Word: soltan
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Neda Agha-Soltan...
...never know the man who stood in front of those tanks in Tiananmen Square, but we do know Neda Agha-Soltan: we've looked into her eyes. For one gut-wrenching moment, as she lay dying from the bullet in her heart on that Tehran side street last June, Neda stared directly into the cell phone that was about to immortalize her. Within hours, millions of people around the world had been beseeched by those fading eyes, making an intimate connection with the 27-year-old music student and the cause for which she was killed by the thugs...
...Makhmalbaf said even modest steps are important, such as publicly mentioning opposition victims like Neda Agha-Soltan, the student shot dead during the June uprising who became an opposition symbol. (Obama mentioned her death, but not by name, the day he won the Nobel Peace Prize.) Washington also needs to recognize and respond to opposition statements, like the apology from Iran's leading dissident cleric, Ayatullah Ali Montazeri, for the 1979 U.S. embassy takeover. Montazeri was once heir-apparent to the revolution's founder, Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, and his gesture on the 30th anniversary of the seizure was a risky...
...Agha-Soltan's name is on the tombstone, but not her date of death: June 20, or Bloody Saturday, a day after the Supreme Leader's Friday prayer sermon spoke of a crushing response to any further street demonstrations. Two young women, wearing nail polish and jeans under their mandatory manteaus, knelt beside the grave and openly cried, in defiance of an unspoken law not to congregate here...
...many young people in the opposition, no measure of reconciliation will erase the fact that dozens of protesters, many in their 20s, have ended up at Behesht. On a visit to the cemetery, a young man walking past Agha-Soltan's grave muttered a quick blessing. Another sympathetic visitor stopped to assure him, "She's a martyr. She has already been blessed...