Ripping Iran Apart

(the cartoon that sparked today's Azeri riots in Iran. The children are yelling "roach! roach!" See http://www.baybak.com/ir/ for more info)


Why would this story make it to the Reuters wire? Well, for the same reason that similar stories depicting so-called ethnic unrest amongst Kurds, Azeris, Baluchis, Jews, even Sunni Muslims in Iran have taken a center stage in Iran coverage over the last year. (Never once do these reports mention that minorities actually have it quite good in Iran, a nation established, from the beginning, by a vast array of ethnicities and the first nation to produce a charter of Human Rights that included specific sections on equal rights for ethnic and religious minorities. Not to mention the fact that the Supreme Leader himself is an Azeri Turk.)

It is no secret that the UK and the US are thrilled at the prospects of divvying Iran along ethnic lines and have actively included this potentially cancerous issue into their Iran agenda over the past year, at least. US Senators and their UK counterparts have held subcommittees, meetings and various open-forums discussing (i.e. encouraging) civil unrest in Iran. The previously normal level of minority dissonance is without a doubt a key platform for splitting Iran at its seams.

It is astoundingly arrogant to imagine ethnic divisions in someone else’s country when your own country teems with such problems to such an extent that racism is nothing less than an open secret. In the UK, a significant political party whose primary platform is that England is "for the White British working class" is rapidly gaining ground in elections. And in the US, one need look no further than that wellspring of reality, hurricane Katrina (and its ugly racist aftermath) to see an accurate picture of a racism that has lain dormant under the not-snow-white skin of that society for nearly 4 centuries.