Iran

I Used To Make Fun Of Rick Steves

Posted on by Laughingnomad

 I used to make fun of Rick Steves.  No more!

Here are a few gems from a Salon.com interview just in case you don’t want to read to the end:

Salon: “Steves wants Americans to get over themselves. He wants us to please shed our geographic ego. Everybody should travel before they vote,” he has written.”

So if McCain and Palin had won, what would we have seen abroad?”

Steves: “More and more Americans wearing Canadian flags”

LOL.  During 7 years of near constant travel, I used to say I was from Canada.  My husband used to say he was from Iceland.  I always said I wanted a T-shirt that said in 6 languages: “I didn’t vote for Bush.”  Election night there were parties all over Mexico. Now they are watching us.

Steves: “As a travel writer, I get to be the provocateur, the medieval jester. I go out there and learn what it’s like and come home and tell people truth to their face. Sometimes they don’t like it. But it’s healthy and good for our country to have a better appreciation of what motivates other people. The flip side of fear is understanding. And you gain that through travel.”

What’s the most important thing people can learn from traveling?

Steves: “A broader perspective. They can see themselves as part of a family of humankind. It’s just quite an adjustment to find out that the people who sit on toilets on this planet are the odd ones. Most people squat. You’re raised thinking this is the civilized way to go to the bathroom. But it’s not. It’s the Western way to go to the bathroom. But it’s not more civilized than somebody who squats. A man in Afghanistan once told me that a third of this planet eats with spoons and forks, and a third of the planet eats with chopsticks, and a third eats with their fingers. And they’re all just as civilized as one another.”

The “ugly American” thing is associated with how big your country is. There are not just ugly Americans, there are ugly Germans, ugly Japanese, ugly Russians. Big countries tend to be ethnocentric. Americans say the British drive on the “wrong” side of the road. No, they just drive on the other side of the road. That’s indicative of somebody who’s ethnocentric. But it doesn’t stop with Americans. Certain people, if they don’t have the opportunity to travel, always think they’re the norm. I mean, you can’t be Bulgarian and think you’re the norm.

It’s interesting: A lot of Americans comfort themselves thinking, “Well, everybody wants to be in America because we’re the best.” But you find that’s not true in countries like Norway, Belgium or Bulgaria. I remember a long time ago, I was impressed that my friends in Bulgaria, who lived a bleak existence, wanted to stay there. They wanted their life to be better but they didn’t want to abandon their country. That’s a very powerful Eureka! moment when you’re traveling: to realize that people don’t have the American dream. They’ve got their own dream. And that’s not a bad thing. That’s a good thing.

That is certainly true of many people I have talked to around the world and most people I talk to in Mexico who have migrated to the north. The fruit seller speaks a little English. I ask if he has ever worked in the north. Yes, he and others say. Three years. Six years. Ten years, the guy in the tiny mountain village 7 hours from the nearest town in Guatemala says. The guy on the corner of my block whose wife sells tamales worked in the U.S. 30 years. But eventually they usually come back. If given an economic choice they would choose to stay in their own country where they can enjoy their own language, their own culture…and their families. One of my eureka moments. Read More

The Enemy That Almost Isn’t

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Iran: The Enemy That Almost Isn’t
Posted: 23 Feb 2009 02:00 PM PST

Crooks And Liars.com

“One of the things that I’ve found most disconcerting about American news coverage of Iran is the complete disconnect between what our own (and international) intelligence reports say and the almost rapturous assurance by the media and public officials that Iran is heading full bore towards our nuclear annihilation. Sean Paul Kelly @ The Agonist:

The Financial Times is reporting today that Iran has enough uranium for a bomb! Oh dear. Except their reporting is very, very lacking in the physics and engineering department.

Here’s what El Baradei recently said about Iran and the bomb:

SZ: In your report it says that Iran is gaining an ever greater mastery of uranium enrichment. Can the USA and Israel accept the fact that Iran is on the threshold of becoming a virtual nuclear power?

ELBARADEI: The question is, what can they do? What are the alternatives to direct negotiations? As long as we are monitoring their facilities, they cannot develop nuclear weapons. And they still do not have the ingredients to make a bomb overnight.

How hard is it to google this sh*t?

Update: As Paul Kerr, from Total WonKerr, just wrote to me in an email: “Here’s the number of weapons you can make with LEU: zero.” Any questions?

Hurts your “Oooh…be scared of the bogeyman” fear-mongering when you inject actual facts and science into it, doesn’t it? Whirled View and my buddy Cernig look further.

Douglas Saunders at The Globe and Mail looks at how the way we view Iran affects our attitude towards them:

What if the world’s biggest threat, instead of growing in size and menace, simply vanished?

Imagine if Iran, after years of extremism, found itself led by a president who had been elected on a platform of women’s rights, a free press, foreign investment and closer relations with the United States and other Western countries.

Imagine if, in response, the U.S. government made a public, formal apology for the 1953 Central Intelligence Agency overthrow of Iran’s elected government, the act that had sent the country on the path to extremism in the first place.

