“How can we support the demonstrators in Iran?”
When Americans see tragedy at home or abroad, the immediate response of millions of them it to want to help. Thus the outpouring of private relief efforts after the Dec. 26, 2004, tsunami in the Indian Ocean, the surge of volunteers and donations into New Orleans after Katrina in August-September, 2005, and the outpouring of support for the rural poor of China after the devastating earthquake of May, 2008.
There are other examples too numerous to mention, and every day sees groups of Americans doing good works around the globe.
Now, as the theocratic fascists of Iran strike back at the protestors in Tehran and around the country, the pictures and videos from Twitter and other social media show mayhem, murder and great suffering.
Americans are again asking “How can I help?” In this case, though, the government wants exactly the opposite of help for the suffering. The regime wants to increase the pain of the people, not alleviate it. Khamenei and Ahmadinejad want to punish, imprison and eventually execute those who call on the West for help.
Since open contact with a dissident can bring the Basij to the dissident’s door, what’s an ordinary American to do?
Go see the movie “The Stoning of Soraya M” when it opens this week in cities across the United States. Buy tickets for your friends. Sell out every screening, and then when the film appears in more cities the following week, go again to a different theater.
Buy more tickets for more friends. Make the opening of the movie an occasion for embarrassing the Mullahs who are killing their own people. Help generate headlines that bring attention to the movie, and through it, to the regime that allows this sort of barbarism to continue.
The movie is beautiful and deeply moving, and the film’s opening would have been an enormous story even had Iran not erupted in a long-suppressed general demand for freedom from tyranny. Stoning is an abhorrent practice, but one that still goes on in Iran, as recently as March of this year, according to Radio Free Europe, when a 30-year old man was stoned to death for adultery.
Some apologists for the Mullahs point to the official moratorium on stoning that Iran adopted early in the decade, but ignore that the practice still goes on and that the law permitting the penalty has not been repealed.
Much more to the point, though, is the fundamental evil of a law code that consigns all women to a second-class status and through which the worst sorts of cruelty are not merely not punished but even endorsed.
“The Stoning of Soraya M” does not portray the Iran of Tehran or the other industrialized cities. It is a poignant picture of rural and remote Iran, the Iran we have been told again and again supports Ahmadinejad against the urban elites that have been pouring into the streets of the major cities for the past 10 days.
When reports of Ahmadinejad’s “base” support roll off the lips of news readers at CNN and elsewhere, I wonder if they ever wonder where such information comes from? Have they been to a village in remote Iran? Have they asked the women there whether they support Ahmadinejad and the continuation of their status?
Every American who sees “The Stoning of Soraya M” will emerge from the theater far wiser about what is driving the revolt of the people in Iran. These demonstrators want their freedom from theocracy.
That theocracy reaches down into every aspect of every life, and its totalitarian demands for control over every aspect of life make it the cousin of every repressive police state that stained the 20th century.
Americans cannot deliver aid to the demonstrators, but they can attend a movie that outrages the Mullahs. A large box office for “The Stoning of Soraya M” sends a message to the Mullahs that won’t be mistaken: Americans support the end of their medieval rule.
Examiner columnist Hugh Hewitt is a law professor at Chapman University Law School and a nationally syndicated radio talk show host who blogs daily at HughHewitt.com.
