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In recent years, there has been a greater emphasis put on understanding the international relations of the post-Arab uprising in the Middle East. An unprecedented combination of widespread state failure, competitive interference, and instrumentalization of sectarianism by three rival would-be regional hegemons (Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Iran) in failing states has produced a spiral of sectarianism at the grassroots level.
I encountered Rahele’s work through this year’s Tomie de Paola SCBW illustrator competition where the prompt was: to illustrate a moment from a passage from Philip Pullman’s version of “Little Red Riding Hood” from FAIRY TALES FROM THE BROTHERS GRIMM (Viking, … Continue reading →
State run media outlets in Iran are collaborating on a new bounty for the capture of author Salman Rushdie.
Forty organizations have pooled $600,000 to pay for the capture of Rushdie. The new fatwa comes 27 years after the original banning of “The Satanic Verses” in Iran for “blaspheming” Islam. The Guardian has more:
The fatwa provoked an international outcry and caused the UK to sever diplomatic relations with Iran for nearly a decade. In 1998, Iran’s former president Mohammad Khatami said the fatwa was “finished”, but it was never officially lifted and has been reiterated several times, occasionally on the anniversary, by Iran’s current supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and other religious officials.
Sometimes, especially in humankind's most urgent matters of life and death, truth may emerge through paradox. In this connection, one may usefully recall the illuminating work of Jorge Luis Borges. In one of his most ingenious parables, the often mystical Argentine writer, who once wished openly that he had been born a Jew, examines the bewildering calculations of a condemned man.
Today, the international community has its hands full with a host of global challenges; from rising numbers of refugees, international terrorism, nuclear weapons proliferation, to pandemics, cyber-attacks, organized crime, drug trafficking, and others. Where do such global challenges originate? Two primary sources are rogue states like North Korea or Iran and failed states like Afghanistan or Somalia.
Anyone who saw the terror on the faces of the people fleeing the attacks in Paris last week will agree that terrorism is the right word to describe the barbaric suicide bombings and the shooting of civilians that awful Friday night. The term terrorism, though once rare, has become tragically common in the twenty-first century.
On 6 November 2015, the New York Times featured a poignant five-minute documentary called “A Conversation About Growing Up Black,” produced by Joe Brewster and Perri Peltz. Brewster and Peltz present Rakesh, Miles, Malek, Marvin, Shaquille, Bisa, Jumoke, Maddox, and Myles. The youngest are 10 and the eldest is 25 years old.
On a blustery St. Martin’s Eve in 1619, a twenty-three year old French gentleman soldier in the service of Maximilian of Bavaria was billeted near Ulm, Germany. Having recently quit his military service under Maurice of Nassau, he was new to the Bavarian army and a stranger to the area.
Not so long ago, we ‘went to the pictures’ (or ‘the movies’) and now they tend to come to us. For many people, visiting a cinema to see films is no longer their principal means of access to the work of film-makers. But however we see them, it’s the seeing as much as the hearing of Shakespeare in this medium that counts. Or rather, it's the interplay between the two.
In July 1867 the British historian Edward Augustus Freeman was in the thick of writing his epic History of the Norman Conquest. Ever a stickler for detail, he wrote to the geologist William Boyd Dawkins asking for help establishing where exactly in Pevensey soon-to-be King Harold disembarked in 1052.
Sometimes, especially in humankind's most urgent matters of life and death, truth may emerge through paradox. In this connection, one may usefully recall the illuminating work of Jorge Luis Borges. In one of his most ingenious parables, the often mystical Argentine writer, who once wished openly that he had been born a Jew, examines the bewildering calculations of a condemned man.
Food lovers with a soft spot for New York City gastronomy congregated to celebrate the upcoming book Savoring Gotham: A Food Lover's Companion to New York City, edited by Andrew F. Smith.
Health care reform in the United States has promoted policies and practices that are evidence-based. Prevention, diagnoses, and treatment decisions are to be guided by the best available empirical evidence. Decisions about what treatments are to be provided are to be informed by findings of randomized, controlled, research studies when such evidence is available.
Iranian poets Fatemeh Ekhtesari and Mehdi Mousavi have been sentenced to 11.5 years and 9 years in prison respectively for “insulting sanctities” and “propaganda against the state” in their poetry.
In addition, they have been sentenced to 99 lashes for shaking hands with members of the opposite sex who they are not related to, at literary events.
