New Media

I wrote a novel a little while back dealing with issues of the Middle East. It’s a part of the world I think about a fair bit (check out my commentary at The Propagandist). Usually, it’s because crazy bad stuff is happening there so it’s in the news. A lot of terrible things will continue to happen in 2012, but I think a few nice things will also happen with the bad stuff. Here goes:

1. Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad will be deposed. Syria may actually become a neo-Ottoman protectorate.
2. Iran’s nuclear program will be further degraded by software viruses and “industrial accidents”. No need for airstrikes. Phew.
3. Israel will continue to develop groundbreaking technology that benefits the world and is grudgingly used by BDS campaigners who never invented anything in their dumb lives.
4. Sales of the Yemeni equivalent of Gatorade will continue to go up due to water scarcity.
5. Egyptian environmentalists protesting the carbon economy will keep blowing up gas pipelines.

Ever wondered what George Orwell’s 1984 might be like in real life? Try chatting up someone who’s spent any time in Iran. They can tell you.

Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani may be executed by Iran at any moment. The following is a letter from her children, Faride and Sajjad Mohammadi e Ashtiani. Please sign this petition to help save this innocent woman.

Plea to the world by Sakineh’s Children
Do not allow our nightmare become a reality, Protest against our mother’s stoning! Today we stretch out our hands to the people of the whole world. It is now five years that we have lived in fear and in horror, deprived of motherly love. Is the world so cruel that it can watch this catastrophe and do nothing about it?

We are Sakine Mohammadi e Ashtiani’s children, Fasride and Sajjad Mohamamadi e Ashtiani. Since our childhood we have been acquainted with the pain of knowing that our mother is imprisoned and awaiting a catastrophe. To tell the truth, the term “stoning” is so horrific that we try never to use it. We instead say our mother is in danger, she might be killed, and she deserves everyone’s help.

Today, when nearly all options have reached dead-ends, and our mother’s lawyer says that she is in a dangerous situation, we resort to you. We resort to the people of the world, no matter who you are and where in the world you live. We resort to you, people of Iran, all of you who have experienced the pain and anguish of the horror of losing a loved one.

Please help our mother return home!

We especially stretch our hand out to the Iranians living abroad. Help to prevent this nightmare from becoming reality. Save our mother. We are unable to explain the anguish of every moment, every second of our lives. Words are unable to articulate our fear…

Help to save our mother. Write to and ask officials to free her. Tell them that she doesn’t have a civil complainant and has not done any wrong. Our mother should not be killed. Is there any one hearing this and rushing to our assistance?

Faride and Sajjad Mohammadi e Ashtiani

Marg Barg Diktator and all that. Terry Glavin asks why Canada isn’t supporting a branch of Iran’s democracy movement.

In related news, Terry gets stoned.

A lot closer than most people realized. A new Guardian documentary reveals “a ruling elite so unsettled by the uprising that it had a plane on standby ready to fly the president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, to Syria at a moment’s notice.”

What might have been.

H/T to Harry’s Place