Shirin Ebadi's Memoirs

Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi has a keen eye for codified injustice, whether it is embedded in the law of her native Iran or in that of another country, like the United States. If she wasn’t willing to work to rectify injustice wherever she found it, the memoirs of one of the most influential and inspiring people of our time, Iran Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope, would never have been published. Anywhere.

Ebadi could not publish her work in the Islamic Republic of Iran because of official censorship in that country. Because of arcane rules of the U.S. economic embargo against Iran (these also apply to a few other countries), any U.S. citizen who assisted her in readying her manuscript for publication or in advertising it for sale here would have been committing a crime.

Unwilling to apply for a special exemption to the rule, Ebadi filed a lawsuit in federal court to challenge the provision that limits Americans’ access to information about countries the government seeks to isolate from the international community. The U.S. Treasury Department eased the restriction before the court could declare it unconstitutional.

The effect of embargo on Americans’ access to information from countries such as Iran makes it even harder for us to find voices such as Ebadi’s that differ from the strident arguments put forth by fundamentalist governments and organizations (whether the fundamentalism is political or religious).

Ebadi and other Iranian intellectuals take their responsibility to expose the rest of the world to the complexities of life and thought in Iran seriously. Because diplomats serve the regime which rarely reflects the “true opinions of the people. The responsibility falls, then, on unofficial ambassadors to relate Iranians’ perceptions and hopes to the world (127).”

Ebadi believes the Nobel Peace Prize rewarded her for a life devoted to service based on “the belief in a positive interpretation of Islam, and the power of that belief to aid Iranians who aspire to peacefully transform their country (204).”

Ebadi’s case is particularly important to those who want to understand revolution and its aftermath in Iran. Unlike many Iranian intellectuals and activists who came of age in the 1970s, Ebadi supported Ayatolloh Ruhollah Khomeini’s revolutionary faction and aims during the struggle against Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. While most readers will probably not be surprised that a well educated, ethical judge would have opposed Iran’s old regime, it is surprising that a woman who occupied a responsible position in the judiciary would have supported Khomeini rather than another opposition leader.

It only took a month of Khomeini’s rule to show Ebadi just how misguided she had been in thinking, for example, that the restrictions on women wouldn’t apply to women like her who had played an active role in bringing the cleric to power. The chapters of the book devoted to her transformation from true believer to opposition leader are particularly interesting.

Through stories about her personal experiences and the cases she has handled after being removed from her position as judge, Ebadi shows that the absurdities (according to her own judgment) that are embodied in laws on women’s personal status, which have been justified by Islamic law in Iran and other countries, are not based on the only possible interpretation of these codes.

For example, Ebadi drafted new legislation on divorce that, if adopted, would have allowed women to divorce husbands without ther permission and for incompatibility (an option currently available only to men in Iran) as well as insanity or infertility. The law, although based on extensive research in texts that are the basis of the education of Shi’ite clerics, was not enacted, and when Ebadi was called to a meeting with a committee of parliamentarians to discuss the proposal, conservative members threw her out of the meeting.

While most of Ebadi’s examples focus attention on restrictions on women’s dress and behavior, it is important to note that such restrictions also apply to men. For example, the Afghan Taliban required men to wear beards that not all men are physically capable of growing (dramatically illustrated in Kandahar, Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s heavy handed film about Taliban rule in Afghanistan). The killing of three Iraqi tennis players clad in shorts this week followed shortly upon the posting of warnings that Islam forbids the wearing of shorts in the Baghdad neighborhood they were passing through.

Ebadi has had an eventful life and she is a generous storyteller. She relates her family and friends’ experiences of repression, war, emigration, reform and opposition including personal details like the difficulty she had remembering to take her headscarf with her when she left the house in the morning, the reason she doesn’t stay in touch with friends who no longer live in Iran and her worries that her daughters would be enamored by the excitement of mass protest.

