Word: shahs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...experience of America in Iran might prove illuminating to Reagan policy planners. Iran was a backward nation, the leader of which had a voracious appetite for arms and a noted aversion to civil rights for his people. While the Shah greedily collected all the gadgetry of death that we would sell him, he left Iran's social needs unmet and crushed all those who urged him to do otherwise. Those gadgets meant little indeed when the people of Iran rose up to defeat the Shah; we would be better off urging the Saudi princes to devote their resources to eliminating...
...Kazem Ala, the physical suffering has faded. Of course, the memory of his arrest in 1979 for participating in an anti-Shah demonstration in the streets of Teheran and his subsequent torture at the hands of the Shah's secret police must linger in his mind. But for Kazem, the legacy of physical scars is dwarfed by the uneasy truth that, for the most part, his fourteen months of suffering in the bowels of an Iranian jail may have been meaningless. For though he was--and continues to be--a dedicated opponent of political oppression in Iran, the very oppression...
After he was released from prison, Kazem fled the Shah's embattled reign of terror and came to Texas, where he enrolled as a full-time student at the University of Houston. He was a refugee from torture and terror, a refugee who nonetheless hoped to one day return home to a more tolerant and stable country. But contrary to the hopes of Kazem and thousands of other Iranian students, political oppression did not end with the overthrow of the Shah's regime, and under the country's new 84-year-old leader. Ayatollah Khomeini, government by decapitation flourished...
...seem to be many) still confused about the explanation for the frenzy that swept the streets of Teheran in November, 1979, need look no further than Resident Exile, Kazem Ala and thousands of other Iranian students like him were systematically arrested and tortured for expressing their opposition to the Shah's regime--a regime that the United States helped set up in 1953 and then continued to support militarily and economically for over two decades, even though the Shah's Iran consistently had one of the worst records of human rights violations in the world. The United States, by virtue...
...Kazem's torture, the team of Anthony. McElwee and Negroponte doesn't simply present scene after scene of tearful recollections. Instead, the directors rely on a rather commonplace scene in a dentist's office to evoke some of the horror of Kazem's persecution at the hands of the Shah's secret police. While Kazem lies prostrate in a dentist chair (a scene itself reminiscent of Marathon Man), the camera focuses on the dentist as he lights a match and uses it to sterilize a dental implement. The camera lingers on the match, and suddenly the memory of Kazem...