More than one hundred American poets including: Robert Pinsky, Claudia Rankine, Billy Collins, John Ashbery, and Tracy K. Smith, have teamed up with PEN American Center to speak about against this harsh punishment. In a joint letter sent to Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, they urge Iran to nullify these convictions. Here is an expert from the letter:
We are deeply concerned by the inhumane sentences levied against Ms. Ekhtesari and Mr. Mousavi for the simple act of expressing themselves by creating art. The act of writing poetry is no crime. Freedom of expression, a fundamental right enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, allows creativity to flourish and promotes the creation of great literature. Iran has a long and proud literary history. As a poet and a scholar of poetry, we appeal to you not to allow this legacy to be clouded by cruel and unwarranted treatment of these two writers.
After two years of negotiations, Israel throwing whatever they can against any possible agreement, and the Republicans in the US Congress doing what they can to scuttle the deal, we finally have a framework for an agreement between Iran and its negotiating partners. It is not a perfect deal, but it is likely the best the West can get and given the other options, it is literally the only hope standing between a rational dialogue with Iran and outright conflict.
Iran has long had a difficult relationship with the West. Ever since the Islamic Revolution of 1979 overthrew the monarchy and established an Islamic Republic, Iran has been associated in the popular consciousness with militant Islam and radical anti-Westernism. ‘Persia’ by contrast has long been a source of fascination in the Western imagination eliciting both awe and contempt that only familiarity can bring. Indeed if ‘Iran’ seems altogether alien to us, ‘Persia’ seems strangely familiar. There are few cultural icons or aspirations that we would associate with Iran; there are by contrast quite a few we would relate to Persia, most obviously carpets, the occasional cat and for the truly affluent, caviar. That these two words would elicit such dramatically different associations is all the more striking because they are describing the same place. Persia is simply the name inherited from the Greeks and the Romans for the great empire to the East that its inhabitants came to know as ‘Iran’. Persia, from the province of Pars, was not unknown to the Iranians but they would not have used it to apply to the entirety of their state.
Yet Persia reminds us that Iran is not as unfamiliar to us as we might imagine. Quite the contrary. The Persians serve an almost unique function in the Western narrative, being present at the birth and some might argue, the creation of a distinctly Western civilisation. If the Greeks under the influence of Herodotus, first defined history as a conflict between ‘East’ and ‘West’, identified as the Persian and the Greeks, it was a model reinforced with some vigour by the Romans whose own political expediency ensured that many nuances in the relationship were smoothed out to provide a reassuring narrative of confrontation between an increasingly civilised West and barbaric East. Yet if the Romans held up the Persians as a mirror upon which to reflect their own glories, the mirror was never quite as untarnished as its proponents would have liked to believe: the Persians were never quite the antithesis of the West that some sought to portray. The relationship, as the Greeks might have protested, was a good deal more subtle and a great deal more intimate.
This is perhaps best exemplified by the attitude towards the Persian king Cyrus the Great, widely admired in the Greek world as the ideal king whose political wisdom was fictionalised for posterity by Xenophon in his Cyropaedia, or ‘Education of Cyrus’. Cyrus, real or imagined was to have a profound influence on the political elites of the Western world from the renaissance through to the Enlightenment, while his role as a ‘messiah’ in the Old Testament has ensured an enduring affection among Christians, intriguingly among the Protestant variety that populated North America where the name remains popular.
Charles Montesquieu, by After Jacques-Antoine Dassier (1715–1759). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Indeed the ancient Persians, for all their antagonism retained nobility that made them attractive to their Western protagonists. So much so, that when Montesquieu sought ‘discussants’ to critique the condition of Western – in this case French – state and society, he produced his ‘Persian Letters’. The Persians in the Western imagination were sufficiently ‘civilised’ to perform this role. They were educated and had good ‘manners’; were proficient in poetry to the highest standard and, as Cyrus himself exemplified, were masters of the art of landscape gardening, indicative of man’s power over and connection with nature. Indeed the Old Persian word for walled garden has given us our word for ‘paradise’.
It is striking how many Renaissance princes sought to emulate these characteristics and achievements. Yet by the end of the Enlightenment, as Western power grew to surpass that of the Persians, and travellers became reacquainted with the country and its people, old prejudices were redefined for the modern era. The Iranians were not quite like the Persians of their imagination but there was a convenient explanation to hand. The Persians of old were undoubtedly civilised but they had succumbed to decadence and hence decay. They had in sum become excessively civilised and indulgent; exotic yet effete. This explained their predicament and reconciled the apparent contradiction of being both civilised and barbarous at the same time.
