Iranians continuously chant in the street demos "Let Palestine be,
Spare a thought for us first"
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