17th
All of You “Twitter Revolution” Fans, Read This
All of you Re-tweeting your asses off about Iran should read “To You, the new Iran ‘Expert,’ by Mo-ha-med.
Excerpt:
Yes, you.
Who thought until this morning that Shiraz was just the name of a wine
Who’s beaming with pride you can now write ‘Ahmadinejad’ without copy-and-pasting it from a news website
Who only heard of Evin prison when Roxana Saberi was there (Roxana who?)
Who’s changed your Facebook profile picture to a green rectangle saying “Where’s my vote?” even though you don’t actually vote in Iran
Who actually thinks that Mir-Hossein Mousavi is a secular
And that his election means that Iran will give up its nuclear claims
And allow you to visit Tehran for Christmas
Who joyfully makes Azadi/Tiananmen square comparisons
Who first heard of Azadi square last Sunday
Who’s quick to link to articles you haven’t read, debunking other articles you’ve barely heard of
Who has just discovered that Iran has a (quasi-)democracy, and elections, and the like
Who blinked in disbelief at the images of women - oh, they have women! and they’re not in burkas! - demonstrating
Who has never heard of Rezai or Karroubi before (hint: they ran for election in a Middle-Eastern country last Friday)
Who staunchly believes that the elections have been stolen - either by ballot box stuffing, (14 million of them!) or by burning some ballots, or both (somehow?), regardless of the absence of any proof (yet)
But who nevertheless
Has been tweeting, and re-tweeting, and polluting cyberspace with what is essentially hearsay, rumours, and unconfirmed truncated reports or falsification coming from people who actually know about the realities of Iran’s political world and have an agenda:
You know nothing. Abso-fucking-lutely nothing about what happened, or is happening across Iran at the very moment. Most of us don’t, actually. What we see is a tiny slice of reality, mind you, what is happening on the main squares in the big cities, under camera lenses.
