Moving from one culture to another can be like an exciting experience or even a full of stress experience. Establishing connections between different cultures is as old as history. People raised up in their origin culture have always translocated for different purposes, like business, education or visit and the new society accepted them if they were generous or opposed them if they came for loot or to occupy; all of them experienced some personal and cultural difficulties. Difference between past and now is in a large amount of people that crossing cultures due to different aims.

Delisting of the MEK has potentially enormous consequences for the Iranian regime and U.S.-Iran relations, and therefore the decision ought not to be taken lightly. Clearly, removing the MEK will be a political loss for the Islamic Republic of Iran, as it has long labored to marginalize the organization. When the European Union removed the MEK from its list of terrorist organizations, it was considered by most onlookers to be a serious blow for the Islamic Republic. However, it bears noting that the regime is expert in seizing political losses as opportunities for heightening its anti-foreign propaganda.

I then fully realized how important poetry still is in Iranian daily life, and I think I know part of the answer to the question why that is the case: poetry is also political, because its subtlety, its metaphors and double meanings allow poets to express their opinion in a country where having one can lead to death. In the West, poetry is indeed a pastime: we are living in such (political and social) luxury that we don’t need the subtleties of poetry as a vehicle for freedom of expression.

The United Nations Human Rights Council has recently designated former Maldives foreign minister Ahmed Shaheed as the Special Rapporteur to investigate the human rights situation in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Renowned Iranian journalist Masih Alinejad has written him an open letter: “It is not too late for many other families to still come forward and unravel the painful truth.”

The way in which our democracy dealt with Islam and Muslim immigrants course after 9/11 is of course rather hypocrite and silly. How many words have not been spoken in various European media (especially in North and Central Europe) about the essential danger of Islam? The entire Muslim part of the population was being generalized and criminalized, and this is a community that rarely had a leader who could retort.

Mohsen Makhmalbaf is one of more than two million Iranians forced by politics to live abroad. The sooner he can return to making the films he wants to, preferably in and around his native country, the better, not only for Iran, but for all lovers of cinema in the rest of the world.

Makhmalbaf became a kind of roving ambassador for Mousavi’s Green Movement, giving interviews, writing op-ed pieces, donating his film prizes to the Green Movement, and making the rounds of various European capitals, the European Parliament, and the White House. He says he no longer has time to make films because he is too busy “working for the Iranian people”.

“I am not sure that this means that, five years from now, the Islamic Republic will have been “erased from the face of time,” but I expect that this system will no longer persist as it is currently configured. That won’t be the result of any definitive outside intervention, I believe, but from the mismanagement and misjudgment of Iran’s own hardline leadership.”

It is ironic that institutions like the Vali-ye Faqih, the Sepah, and Basij may be the main obstacles to democratic popular will, but at the same time they are like a glue that hold together a true nest of stinging bees. The fact that these ruling institutions no longer rely on negotiation or compromise with public opinion but only on brute force is a very dangerous sign. Obstinacy, inflexibility, and resorting to brute violence may signal the end of politics and of the possibility of negotiation.

What measures and strategies are there for the Green Movement to bring to fruition the hopes that this movement has created in the hearts of those who love freedom? On the occasion of the anniversary of the demonstration of millions of people of Iran to reclaim their citizenship and civil rights, TehranReview interviews Iranian theorists and scholars. In the third episode of this series of interviews, we spoke with Mehdi Jami.

When I read the news that the Moral Security of the Society Project is once again going to start, and when I saw those hateful faces in the crossroads, I started shivering. “What have we done wrong, that we should go through this much humiliation?” I wondered. “How long should we feel this anger in our hearts, go through hidden shivers, clench our fists, fill our hearts with hatred and turn into disappointed and frustrated people? How long?”

بگو هنوز هم می گویی خشم را کنار بگذاریم و متانت به خرج بدهیم وقتی تو را شبانه به خاک سپردند و بی گناه جانت را گرفتند؟ بگو هنوز هم می گویی خواسته هایمان را روی کاغذ بنویسیم؟ بگو صدای ضجه های سوگواران این سالها را به گوش خدا خواهی رساند؟

What were the positive and negative aspects in the American president’s recent Middle East speech? President Obama’s recent Middle East speech merits serious investigation for one particularly ironic reason, namely, that it went almost unnoticed in the Middle East and that you could not but observe that it proved to be a nonevent.

Hamid Dabashi is Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York.His book Iran, The Green Movement and the USA: The Fox and the Paradox (Zed Books, 2010) was published in 2010.

Dr. Elizabeth M. Bucar, an assistant professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, has recently published a book comparing the feminist politics of U.S. Catholic to Iranian Shi’i women. Such a comparison might seem strange and challenging at first glance, but Bucar’s views on feminism and the nature of Shii and Catholicism seem even more challenging than the subject of her book.

Yes Mr. Mario! You writers are the ones who encourage sedition. You are the ones who reproduce sedition with your dark books and blasphemous pens. Reading these books one begins comparing the existing situation with that of the fiction and becomes encouraged to do something.

For some time now, Bahrain has been witness to the uprising of the people of this country against the Al Khalifa dynasty and the violent crackdown on this movement. What is interesting here is the level of intervention by Iran in Bahrain. This interference reached a point that Hossein Shariatmadari, the license holder of Kayhan newspaper and close ally of the Supreme Leader in Iran, asked for the direct military intervention of Iran in Bahrain.

“The way I used the term does not refer to criticism of American or European policies, or even cultures. ‘Occidentalism’ is a violent fantasy that imagines the West to be so wicked that it must be destroyed. This is a symbolic West, of course, a demonic image associated with sin, greed, corruption, sexual depravity, etcetera. It is a form of dehumanization, because it holds that Westerners have no souls, just base appetites.”

“I think the onus for self-criticism is mostly for those outside of the country who spent much of the fall and winter of 1388 (especially around Ashura) presenting a triumphalist message that the Greens were going to out-maneuver the state. Not only did these pundits over-estimate the organizational breadth and coherence of the Green Movement, but they downplayed the agency of the regime.”

I don’t want to stick to clichés, but I like my country because I have grown up here. All the mountains, polluted rivers, ancient places that have been destroyed by now, draw me like a magnet. If I was born somewhere else, I would feel the same about that place. But I don’t want to feel defeated. I don’t want to admit that I am giving this land away to the people who have no interest in it and are fantasizing about the day it is ruined. We should stay and resist and call back all Javads, Nasims, and Farhads, and try to put things back to where they should be.