Gibbon, perhaps like Herodotus before him, had found a means of reconciling contradictory tendencies, not only in defining the Persians but in explaining the Western relationship with them. A relationship that has been far from confrontational and much more symbiotic than some might suspect. Persia represents at once an ideal and the dangers ever-present in the corruption of that ideal. Persia – and by extension Iran – has been part of the grand narrative of the ‘West’ since its inception: it is neither as alien, nor indeed as foreign, as we may like to think.
Featured image credit: Apadana of Persepolis, by F. Ameli A Persian. CC BY-SA-2.5 via Wikimedia Commons
“Defensive warfare does not consist of waiting idly for things to happen. We must wait only if it brings us visible and decisive advantages. That calm before the storm, when the aggressor is gathering new forces for a great blow, is most dangerous for the defender.” –Carl von Clausewitz, Principles of War (1812)
For Israel, long beleaguered on many fronts, Iranian nuclear weapons and Palestinian statehood are progressing at approximately the same pace. Although this simultaneous emergence is proceeding without any coordinated intent, the combined security impact on Israel will still be considerable. Indeed, this synergistic impact could quickly become intolerable, but only if the Jewish State insists upon maintaining its current form of “defensive warfare.”
Iran and Palestine are not separate or unrelated hazards to Israel. Rather, they represent intersecting, mutually reinforcing, and potentially existential perils. It follows that Jerusalem must do whatever it can to reduce the expected dangers, synergistically, on both fronts. Operationally, defense must still have its proper place. Among other things, Israel will need to continually enhance its multilayered active defenses. Once facing Iranian nuclear missiles, a core component of the synergistic threat, Israel’s “Arrow” ballistic missile defense system would require a fully 100% reliability of interception.
There is an obvious problem. Any such needed level of reliability would be unattainable. Now, Israeli defense planners must look instead toward conceptualizing and managing long-term deterrence.
Even in the best of all possible strategic environments, establishing stable deterrence will present considerable policy challenges. The intellectual and doctrinal hurdles are substantially numerous and complex; they could quite possibly become rapidly overwhelming. Nonetheless, because of the expectedly synergistic interactions between Iranian nuclear weapons and Palestinian independence, Israel will soon need to update and further refine its overall strategy of deterrence.
Following the defined meaning of synergy, intersecting risks from two seemingly discrete “battle fronts,” or separate theatres of conflict, would actually be greater than the simple sum of their respective parts.
One reason for better understanding this audacious calculation has to do with expected enemy rationality. More precisely, Israel’s leaders will have to accept that certain more-or-less identifiable leaders of prospectively overlapping enemies might not always be able to satisfy usual standards of rational behavior.
With such complex considerations in mind, Israel must plan a deliberate and systematic move beyond the country’s traditionally defensive posture of deliberate nuclear ambiguity. By preparing to shift toward more prudentially selective and partial kinds of nuclear disclosure, Israel might better ensure that its still-rational enemies would remain subject to Israeli nuclear deterrence. Over time, such careful preparations could even prove indispensable.
Israeli planners will also need to understand that the efficacy or credibility of the country’s nuclear deterrence posture could vary inversely with enemy judgments of Israeli nuclear destructiveness. In these circumstances, however ironic, enemy perceptions of a too-large or too-destructive Israeli nuclear deterrent force, or of an Israeli force that is plainly vulnerable to first-strike attacks, could undermine this posture.
Israel’s adversaries, Iran especially, must consistently recognize the Jewish State’s nuclear retaliatory forces as penetration capable. A new state of Palestine would be non-nuclear itself, but could still present an indirect nuclear danger to Israel.
Israel does need to strengthen its assorted active defenses, but Jerusalem must also do everything possible to improve its core deterrence posture. In part, the Israeli task will require a steadily expanding role for advanced cyber-defense and cyber-war.
Above all, Israeli strategic planners should only approach the impending enemy threats from Iran and Palestine as emergently synergistic. Thereafter, it would become apparent that any combined threat from these two sources will be more substantial than the mere arithmetic addition of its two components. Nuanced and inter-penetrating, this prospectively combined threat needs to be assessed more holistically as a complex adversarial unity. Only then could Jerusalem truly understand the full range of existential harms now lying latent in Iran and Palestine.
