Robert Fisk: Symbols are not enough to win this battle

Robert Fisk: Symbols are not enough to win this battle

It is indeed an 'intifada' that has broken out in Iran, however hopeless its aims

Tuesday, 23 June 2009

You don't overthrow Islamic revolutions with car headlights. And definitely not with candles. Peaceful protest might have served Gandhi well, but the Supreme Leader's Iran is not going to worry about a few thousand demonstrators on the streets, even if they do cry "Allahu Akbar" from their rooftops every night.

This chorus to God emanated from the rooftops of Kandahar every night after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 – I heard it myself in Kandahar and I heard it last week over the rooftops of Tehran – but it no more stopped the Russians in their tracks than it is going to stop the Basiji or Revolutionary Guards. Symbols are not enough.

Yesterday, the Revolutionary Guards – as unelected as they are unrepresentative of today's massed youth of Iran – uttered their disgraceful threat to deal with "rioters" in "a revolutionary way".

Everyone in Iran, even those too young to remember the 1988 slaughter of the regime's opponents – when tens of thousands were hanged like thrushes on mass gallows – knows what this means.

Unleashing a rabble of armed government forces on to the streets and claiming that all whom they shoot are "terrorists" is an almost copy-cat perfect version of the Israeli army's public reaction to the Palestinian intifada. If stone-throwing demonstrators are shot dead, then it is their own fault, they are breaking the law and they are working for foreign powers.

When this happens in the Israeli-occupied territories, the Israelis claim that the foreign powers of Iran and Syria are behind the violence. When this happens on the streets of Iranian cities, the Iranian regime claims that the foreign powers of the United States, Israel and Britain are behind the violence.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-symbols-are-not-enough-to-win-this-battle-1714153.html