Iran's New Chant -- "Death to no one!"

By John Ballard

Hamid Dabashi is the author of "Iran: A People Interrupted." He is Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York. His Web site is http://www.hamiddabashi.com/. 

I heard a news reporter this afternoon refer to Iran's street demonstrations as "the biggest civil disobedience action ever." The images are powerful. The message will not be muted. It will be neither quick nor easy, but the transformation of Iran's political landscape is as inevitable as the birth of a baby.

This opinion column by Hamid Dabashi at CNN International (H/T Abbas) glows with hope and optimism.

I am one of the last Iranian students who peacefully walked into the United States embassy in Tehran. I went there in July 1976 with a recently acquired Iranian passport and an even more recently obtained acceptance letter from the University of Pennsylvania, and an I-20 form, as we called it then. Then a 25-year-old, I applied for a visa, received one and boarded a plane to Philadelphia.

In just about a second and a half, the way time flies these days, I will turn 60, and I will have a claim over Philadelphia and New York as my successive hometowns more than I do over the cities in which I was born and received my college education, Ahvaz and Tehran.

I've seen both sides of the tension between Iran and the United States: Two homelands that have so far failed to connect on friendly terms. My time in America began with the Gerald Ford-Jimmy Carter presidential debates.
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Roger Cohen has written a column for the New York Times speculating about what would have happened if the massive June demonstrations in Iran had been successful in dismantling the Islamic republic. One must also wonder what would have happened if the coup of 1953 had not implanted a national trauma in Iran that laid the groundwork for Ayatollah Khomeini's anti-American measures and the creation of a repressive government.

When on November 4, you see throngs of young Iranians chanting "Death to No one!" they are not just challenging the brutal theocracy that is distorting their history and abusing their youth, they are also raising a gentle accusatory finger at their own parental generation.

I am father to four American children -- two born in Allentown, Pennsylvania and two in New York City -- who have never set foot in their parental homeland. The Iran they now watch on television, track on the Internet, and follow in the news is no longer paralyzed by the post-traumatic syndrome of the 1953 coup.

A young generation of Iranians -- 80 percent of the population under the age of 40, 70 percent under 30, 50 percent under 25 -- seems determined to chart a future free from their parental follies.

So one day with the first direct flight from JFK to Mehrabad Airport, I, too, might take my children, two of them now old enough to have voted for President Obama, to the other side of who they are -- and of who they must proudly be.