Iranian comedian - Mohammad Ali Salimi

Mohammad Ali Salimi looks like a typical American jock. He is, but only in a "San Dimas high-school football rules!" kind of way. He's also an Iranian American stand-up comedian. He's from Georgia and and has a YouTube channel. He's got some good stories about growing up as the whitest kid in his area, his dad trying to fit in to American life and talks crap about every university in California.

Camel jackass

His stand-up debut

Yiddish the struggle for survival - podcast

Dennis Marks presents a fascinating look at the Yiddish language, its fortunes and a micro-revival in New York. Originally aired on the BBC, you can download it directly:

• Yiddish: the struggle for survival - part one
• Yiddish: the struggle for survival - part two

Millions of Yiddish speakers may have perished in the 20th century and millions of others have been discouraged from learning the language, but depsite this, Yiddish is still alive.

Iranian Revolution photo gallery

British newspaper The Times recently added a gallery of photos from the Iranian Revolution to their website. Most of the pictures are depressing, black and white shots of Khomeini, the US Embassy, burning effigies of the Shah, etc. All very out of step with the beautiful multi-colour Iran found on sites like Flickr.

Another American in Iran - this one has a film crew

Rick Steves is a veteran and popular European travel writer from the USA. He recently toured Iran with a film crew. Here's an interview he did afterwards where he sheds some light on what it's like to be an American in Iran. Asked about his experience he said:

But that's not all. You can listen to 4 hours of radio interviews about travel in Iran, watch a preview of Rick Steves' tour, read his travel journal and see his photo gallery. I think it's good that he's a well-known American and sees his visit helping promote peace and understanding between the two countries.

When I came home after the most learning 12 days of travel I've ever had in my life, I realized this is a proud nation of 70 million people. They are loving parents, motivated by fear for their kids' future and the culture they want to raise their kids in. I had people walk across the street to tell me they don't want their kids to be raised like Britney Spears. They are afraid Western culture will take over their society and their kids will be sex toys, drug addicts and crass materialists. That scares the heck out of less educated, fundamentalist, small-town Iranians, which is the political core of the Islamic Revolution and guys like Ahmadinejad.

Being more on the entertainment side, he does focus on the squat-toilets, no-alcoholic-drinks, everyone-is-in-a-hijab side of things. And he does seem to have spun his visit out into a lot more media than anyone else who's visited Iran recently. Here's a short clip of him talking about his trip, a slightly longer one, a video of a talk he's given and Rick talking about constraints on university life in Iran and finally... nah. That's it.

Iran's Jews, Perisan Jews and Jews of Iranian descent

Iran's Jews don't just live in Los Angeles, New York and Israel. They live in Iran too. They are not an incredibly visible population, but they are a part of life there. There are two snippets of a documentary about the history of the Jews of Iran and their lives.

"My mother did not become beautiful" -- Persian poem

Here's a video of a reading of the (translated) Persian poem 'My mother did not become beautiful', over music.

Indian women attacked

India is the world's largest democracy. A country full of aspiration, poverty, hope, dreams, racism and class struggle with a broad political spectrum running from Communist-controlled states to ones run by Hindu religious fanatics. Despite all the crap the country has been through in the past 60 years, it's disheartening to see right-wing religious nutcases feeling empowered enough, in a large cosmopolitan city to attack women drinking alcohol in public.

The last thing India needs is more home-grown trouble.

More on Science and Islam, Arabic loan words in English

One of Jim al-Khalil's arguments in Science and Islam is that Muslim scholars, astronomists and mathematicians gathered the data that Copernicus, Galileo and others used in working out their theories. As Isaac Newton claimed to be standing on their shoulders of giants, so it happened that those before him had stood on Muslim shoulders and those Muslims had been standing on Greek, Roman, Persian and other shoulders.

Looking at the influence of Arabic on other languages, the use of Arabic loan words in English shows the lasting effect of those ideas and concepts which may have either been non-existent or undefined in other languages before being expressed in Arabic. Algebra, alcohol, alchemy and algorithm are all important scientific words coming directly from Arabic.

