Freelance

I have recently posted my review of Hooman Majd’s new book, Minister Without Portfolio, here on my blog.

I had read the book with rather mixed feelings. On the one hand there was some admiration for a person with a successful career in the music industry and as journalist, author and writer, living involuntarily in exile (in the United States and the United Kingdom) and who had hardly ever spent any significant amount of time in his actual home country. On the other, a certain relief that it clearly showed the impossibility of actually getting along with this special case of an Islamic Democracy when socialized in the West.

No, Iran has become an impossible place to live in, at least after the stolen election in 2009, the year when I myself visited it the last time, months before the election.

In January, when I actually read Minister Without Portfolio, again, hundreds of thousands of Iranians took to the streets of Tehran and other big cities. This time, on 8^th and 9^th of January, the internet was closed down when probably tens of thousands (maybe 30,000 or even more) were killed by thugs of the regime, or executed.

There were hardly any reporters from the West in the country. The massacres took place without any witnesses. I have heard an Iranian exile this morning in a talkshow on TV stressing the point that such a massacre on just two days can only be compared with that in the Ukraine in September 1941 in Babyn Yar in the Ukraine. A horrendous misrepresentation.