Thursday, December 02, 2004

Fatherhood in Bizarro World


Fatherhood Posted by Hello

It's a touching picture of a father and daughter in the Muslim world -- Iran, to be exact. You can see the pride on his face and can only imagine that he is dreaming of the best for his daughter and her future.
Except, according to the caption, this father is "prepar[ing] his daughter by covering her face in the same style of Palestinian and Lebanese militants, during a ceremony for the first suicide commandos unit at a cemetery just outside Tehran, Iran, Thursday." The group aims to attack Americans in Iraq -- and Israelis.
This perversity fits perfectly with what Mark Bowden wrote about Iran in this month's Atlantic:
For a visiting American, Iran is like Bizarro World, the mirror universe in Superman comics in which everything is inverted. Bad is good and good is bad. In Tehran patrioric symbols of the United States are everywhere, but always wrenched into images of violence, evil and defeat... In the West we are bombarded with advertising images of youth, beauty, sex, and life; in Tehran the preponderance of advertising images celebrates death. There are murals everywhere celebrating martyrs....
If you can get hold of the full article, by the way, it is a fascinating study of what happened to the students who stormed the Tehran US embassy 25 years ago. A good number of them regret what they did, recognizing the damage they ultimately did to the country, and are in constant trouble with the authorities; others are cabinet ministers.

Full story on the 'suicide unit' here.

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