Word: berahini
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...said he went to a lecture Chomsky was sponsoring for the Committee for Artistic and Intellectual Freedom in Iran. They had an Iranian poet to read his poetry--Reza Berahini... and a mob of Iranian students delayed the lecture for hours. There was a bomb threat. The Americans were scared. The Iranians said Berahini was a CIA agent. Yet he was an anti-Shah poet--he spent years in jail. So finally, Chomsky let one of the students speak at the podium, and the student waxes hot-faced and apologizes to the crowd for the disturbance. He says...
...speaker, who wished to remain anonymous, accused CIAFI of misrepresenting the Iranian people, and said Berahini is a CIA agent...
...Berahini said there are more than 100,000 political prisoners in the Shah's jails, most of whom are constantly subjected to torture. He added that Iranian law treats women as "second-class citizens," regarding them as inferiors in society...
...Berahini and Chomsky rebutted the ISA speaker. Berahini said that neither he nor the ISA represent the people of Iran, "the people who were fighting in the streets of Tabriz." He defended his credentials as a poet and an activist against the Shah, and said his goal at MIT was to expose the "violation of human rights" and plight of Iranian political prisoners to the American people...
Chomsky added he thought the bickering of the ISA over the credibility of Berahini detracted from the main issues of the evening and "turned a lot of potentially sympathetic Americans off" to the issue of human rights repression in Iran...