The 2009 Iranian election protests: "Oh fallen student, your path shall be continued." Photo: Milad Avazbeigi
Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has supposedly captured the spirit of the “Arab street.” As an Iranian, I have on a number of occasions been a discomforted beneficiary of such affection; the Lebanese lady who gave me a hug in tribute to my great leader or the Moroccan taxi-driver in Paris who adamantly refused to take his fare. Such encounters have always left me speechless. Only once—on being told, in classic Ahmadinejad logic, that the “The Zionists planned the holocaust to take over Palestine”—have I mustered a frustrated response, telling my interlocutor that “if the Zionists were such great planners why don’t we give them the world to run?”
Iranians who believe the 2009 presidential elections were fraudulently stolen by Ahmadinejad have been met with the brutal force of the state—the killing of unarmed street
Huzaifa Zoomkawala
The parallels in terms of the conspiratorial mindset between here in Pakistan and the Arab street are striking. And it infects the young more feverishly than it does the old. But if the extreme condemnation that follows the conspiratorial logic is hypocritical (here too gross human rights violations are daily glossed over all too readily by vocal critics of the ‘corrupted’ west), the silver lining too I feel lies in this very hypocrisy. That is because the high flowing condemnatory attitude eventually betrays its unsureness and insecurity: the bluster in the end is a bluff.
And if we are to address this insecurity rather than pooh-poohing the hypocrisy, there is hope.