In his biography Long Walk To Freedom Nelson Mandela uses the existence of

a recurring argument among the political prisoners on Robben Island, on the question of tigers in Africa. One group insisted that tigers were native to India and Asia, and quite exotic to Africa. The others were just as adamant about Africa as the tiger's natural habitat. In fact, they would argue, there were still many of them around; some went so far as to vouch that they had seen tigers in the African jungles with their own eyes. Mandela's view was particularly illuminating:

"I maintained that while there were no tigers to be found in contemporary Africa, there was a Xhosa word for tiger, a word different from the one for leopard, and that if the word existed in our language, the creature must once have existed in Africa. Otherwise, why would there be a name for it?" (source ANC website)

Conservative Christians often claim the Bible condemns homosexuality. It's a difficult claim to defend given that the concept of homosexuality wasn't created until sometime around 1869. Before then there were acts that were prohibited and persons who engaged in prohibited acts. The concept of a homosexual, even though there were undoubtably lots of homosexuals, hadn't been invented.

It is remarkable how different cultures mix, what persists through the ages and why. The following anecdote about how 'Allah' became 'Ole' puts an interesting spin on packed crowds in football stadiums chanting 'Ole! Ole! Ole!' as their team scores a goal.

Then she went on to describe how centuries ago in the deserts of North Africa, people used to get together for moonlight dances celebrating sacred entities that would go on for hours and hours. Every once in a while, very rarely, something would happen and one of the performers would be imbued with something transcendent.


"And I know you know what I'm talking about," she said. "Because I know you've all seen at some point in your life a performance like this."

It's as if time stopped, and the dancer stepped through a portal. He wasn't doing anything different than he'd done a thousand times before, but for some reason everything was aligned and he no longer appeared to just move. Instead, he seemed to be lifted from within and below.

"And when this happened, people knew it for what it was," she said. "They called it by its name. They'd put their hands together and would start to chant Allah, Allah. 'God, God.'"

As an aside, she noted that when the Moors invaded southern Spain they brought this custom with them, but the pronunciation changed over the centuries from chanting Allah, Allah, Allah to chanting Ole, Ole, Ole, which is now heard at bullfights and flamenco dances when a performer does something incredible. (Source: Wired)

The strange thing about culture is that all cultures owe a debt to those they have come after, and even to those they are a reaction to.

Americans and torture

58% of Americans are against torture and we're supposed to take comfort in that. The so-called Greatest Nation on Earth, a beacon of freedom, hope and democracy still has 40% of it's population in favour of torture. There are enough people there that think people don't matter. Their rights don't matter. Even though anyone with a clue says torture has no intelligence value. Too many nights spent watching 24 and not even flinching when someone... you know... has to be tortured to reveal where the ticking bomb is planted. Even Slumdog Millionaire makes light of torture. The main character is abducted by the police, held without charge, electrocuted and then, seemingly none-the-worse, set free to go and win 25 crore rupees.

In countries where torture is commonplace and seen as a valuable tool for breaking opposition movements, political dissidents and "enemies of the people", many people look to the United States as a place where these kinds of things can't happen. A place where a tried and true belief in liberty protects people from the state. Yet stories leek out about policemen beating people, shooting innocent citizens in cold blood and planting weapons, killing people held in cells, abusing their power, etc. These are the kinds of things people like to brush off as "rogue elements" or "cops stepping over the line", but maybe they aren't. And they're shielded from punishment by public complacency.

Maybe they aren't Lethal Weapon-style kill-all-the-bad-guys excesses, rugged individualists against the corrupt system crap, but are indicative of something far more corrosive in American society -- that the state knows what's best and people don't matter.

Let's hope Barack Obama and his new administration take a real stand against torture and send out a clear message -- the USA does not torture, will not torture, nor will freedom-loving Americans stand by and allow others to torture.

U.S. policies led to Iran regime change

Recent evidence suggests that the US policies towards Iran created the foundation from which the Iranian Revolution and hence the Islamic Republic of Iran could spring from. In other news, the Pope is a Catholic, water is wet and bears... There's nothing original in that.

It's more interesting to look at the forces within Iran that were contesting for power and the class structure/struggle there. Bazaaris locked out the dollar economy, jealous of a Shah's new upper class, clerics locked out of power, dirt-poor but hopeful believers hoping for the return of the Madhi, etc. As Iranians love to blame "the British" for much of what has befallen them, Westerners love to blame their own governments and intelligence agencies. Iranians were involved, profited from and backed the disturbances that lead to the Constitutional Revolution, the 1953 Coup and the fall of the Shah.

Iranians are not, and have never been, pawns in a grand imperial game. They have their own, diverse opinions, politics and motives. Constantly lumping them into a single homogenous group misreads everything and won't give you any insight into politics and peoples' lives in Iran.