Tehran Glitter
I’m not going to get into my histrionic reasons, but I’ve been obsessed with the ‘79 Iranian Hostage Crisis for as long as anyone who knows me has known me.
Ask anybody at work: I have a weathered photo from the crisis taped up on the door of my office. And at home, I have framed pictures from the NYT’s and Time magazine’s contemporaneous coverage. That’s how goofy I am about Tehran ‘79. (Man, I even wrote a 4-minute “operetta” about the whole thing—which I had performed at the Seattle Composer’s Salon in 2002.)
I will say this: Both in 1979—as a precocious kid—and to this day, I sympathize/d with “The Students.” They had a direct (and justified) connection to the mid-20th Century’s beautiful upheaval against the old guard.
There’s been a wave of new books about the crisis published in the last two years. And with titles like “Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America’s War With Militant Islam” & “The Crisis: The President, The Prophet, and The Shah—1979 and the Coming of Militant Islam,” it’s apparent why there’s renewed interest in the 27-year-old event.
In a review of Guests of the Ayatollah in The NYT Book Review this Sunday, there was a beautiful passage that I’ve been waiting for since 2001:
“The seizure of the embassy was a form of political expression, if a violent and, in the end, extraordinarily cruel one. The students wanted to say something to America and the West; that’s why they argued with the hostages rather than beheading them. The terrorists who plant bombs on the London subway have nothing to say.”
While I dug the Iranian students, I have zero sympathy or “understanding” for bin laden and the fascist al qaeda movement. Zero. They are right wing reactionary thugs; “Reactionary Utopianism” as Christopher Hitchens accurately calls it. Those who claim to “understand” al qaeda’s anger are knee-jerk pseudo leftist morons. (I’m sorry, but mouthing convenient oppostion to America’s support of Israel is not a get out of jail free card for messianic fascism.)
The U.S. backed the Mujahadeen insurgency in Afghanistan. While trite leftists think that makes the U.S. hypocritical—it actually makes the U.S. consistent.
You are defending a childhood fantasy.
The "students" of '79 are the Islamofascists of today. There is a factual and historic continuity between the two.
You are kidding yourself if you think otherwise.