Iran Awakening

Anyone reading this book will come to understand why some Iranians hate the US and why our military threats only exacerbate the situation.

As Shirin Ebadi, nobel prize-winning defense lawyer for children’s and women’s rights and political prisoners, describes in her memoirs, she was in grade school the year Kermit Roosevelt and the CIA came in with enough money to hire thugs and demonstrators to force the populist and popular prime minister Mossadegh to flee and the repressive Shah Pahlavi to take control of the country.

This coup d’etat was probably the result of Mossadegh’s having nationalized Iran’s oil industry thus upsetting US plans for accessing oil in the Mideast. It was as though the British had sent George Washington into exile and installed a British vice roy as president.
Through the years, Ebadi tells us, her liberal family somehow coped with imprisonment and death threats first from tyrannical shahs and later from implacable Muslim clerics. Meanwhile she became a judge and later, when removed from that office, a lawyer defending human rights, often at the risk of her own life. At one point she found in some political case papers the order for her own assassination.

But Shirin Ebadi refuses to flee her country, determined to assist abused women and children and political prisoners. There is a large element of liberal sympathy in Iran that is only more brutally suppressed when the US and Israel hint at military strikes.