Imagine if the Iranian people then began holding pro-U.S. demonstrations.

And imagine if that moderate Iranian leader offered to accept peace with Israel, to permanently halt funding of Palestinian militant groups such as Hamas and to submit fully to inspections as it abandons any nuclear-weapons programs in exchange for better relations with America.

Ah, imagine. It could never be so easy. But wait. Don’t I recall something from my pile of newspaper clippings? Ah yes, here it is, and not even yellowed. Amazing how fast we forget things.

Mohammad Khatami, the pro-Western reformist, was elected in 1997.

Madeleine Albright, the U.S. secretary of state, issued the big apology to Iran in March of 2000. “Certainly, in our view, there are no obstacles that wise and competent leadership cannot remove,” she said. “As some Iranians have pointed out, the United States has cordial relations with a number of countries that are less democratic than Iran.”

The pro-American demonstrations, by all reports genuine (and unpunished), took place over several days in 2003. In that spring, Mr. Khatami sent a Swiss official to Washington to make the peace offer. In exchange for recognizing Israel, cutting off Hamas and proving it had abolished any nuclear-weapons plans, Iran wanted an end to sanctions, normal diplomatic relations with the U.S. and recognition of its role in the region.

So what happened? Well, nothing. George W. Bush was president, the Iraq war was just approaching the “mission accomplished” phase, and nobody in the White House thought it would look good to make peace with Iran, a country that only the year before had been made a rhetorical component in Mr. Bush’s “axis of evil.”

As one State Department official directly involved with the Iranian offer told me, “It was like we missed the biggest Middle East peace opportunity of the decade, just so we could keep saying ‘axis of evil.’”[..]

It was physicist Werner Heisenberg who found that the act of observing can affect the nature of the thing being observed. It is likely that simply by looking at Iran as a threat, we’ve made it one. Look again, and it might change.

Maybe it’s time to start looking at Iran a different way.”

The Art Of Obfuscation

Posted on by Laughingnomad

I wondered what my Iranian friends were thinking as I sat squirming in my chair during the indelicate introduction to President Ahmadinejad’s remarks at Columbia University yesterday.

And I squirmed some more trying to follow Ahmadinejad’s obfuscated logic.

And I squirm some more wondering how all this is playing out on the streets of the middle east. If he is trying to “lead the charge” against the U.S. how will this event affect how the Arabic world sees him? And us?

I did laugh, though, when he said Iran didn’t have any gays. But perhaps this isn’t so funny if Iran is hanging them.

And yes, what does the holocaust directly have to do with Palestine? But then my history is fuzzy.

I would have liked to ask him why so many journalists were in jail. And what his ideas are about how to stabilize Iraq.

And I wonder how the women of Iran reacted if they heard his remarks about them.

In the midst of his outrageous denials no one seemed to hear his message to us about our troubling foreign policy. Today he will be at the UN.

The Washington Post this morning has a couple articles with details about the Columbia and National Press Club appearances here.

Shirin Ebadi

Posted on by Laughingnomad

In Bangkok, in April of 2005 at the Thailand Foreign Correspondent’s Club I listened to a talk by Shirin Ebadi…a strong brave woman lawyer who won the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize for defending human rights in Iran. Yesterday the NY Times reported (below) that she has been threatened with arrest if she doesn’t close her Center for Defense of Human Rights in Tehran.

Ms Ebadi is a self declared human rights activist, having already been jailed once, and one of the many attorneys who are working together with many of the nearly 200 journalists who are currently incarcerated in Iran. She said that it is impossible to determine the exact number of people jailed for their human rights work because the statistics are not released by the government and families do not want to tell why their members are in jail for fear of reprisal.

Her most adamant point was that violence and war solves nothing but instead intensifies conflict. She added that Iran is not in a position to pose any danger to any of it’s neighbors. Then she continued by saying that it is left up to various Non-Governmental Organizations in Iran to go into neighboring countries with messages.

In describing her work, Ms Ebadi stressed that “the power of the pen is much stronger than the power of arms…the work of the pen can do more than an entire army,” she said.

“So human rights activists are fighting for the freedom of the pen,” she said. “All societies need freedom of expression…the first stepping stone of democracy.” Regarding Burma, she said that the role of mass media is critical and the media should demand that the democratically elected leader and Nobel Prize winner, Aung San Suu Kyi, be given her freedom from house arrest.

She said it is impossible for one person to make a complete change in a country and any change must take place through the people. “The world is a mirror that reflects the good and bad in us eventually,” she concluded.

I am afraid she will suffer reprisal.
Read More

Walking Out On The Iranian Ambassador

Posted on by Laughingnomad

The Foreign Correspondents Club hosted another panel discussion last night with the Iranian ambassador to Thailand, H.E. Mohsen Pakaein

Western observers were confounded by the surprisingly strong victory in Iran’s recent presidential election by dark-horse candidate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a conservative cleric, mayor of Tehran and former Revolutionary Guard. At his first presidential press conference, Ahmadinejad declared that his victory marked the dawn of a new Islamic revolution that would spread around the world. He also vowed to press ahead with his country�s controversial plans to acquire a uranium enrichment capability, adding that neither he nor Iran would be dictated to by the West.

