THERE WERE TWO separate rallies taking place at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, on 1st Avenue, Tuesday, to mark the second day of protests of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to the United Nations. Both consisted of Iranian-Americans calling attention to the grave human rights atrocities perpetrated by the mullahs against their own people, rather than focusing on the threat a nuclear or terror-sponsoring Iran poses to the international community. Monday’s far larger event, which drew about 2,000 people and was coordinated by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, dealt with the “minute to midnight” aspects of a theocracy that boasts of future Judeocide, while denying that the first ever took place. Meanwhile, wedged between the two camps were a handful of Falun Gong meditators protesting the People’s Republic of China. New York is nothing if not a city of political non sequiturs.
The larger anti-Ahmadinejad rally was organized by a group known as the National Council of Resistance of Iran; the smaller was more of a hodgepodge of individual oppositionists–monarchists, social democrats, even a handful of Communists–drawn together under the charismatic sway of Nazanin Afshin-Jam. She is the former Miss World Canada, as well as an international pop star, regarded as much for her extraordinary beauty and Top 40 vocals as for her tireless activism on behalf of the child victims of the Islamic Republic. (You might say that she really has used her crown to pursue world peace.) Posted on stage behind the assorted speakers invited to her rally was “Ahmadinejad’s Wall of Shame,” a memorial to the 140 minors now sitting on death row in Iran. There were also, at ground level, cardboard effigies of faceless children wearing black bandanas, symbolizing the Martyrs Brigade that was commissioned as suicide-warriors by Khomeini during the Iran-Iraq war, as well as a mock gallows from which dummy adolescents were hanging.
