NO VALENTINES FOR YOU! Yesterday Tunis, Today Tahrir Square, Tomorrow Tehran?

Faster, Please! » Yesterday Tunis, Today Tahrir Square, Tomorrow Tehran?

by Michael Ledeen Feb. 13, 2011

Just as the anecdotal broken clock rings true twice a day, so Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei got it right last Friday at his rare cameo appearance at prayers when he said that Iran had inspired the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia (and he could have added Jordan and Yemen, where the inspiration has been more material than ideological).

Except that he had the inspiration all wrong (indeed he had it inside-out and backwards). It wasn’t, as he claimed, Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution that inspired many of the demonstrators in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, but rather the mass movement that started in 2009 in defiance of the theocratic tyrants who rule the country.

But Khamenei was right in saying that there was now an active insurrection all over the Middle East, and there is clearly an interplay between the demonstrators from one country to another. As Wael Ghonim, the poster boy of the Egyptian uprising, said to the Iranians, we hope to inspire you, as you have inspired us. And there is little doubt that the Tunisian and Egyptian examples have spurred the Iranian Greens to be more ambitious and perhaps more aggressive. Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, the most public Green leaders, requested a permit to demonstrate in support of the peoples of Egypt and Tunisia. It was a clever maneuver, since the supreme leader himself had praised the Arab insurrections, and if — as one could have predicted — the regime nixed the request, then the Greens had a fine example of theocratic hypocrisy.

Then the Greens went further, and called for mass demonstrations for tomorrow, Saint Valentine’s Day. This carried an additional layer of symbolism, for the regime, terrified as it is by any act of love or mere fun, had banned all Valentine’s Day celebrations. Moreover, as the right to assemble and express oneself is guaranteed by the constitution of the Islamic Republic, the Greens are entirely within their rights to demonstrate.

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