She also knows, or has defended, most of the opposition activists the world community has heard of. She counted as friends many of the intellectuals who were almost killed in a pre-arranged bus accident while traveling to a conference in Armenia in august 1996. She has represented, for little or no payment, the families of Ezzat Ebrahimnezhad, whose bloodied shirt was immortalized in a photo of Ahmad Batebi that became the iconic image of student protests in 1999, and Iranian-Canadian photographer Zahra Kazemi, who was killed in prison after refusing to hand over film of people waiting for news of their relatives outside Evin Prison in 2003. When she was awaiting her own arrest during her work on Ebrahimnezhad’s case, she drew strength from Akbar Ganji’s statement that serving some time in prison was necessary, “In Iran, he’d warned, unless you are punished before the public, everyone will assume that you collaborate with the regime (174).”

The fates of those who oppose the present regime in Iran are intimately tied to Western foreign policy, but not in the way most Americans might assume, Ebadi cautions. Rather than helping the opposition, Western statements of solidarity with opposition movements often result in even more brutal destruction of the people involved.

As Ebadi put it, Western insistence that military force could be employed to bring down the current rulers of the Islamic Republic of Iran

“endangers nearly all of the efforts democracy-minded Iranians have made in these recent years. The threat of military force gives the system a pretext to crack down on its legitimate opposition and undermines the nascent civil society that is slowly taking shape here. It makes Iranians overlook their resentment of the regime and move behind their unpopular leaders out of defensive nationalism. I can think of no scenario more alarming, no internal shift more dangerous than that engendered by the West imagining that it can bring democracy to Iran through either military might of the fomentation of violent rebellion (214-215).”

Read Shirin Ebadi’s book. Her memoir humanizes Iranians’ social and political dilemmas and in the process, reveals complexities of the situation that should cause readers to question Western leaders’ recent fearmongering, both within their own borders and in the international arena.

Gym Source

Texas Democratic Candidates

One of the Guadalupe County Democratic Club members pointed out in an e-mail to me that most of us probably don't know who the Democratic candidates are for the statewide races. I realized that I didn't, and have set out to find out who the candidates are, not just their names but their ideas for how to revive what I think is a healthy competition between parties (maybe it would be better, even, to have competition among several parties) for seats in state government. I'm not far along in this project, but I did find the list of Democratic candidates for all Texas offices.

Here's the short list (leaving out district candidates, which you will find in profusion at the Democratic Party's Web site):

Barbara Ann Radnofsky for senator
Chris Bell for governor
Maria Luisa Alvarado for lieutenant governor
David Van Os for attorney general
Fred Head for comptroller of public accounts
Hank Gilbert for agriculture commissioner
VaLinda Hathcox for land commissioner
Dale Henry for railroad commissioner
William E. "Bill" Moody for justice, Texas Supreme Court, Pl. 2
J.R. Molina for presiding judge, Court of Criminal Appeals

When I started looking at the candidates' own Web sites, I discovered David Van Os has a blog about his grand Texas tour. He calls the meeting Whistlestops. This link will take you to his report of the stop in Seguin.

I'm guessing that some of you moved to Texas as adults and missed the usual public school courses in government that would help you understand what all of these public servants actually do in their various offices. I looked at the Texas Constitution (the links to offices in the list of candidates; candidate links take you to their campaign Web sites) to find the basic descriptions of duties. I found some of them easily but not others.

For example, the Railroad Commission is really important, and not just for railroads, but my quick view of the Constitution didn't tell me much about the office of railroad commissioner. The duties of the governor are spread out in a number of articles.


Texas Politics, a UT site, offers a lot of assistance to those who want to know what happens to our tax dollars Comptroller of Public Accounts or who are perplexed by 19th-century-sounding offices like the General Land Office. Only the state of California has more agricultural production than Texas, so the Commissioner of Agriculture also has a lot of responsibility.