During the questioning, much of which was hard-hitting, the ambassador gave party-line non-answers….most of it prompted by his sharp-eyed aide sitting by his side. We had recently heard a presentation by Nobel Peace Prize winner Sharon Ebidi from Iran who, as an attorney supporting freedom of the press, told us that they estimate that up to 200 journalists were in prison. So when the ambassador denied any violation of human rights, I got up from my front row center table, turned my back on the ambassador and walked out….many others trickling out quietly after me.

A retired Scottish engineer and human rights worker, a young Russian Jew who fled his “lost generation” and immigrated to Thailand at the age of 28 and a woman who is a Korean/English interpreter and I justly debriefed the talk over beer until well into the morning.

A Talk By Shirin Ebadi

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Bob has been in the north for the last week so I joined the Foreign Correspondents Club the other day as a way of meeting other English speaking people in Bangkok.

Membership is reciprocal with Foreign Correspondents Clubs around the world; I first discovered the club in Phnom Penh, Cambodia a couple years ago. The club provides journalists with a venue and equipment for media activities but also provides memberships for other expats who live abroad or visit often…my category being “retired.” The club, in the penthouse of the Mayeena Building, sponsors activities like talks by visiting personalities like the Dalai Lama, has a bar and restaurant and a collection of English language papers, books and magazines.

So my first visit was to a talk given by Shirin Ebadi, the Muslim activist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003. The talk was very short…the questions by many of the media seemed designed for making their own statements about other governments like Burma, North Korea, the U.S. and Iraq.

Ms Ebidi is a self declared human rights activist (having once been jailed for her activities) and one of the many attorneys who are working together with many of the nearly 200 journalists who are currently incarcerated in Iran. She said that it is impossible to determine the exact number of people jailed for their human rights work because the statistics are not released by the government and families do not want to tell why their members are in jail for fear of reprisal.

Her most adamant point was that violence and war solves nothing but instead intensifies conflict. She added that Iran is not in a position to pose any danger to any of it’s neighbors. Then she continued by saying that it is left up to various Non-Governmental Organizations in Iran to go into neighboring countries with any messages, eg. human rights workers in Iran “are in agreement with Iraq’s Muslim leader, Sistani, who is adamantly advocating separation of church and state in Iraq.”

In describing her work, Ms Ebidi stressed that “the power of the pen is much stronger than the power of arms…the work of the pen can do more than an entire army,” she said. (Most of the people in attendance clapped in agreement when she commented that now that Saddam Hussein is going to be put on trial, the country must put western governments on trial too for collaborating with Hussein when he gassed the Iranians during the seven-year Iran/Iraq war!)

“So human rights activists are fighting for the freedom of the pen,” she said. “All societies need freedom of expression…the first stepping stone of democracy.” Regarding Burma, she said that the role of mass media is critical and the media should demand that the democratically elected leader and Nobel Prize winner, Aung San Suu Kyi, be given her freedom from house arrest.

When asked for her reaction to the Muslim woman in New York City who led a group of Muslim women in prayer over the objections of male Muslim leaders, she said she was not a religious person so she couldn’t comment on religion…but then went on to say that all women should be able to practice their religion the way they want. Islam, like all other religions, can be interpreted differently but any interpretation must be consistent with today’s societies. “What is the true Islam,” she asked? She answered herself by saying that “we all have a small piece of the truth. We must believe in what we are doing and believe in our path and allow the others to follow their own paths.” But then she added that “many use Islam to impose their political will on others.”

The most interesting question was asked by a woman from the BBC. She wanted to know how Ms. Ebidi was able to be critical of Iran, a country, like Thailand, that considers criticism as unpatriotic, without incurring reprisal. Her answer was that sometimes activists are accused of plotting against national security, but that it is impossible for one person to make a complete change in a country and any change must take place through the people. “The world is a mirror that reflects the good and bad in us eventually,” she concluded.

A man at my table was a professor of engineering at a local university. After introducing myself (retired and a traveler) he wondered why I was interested in “this.” I thought it was an interesting question. I was kind of speechless for a moment since the answer seemed so obvious to me. Then I remembered that my son Doug told me that when they got married his Thai wife, Luk, didn’t know who Prime Minister Thaksin was…an example of the lack of general knowledge of and interest in civic affairs. The other person at my table was a woman who worked in the human resources department of an oil company who was going to be doing business with Iran. The man at the table had a slight Indian accent but side-stepped the where are you from question from the woman. I mentioned that I thought the speaker was very “cagey” in her answers…and the guy was delighted with the use of the word “cagey” but I admitted I had no idea how the word came to be used this way! I love this stuff.