This is a link to a short slide show sent to me from Saleh Ara, a young man who resides in Tehran. It depicts scenes, people, and activities in a place most of us in the west will never really see except as it is portrayed in American media. This little show puts a more human face on people that some of us know absolutely nothing about.
Ideal images of Tehran? Undoubtedly so. It just seems to me that a balance has to be made between what we imagine the "Evil" empire to look like and what it really looks like. It would be hoped they could do the same, but that isn't our responsibility. I don't believe change takes place while we sit back and wait for someone else to do it.
I can, in the end, control and change only two things in the world and they are the things I think and the things I do. Pretty simple, right?
Saleh Ara was born in Tehran in 1982. He is a university graduate and works as an agronomist. He is an amateur photographer and maintains a photoblog www.8pmdaily.com. He posts at, you guessed it, 8pm daily Tehran time.
3 comments:
Of course it's propaganda. I'd expect no less. But we rarely hear anything else in the US besides the worst part of the message. If it isn't obvious by now, not everyone in Iran is in agreement with what their government does or believes, just like here.
As for anti-Israeli sentiments, it's interesting to recognize the fact that Ahmadinejad's comments about Israel aren't too far away from the thinking of many Americans. We've got our own Nazis, our own Klan. His little Holocaust symposium was visited by our own David Duke. He may not speak for a majority of our countrymen, but he speaks for plenty. Funny. When he ran for president, he ran as a Republican. Can I assume that he represented Republican philosophy?
Hitler knew he could pull off the Final Solution because no one would stop him. To think that Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt didn't know about it when 80% of the Jews in Europe disappeared up smokestacks (facts that the OSS knew about and reported)gives them more credit than they're worth.
Just thought I'd point out that Iran has a well-developed film industry. Their work has placed highly at film festivals worldwide for years and is readily available here in the States on video. Their world is not exactly hidden from view if you look for it. Just for example, here's a list of Iranian films available from Amazon -
http://www.amazon.com/Best-Films-from-IRAN/lm/YDNFN0FFA25M
Hi. I came here through Saleh's blog. Just a note to say that in general Iranians know more about the US than the other way. Movies, books, even Hillary Clinton's memoires - translated - was a best seller.
Everyone knows someone who lives or has been to the US. In the other hand, people just don't trust any of the "official" news.
In an article for the NYT, Kristoff exposes this other side of the country.
http://www.iranian.com/RoozbehShirazi/2004/May/NYT/index2.html
- please feel free to delete if I have posted twice this comment :)
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