To make sense of the governor's job, go to the beginning of the constitution; you'll pass go after reading much of Article Four on the Executive Department. Texas Politics sums up the powers of the office for those who don't want to sift through sections of the constitution. Actually, the Texas Politics site offers much toward understanding how the government functions in general, including the legislative branch (which I have purposely ignored in this summary).

I'm planning to contact the candidates before writing anything about their campaign planks. More to come.

Gym Source

Texas Democrats' Traveling Show

A truck driver nearly ran David Van Os off the road on the highway from Gonzalez to Seguin Wednesday. A figurative Mack truck hit him and his companions on the stump circuit when they finally arrived in Central Park after delays due to road construction.

Six local progressive voters and one reporter greeted Van Os and his wife Rachel, Maria Luisa Alvarado, VaLinda Hathcox and her mother as warmly as the sun that had been beating down on us while we waited, but then the meeting got even hotter.

First, we learned that Guadalupe County Judge Donald Schraub had denied Van Os, who is running for attorney general, permission to speak on the steps of the court house, thus thwarting the candidates’ strategy to speak to passersby as well as Democratic supporters.

Van Os, who arrived in an SUV decorated with political stickers and wearing a white cowboy hat, plans to visit all 254 counties in the state to deliver his pitch to the people of Texas to take back the democratic process by catching them going about their daily business.

Van Os and Alvarado, the Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor, are just as critical of beltway Democrats as they are of Republicans, maybe even a tad more critical. Both said that the Democrats’ use of political consultants and polling has taken the focus off meeting the real people of the state. Van Os also criticized the move toward the center that the Democratic Party has taken in the last few years, saying that big business has a party and a half in its corner these days. “This bigness is always going to have a party,” Van Os said, “but the people need a party too.”

This is the message Van Os and Alvarado delivered in a nut shell. Hathcox, however, gave the handful of voters who had gathered in Central Park something to think about. Hathcox talked about concrete problems she has noted, and researched, in the current workings of the General Land Office. She explained how she would tackle concerns that the proceeds of the use of public lands (for oil drilling, for example) aren’t getting into the permanent school fund as they are supposed to. She talked about her plans to reform gaming in Texas and to direct the proceeds to schools, as was the original plan when the lottery was instituted.

Hathcox demonstrated that she knew the history of the department she hopes to lead. She also has experience working in the General Land Office. Most importantly, she showed that she has the initiative and ability to learn as much as she can about current problems in this area. She earned the support of anyone who decided to vote for her this afternoon through competence and willingness to take the voters seriously.

Van Os and Alvarado need to take their cue from Hathcox, and take their own advice.

“The beltway Democratic Party has been turning its back on the grassroots party again and again and again,” Van Os said, insisting that he is part of the grassroots party. He criticized Democrats for having a defeatist attitude and for writing off the “red” parts of the country and state as unwinnable.

He said that Texas is a “huge domino” in the struggle to restore representative democracy to vigor in the United States. “Texas has to start the return of popular democracy. This evil [the current focus on big business and rollback of civil liberties] started here and it can only be dug up by the roots in Texas,” Van Os said.

Most of those in attendance expressed sympathy for this agenda, but wanted something more concrete from Van Os about how he would get the domino effect going.

Some of the group expressed downright anger at the party for leaving the grassroots hanging out to dry in small towns like Seguin. While the candidates wanted to talk about ending defeatism and getting people out to vote, Sylvia Manning and Art and Mitzi Preisinger, all of Seguin, were not content to stop there. These active progressives wanted to talk policy in a concrete manner, but the candidates stuck to their motivational speaking and to establishing that they are of the people rather than of the wealthy elite who now hold power in Texas, the nation and the Democratic National Committee.

As a critique of candidates who rely on pollsters, campaign consultants and large media markets, Van Os said, “Political communication from a person like me that has put himself up for public service shouldn’t be about profiling but about spilling my guts.”

