Amir is back blogging

This one's for you Gracchii of Westminster Wisdom:

This is an old post of Amir but contains information you will not read anywhere else. . Here we go:

In 1980 Yasser Arafat came to Iran and brought with him a few dozen girls of say 9 and 10 to around 14. (I was 9 then.) They were staying at the hotel my dad was managing at the time, and where my family was staying, the Arya-Sheraton (Homa). They were also on the News, they had singing choruses, singing revolutionary songs, and of course “Khomeini qa’ed”. At some point my dad was forced to go with them and meet Khomeini at Jamaran.
Years later my dad told me that these girls were brought to Iran as an offering of sorts. Everynight, the Hezbollah bigshots and the important mullahs would go to their rooms and temporarily marry them. In Iran this is called “sigheh;” in Arabic I think it is “jawaz muta” or something like it. In America it is child-prostitution.

Then my dad would get a call from housekeeping about the disgusting state the rooms would be left in the next day.

The host of this group was Ayatollah Karubi, the long time leader of the Islamic parliament and a presidential candidate in the last elections, running on a “reform” platform.
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I am told that my experiences with the Hezbollah in Iran has blinded me, rendering me inable to understand that the Hezbollah in Lebanon is a “grass-roots” movement.

Well, a “grass-roots” movement funded (given weapons to) in the hundred million dollar a year range, by Iran, while the line of absolute poverty is always on the rise in Iran. “Grass-root”? Well, let’s cut the foreign money and see how “grass-roots” it is. And does being a “grass-roots” movement make it right? Nazis were also “grass-root.”

As the matter of fact, among the people who accuse me of not realizing the difference between the Hezbollah in Iran and the “grass-roots” movement in Lebanon, I am the only one who has seen both.

I’ve seen the places that are currently bombed, in Beirut and in the south, close up, and I’ve even spoken to the Hezbollah characters, both Iranians and Lebanese.
The Lebanese of other confessions other than Shiite Islam, because they don’t (yet) have to conform to the Shiite rules made up by the Hezbollah, have little problem tolerating what the Hezbollah does to their own people. They keep thinking to themselves that what is going on in Iran is perhaps part of their culture, and that no one will ever force them to be the same, because they are different and special… I remember during the revolutionary upheavals how Christians and Jews were also ranking among the Hezbollahis and how even my own family members would put on a chador or a veil just to show solidarity… They then were never able to take them off, and the Christians and Jews lost all their rights and in huge numbers had to flee the country.

Being a Shiite would mean either having to submit to the mafia that is running the neighborhoods, or to break-away completely and live with harassments, being a Kafar, someone who has had religion but now is going against it, an apostate… The sentence for that is death, no questions asked. This is of course a lot harsher in Iran than in Lebanon. In Lebanon this self-proclaimed “resistance movement” does not yet have hegemony… But many Lebanese, “blinded” by heroic tales of the unity of the underclasses around the world against big business and IMF and World Bank and Imperialism and what have you… might soon make a hegemonic force out of this so-called “resistance movement” that hides behind the civilians.
But the Iranian money they receive, if they were a grass-roots movement that really cared about the well-being of their community, should have improved their neighborhoods enormously. Instead, they are proud of having Iranian re-fabricated Chinese and Ukranian military technology that only brings on them more death and destruction and subjects them further to the mercy of this ruthless fascistic cult.

I don’t care about Venezuella, the multi-national corporations that want to rule the world. I don’t care about Ghana. I don’t care about places I haven’t been to. I only care about places I have been to, and the people I know, not some generic revolution of the downtrodden.
When I became a US citizen, the oath that I took was not a lie. I truly believe what I promised, and realize why I am here and what a privelege it is to be here. But I also remember Iran, read and follow the news about it, and have seen Lebanon also.

I hope they take away Hezbollah’s weapons and stop them from starting fights that they cannot win.

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