If Jewish leaders fail to recognize Iranians as their allies in the war against Ahmadinezhad and forget the historic magnanimity of Persians toward Jews, they will lose a great opportunity in the Middle East. After all, it was the Persian king Cyrus who provided protection to Jewish refugees after the fall of the First Temple, and his impassioned defense of them became the blueprint of the modern-day Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Ali Ferdosi Reviews Roya Hakakian's book, Journey from Land of No

In Persian. (2002)

A selection from the original
book in Persian. (1993)

Read the Introduction and a chapter excerpt, visit the cast of characters in the book with pictures and much more. (2004)

DAWN had always arrived in Berlin’s Turm Strasse with the bustling of shopkeepers and the drowsy hiss of buses pulling into their stops. Always, except on the morning of April 10, 1997. On that day, the street had been cleared of traffic and blocked to anyone but pedestrians. On the rooftop of every building leading to Nos. 91-92, snipers had been stationed.

Holiday parties always seem to bring out the semi-inebriated men who find their way to my corner. There is, as expected, an opening line, which hardly ever leads to a conversation. But if it ever does, and if that conversation shows signs of vitality, even a dim glimmering of erudition, a rhetorical question is sure to follow. They lean into me and murmur: "Did you say you were Persian or Parisian?" They count on the tie, the long-stemmed wine glass, or the exalted titles on their name tags to make flirtation pass as ethnographical inquiry.

THE news of the exhibition of Holocaust cartoons in Tehran took me back to a moment in my childhood. In 1974, his first year at Tehran’s Academy for Visual Arts, my brother mounted an exhibition of his own cartoons. The drawings were a novice’s best attempt at political satire, but they were enough to alarm my law-abiding father into sending my brother away to America. Our family was never whole again.

At long last, some good news from Iran reaches U.S. shores. Akbar Ganji, one of Iran's leading advocates for democratic change, will arrive in the U.S. today. More than his arrival, it is his survival that should count as a small miracle: No one in Iran has so boldly broken political taboos and lived to tell the tale. Mr. Ganji has denounced the country's rulers as members of a fascist regime and, borrowing the famous words that Ayatollah Khomeini used to address the Shah, has said that Supreme Leader Sayyid Ali Khamenei "must go!" Now, from July 14 to 16, he has called for a three-day hunger strike before the U.N. headquarters in New York City to demand the release of all political prisoners, including the two key figures Mansour Ossanloo and Ali Akbar Mousavi Khoini.

Zealots do not laugh. The closest they come is to grin while they stand in profile staring into the distance. Laughter undermines zealotry. Hitler smiled early on, but rarely after he became Der Führer. Ayatollah Khomeini smiled, but since he never made eye contact with his audience, his sinister smiles alluded to a wisdom too great to be shared with mere disciples. Laughter could unhinge a person, loosening him into defiance against submission. It's no wonder why all things stern -- flags, weapons, uniforms and street marches -- abound in a zealot's universe. He may promote seriousness as prime virtue, but to the perpetuation of his rule it is dire necessity.