In keeping with John Owen’s request to not read the same stuff you read before you came to London, I’ve started to read news coverage outside of my "comfort zone" of Time and The New York Times. That means more international stories, more international sources, and more understanding of the major issues in the world (which means little to no celebrity coverage). Now, I started this a bit late (I started yesterday, in fact ::darts eyes::), but at least I started, and I’ve found a few articles that stick out.
1. From Britain’s Guardian daily comes news that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warns of the collapse of the ruling elite if they don’t respond in the right way to the protests over the election. He said this, according to the article, in response to three reformers’ (Mohammad Katami, Mir Hossein Mousavi, Hashemi Rafsanjani) public comments criticizing the government’s actions. The article (and others elsewhere) also said that Khamenei is not viewed as above the fray anymore, but rather someone that can be challenged in public. Near the end of the article, this appeared:
Khatami's political organisation, the Association of Combatant Clerics, issued a statement on its website saying that a referendum should not be overseen by "bodies and centres that manipulated" the 12 June vote, a reference to the Guardian Council, a body that oversees elections and endorsed the official election result.
It is highly unlikely that either Khamenei or the Guardian Council would agree to such a referendum. It appeared to designed principally to open a new avenue of attack on the conservative establishment.
I added the “[be],” so ignore the lack of grammatical sense in that original sentence. I want to focus, however, on the semantic sense, what that sentence is saying. It’s saying (at least in my reading of it) that the current government establishment in Iran is staying too much in the past, and the Iranian reformists are out to bring radical change to the power structure. I’ve read that in other places, too, and I have to admit, it plays into a fault of international reporting, or at least of how we in the West see international issues. I think The Observer’s Peter Beaumont said it best:
In the case of Iran, what has been visible in the west has been two competing versions of the country, coloured by political imagination and appropriated by the two rival - and confrontational - camps that have dominated our debate on foreign affairs since 11 September and the invasion of Iraq. Parties to a new cold war of ideas, their narrow and mutually antagonistic positions have reinterpreted each emerging international crisis to suit their own agenda and in defiance of the other's.
[…]
The two tendencies, however, do mirror each other in one crucial aspect: the way in which they tend to describe a more homogenous Iran than exists - either more universally desperate for change or more supportive of Ahmadinejad.
I wish I had brought that up in class in London, but alas I didn’t do so. So, I bring it up here: This is not a right v. left battle with easy-to-draw lines. Whether you see the liberal side as keeping out of the Iranian issue, or you see it as advocating the reformist position, you have something wrong. Mousavi and the reformists’ side “is far less radical than (international supporters) assume;” in fact, the reformists have described themselves as “fundamentalist reformist.” They still support the idea of the Islamic Republic and defend the Revolution; they just don’t think it has maintained itself very well.
Whatever side you’re on in that issue, keep that in mind. Never assume you have all the facts, and don't simplify anything too much. Please.
[To my relative surprise, CNN did a pretty good job on this front. And The New York Times ran an article labeling a protesting candidate a conservative. Maybe I'm too late in my criticism.]
2. From The Jerusalem Post comes an editorial that scared my logical side to pieces.
Admittedly, it’s an editorial, so there’s no hard international news in there. I read it because I was getting a feel for the differences between the JP and its cross-town counterpart, Haaretz. Again, like I implied up top, you can’t simplify people’s or organizations’ positions, but after a bit of opinion reading, I think I have a rough feel for how each paper thinks.
I’ll let you come to your own conclusion regarding that (if you’re interesting in reading those papers), but I do ask you to read the above-linked column. Look for the sensational language, the weasel words, and the feeling of doomsday. I’m not saying it’s all false; I’m just saying that as they’re presented, the ideas in that article don’t seem… um… oh, let’s say credible. I’ll leave it at that. And promise me you won’t ever write like that.
3. This is by no means international, and the only segue from #2 to this is the Jewish element. An Indianapolis researcher compiled a database of all the people buried in the city’s old Jewish cemeteries, and the Star’s story on it is pretty good, not least because it’s a good story by itself. It ran on the front page, with a good photo attached to it, but the choice of headline was a bit… unfortunate. The first thing I thought of was not finding your ancestors, but The Legend of Zelda. See it here.
That’s a wrap of what I’ve read on the Internet recently. Enjoy your own reading.
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