Iran Forum: No to War! No to Crippling Sanctions! Yes to the Iranian Civil Rights Movement

The American Iranian
Friendship Council presents

Iran Forum:

No
to War! No to Crippling Sanctions!

Yes
to the Iranian Civil Rights Movement

Room190, School of
Business Administration,

Portland State University

631 SW Harrison St.
Portland, OR 97201

Saturday, July 10, 2010
at 6 PM

While US and EU expanded the United Nations
Security Council’s resolution to impose further sanctions on Iran,
reports from many sources including a recent article by Noam Chomsky are
indicating that the threats of a military strike on Iran is as close as
it has ever been.  The President Obama’s campaign promises
of engagement with Iran have now replaced with Secretary Clinton’s
campaign promises of toughening sanctions against the country and so
called “massive retaliation”.

Dr. Hamid Dabashi is the
Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies
and Comparative Literature at Columbia
University in New York. He was born in Ahvaz, Iran . After
attending college in Tehran he received a dual Ph.D. in Sociology
of Culture and Islamic Studies from the University
of Pennsylvania in 1984, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship
at Harvard University.

Since last year’s disputed elections in Iran Professor Dabashi
has become a prominent voice in major media outlets, such as CNN
and the New York Times, to narrate “the civil rights
movement” in Iran, a term he used for the first time to define the Green
movement. In explaining the Green Movement he wrote: “With the ring of that simple but resounding question, "Where
is my vote?" millions of Iranians have forced the hand of the Islamic
Republic, exposing its naked brutality. If the world were to listen and
watch carefully, it would see that the ancient Greek theory of
democracy; the French Revolution's cry for liberty, equality and
fraternity; the American revolt against despotism and tyranny; and
ultimately the American Civil Rights
Movement of the 1950s and 1960s are today all resonating in the Iranian
cry for freedom.”

Dabashi believes that “This movement has been decades, if not centuries, in the
making. And it needs no American money to sustain itself. The only thing
it needs is the moral voice of the American civil rights movement to come to its
aid.” In objecting to US funding of interference in Iran’s
internal affairs Dabashi writes: “Whatever the fate of
the Islamic republic, the noble cause of civil liberties will remain
constant in Iran and will emerge as a model for the region. By wedding
the freshly cut flower of Neda Aqa-Soltan's young life in the fertile
soil
of Rosa Parks' memory, Iranians and Americans will finally come
together in their common dreams of basic human decency.”

It's sometimes assumed
by neo-orientalist commentators that people who are struggling in the
Middle East are either white man's agents, or ignorant
fundamentalists against the outside's world.  Hamid Dabashi
has said it so perfectly: “Perhaps the single most important problem
with American politics, policymakers and pundits -- left or right,
liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican -- is that they think
that anything that happens anywhere in the world is about them or is
their business. The imperial hubris that seems definitive of the DNA of
this political culture wants either to invade and occupy other people's
homelands and tell them what to do, or else disregard people's
preoccupation with their own issues and impose, demand and exact
"engagement" with them, whether they want it or
not." 

Professor Dabashi has written more than 20 books, edited 4, and
contributed to many more. Dabashi’s books include Authority in Islam; Theology of Discontent;
Truth and Narrative; Close Up: Iranian Cinema; Staging
a Revolution: The Art of Persuasion in the Islamic
Republic of Iran; and Iran: a People Interrupted. http://www.hamiddabashi.com

Mehdi Saharkhiz is a
graphic designer, photographer, journalist and blogger from Iran who now
lives in the United States. Initially not political, he was inspired by his father, Isa
Saharkhiz, to become involved. The elder Saharkhiz, a prominent Iranian
journalist and former spokesman for Mehdi Karroubi, is an
outspoken leader in the pro-democracy Green movement.  He
was arrested last July in follow up to the disputed presidential
elections and remains in prison.

A unique feature of the Green movement is the
fact that in the absence of the professional reporters citizen
journalists report first-hand accounts from the streets of Iran,
responding to the movement’s call for “everyone to be the media”.  Since
the beginning of the uprising Mehdi Saharkiz has uploaded more than
2,600 separate “citizen journalism” video clips to his
YouTube site. http://onlymehdi.saharkhiz.net

This event is made
possible in part by a generous grant from

 the McKenzie River
Gathering Foundation (www.MRG.org) .