This small group of Guadalupe-County voters waited in the hot sun to see those innards in the form of concrete plans for policies Van Os would institute if the voters elect him attorney general in November. But as Mitzi Preisinger pointed out before leaving, only Hathcox really did cough up.

Alvarado said she would be consider herself a success if the voter turnout in November is higher than it was in the spring primaries. While that might not be too hard to achieve given the abysmally low turnout in March and April, voters aren’t getting much from these candidates that would make them want to race to the polls.

Van Os faulted Republicans for thinking that country people aren’t smart enough to figure out that something’s gone wrong in American government, but his rhetoric suggested that he doesn’t trust us to follow the complexities of the post he is seeking. If he wants to get the vote of the smart folks in the small towns he will be visiting on his odyssey through Texas, he’s going to have to treat voters at least as well as the Republican candidates do.

I hope I’ll see him on my doorstep one day, ready to talk specifics like Valinda Hathcox did today. I’ve had a number of house calls from Republican candidates, but if Van Os turns up, he’ll be the first Democrat to grace my porch.

Gym Source

Larvae

When I saw the first wriggle in the sesame seeds, I reached for the garbage can with one hand and the cupboard door with the other.

All the grains, lovely organic grains from my favorite grocery store in San Antonio, dried fruit, herbs and spices off the shelves were destined for the garbage can because I know from sad experience that insects don’t have as refined taste as I do. When I see them in one bag, they’re bound to be in others as well.

Just as I was about to drop every Zip-loc bag from the cupboard into the trash can, I remembered Ada.

One day, after I had lived with her family for three months in Kazan and returned to Russia for another extended visit, Ada let me help her with the real work in the kitchen. One bag after another, we spread on the kitchen table the rice, flour and other grain products that the young man of the house had just brought in from the market. I thought Ada was just suspicious of these particular commodities, but she said no. “We have to check every bag for 'someone,'” she said with a sad look on her face.

With bags of barley, sesame seeds, and even Valhrona cocoa powder, hanging over the open maw of the kitchen garbage can, I felt as spoiled today as I did when Ada’s expression told me how privileged I was that I did not even think to check my grains for bugs when I was stocking my own kitchen.

I tore off a big piece of parchment paper, spread it on the dining room table and dumped the barley on it. Grains formed patterns of light and dark, straight lines and arcs, but nothing moved. Parchment paper was too plush for the larvae; I needed a less inviting surface to disengage them from their comfy couches, so I climbed up to reach the baking sheets in the highest cupboard near my 1915-era high, high, high kitchen ceiling.

I started to sift. Shaking the baking sheets pissed the larvae off, and they began to squirm visibly. I am still sifting to save the organic produce that was spawning insects in the relentless heat of Texas spring. So far, not so many larvae or newly emerged flies after all, although I did have to toss the currants.

Lots of Americans think their environment is more sanitary than the rest of the world, but that’s a misguided illusion. Even the food of the wealthy appeals to insects. Why wouldn’t it?

These insect eggs came in the grains I buy at the swanky supermarket in San Antonio, not at the Seguin store that screams on its plate glass window that it accepts WIC coupons or the unregulated Russian farm market.

Our food is just as much a part of the food chain as food is anywhere else. Yes, we have USDA regulations and quality control mechanisms, but they are not impregnable, nor could we expect them to be. Texas summer heat is bound to encourage the eggs that slipped through the cracks to hatch in their cushy, barley bed.

Careful cooks all over the world sift their grains, and I will be sifting with them from time to time. My ingredients are ultimately my responsibility. Good laws are only the beginning. Responsible stewardship is everyone’s responsibility.

If Ada hadn’t slipped up in her effort to show me only the world as she assumed I knew it, I would have thrown away more food today than a family of refugees in Darfur gets to eat in a week. And it would have been 98 percent waste of perfectly sound food.

What do people eat who are squeamish about food insect feet have trod?

Gym Source