Armed with such a suitably enhanced understanding, Israel could meaningfully hope to grapple with these unprecedented perils. Operationally, inter alia, this would mean taking much more seriously Carl von Clausewitz’s early warnings on “waiting idly for things to happen.” Interestingly, long before the Prussian military theorist, ancient Chinese strategist Sun-Tzu had observed in The Art of War, “Those who excel at defense bury themselves away below the lowest depths of the earth. Those who excel at offense move from above the greatest heights of Heaven. Thus, they are able to preserve themselves and attain complete victory.”
Unwittingly, Clausewitz and Sun-Tzu have left timely messages for Israel. Facing complex and potentially synergistic enemies in Iran and Palestine, Jerusalem will ultimately need to take appropriate military initiatives toward these foes. More or less audacious, depending upon what area strategic developments should dictate, these progressive initiatives may not propel Israel “above the greatest heights of Heaven,” but they could still represent Israel’s very best remaining path to long-term survival.
Headline image credit: Iranian Missile Found in Hands of Hezbollah by Israel Defense Forces (IDF). CC BY-NC 2.0 via Flickr.
Is there a better way to start the new year than by introducing you to a book which will take you somewhere you’ve likely not visited via picture books before, is illustrated by the first Asian recipient of the most prestigious awards in children’s literature, the Hans Christian Andersen Award, and is about to be published for the first time in the UK with its original illustrations?
As anyone who’s spent time with children knows, the littlest people can ask the biggest questions, and so it is with the little black fish in this story who wants to find out more about life outside of the pool where he and his family have always lived. Just because the family have always lived a certain way, why shouldn’t this brave and curious fish extend his horizons and set out to explore beyond his known world?
As the fish travels downstream he sees incredible sights the like of which he could never before have imagined. He also faces some terrible dangers. Will the fish survive to see his dream – the wide open ocean? Will his story of inquisitiveness and desire for freedom inspire others?
Behrangi’s story took on great political significance in Iran after it was published, read by many adults as a political allegory (you can find out more here). Indeed the message was so powerful, the book was banned in pre-revolutionary Iran. Whilst this historical background gives the book an additional charge for adults, younger readers in 2015 can enjoy this short story as an encouraging tale about believing in oneself, about learning from personal experience, and about not being afraid to be different.
The Little Black Fish won the First Graphic Prize at Sixth International Children Books’ Fair (1968) in Bologna for its illustrations by Farshid Mesghali. The stylish bold textured prints in a limited range of colours are beautifully reproduced and bound in this smart edition from Tiny Owl Publishing. Their apparent simplicity suggests something both childlike and timeless.
Inspired by the style of illustrations in The Little Black Fish we set about creating fish prints using plasticine (oil based, non permanent modelling clay). This was a great activity for giving old and manky plasticine one last shot at life!
We squished together lots of old pieces, and created “blanks” of different sizes. These blanks were turned into fish shapes using scissors to cut them, and then decorated with impressions made using butter (blunt) knives, forks and sharpened pencils.
Top tips for printing with plasticine
Plasticine is more forgiving than lino or styrofoam for printing with little kids; it works really well when the inked design is squished a little bit into the paper.
If it’s a bit old or hard for little hands to work, drop it into a bowl of hot water or run it under the hot water tap for 10-20 seconds. This will soften it up and make it much more malleable and easier to press implements into.
Pencils work really well as mini rolling pins for little hands to roll out the modelling clay.
Once the plasticine is in the shape you desire, you can put it in the fridge for an hour or two to firm up before printing.
If you use poster paint or water-based printing ink, this can simply be washed off the plasticine afterwards. Because the plasticine is oil based, water is repelled and once the ink has been washed off you can dry the modelling clay and reuse it (something you can’t do with styrofoam or lino!).
Buttons, lego bricks, cocktail sticks, forks, hair grips, seed pods, pencils and shells are all useful tools for making impressions in the plasticine.
Once our prints were made we worked on some net-themed frames for them, making use of some of the cardboard collected over the Christmas parcel and present season. Here’s a short animated tutorial I made to show you how we did it:
Here are some of our finished and framed prints of fish exploring the wider world!
Whilst weaving and printing we listened to:
Persian songs for kids on youtube including
Some Iranian folk music and dance including
We also watched several videos of Viguen, “King of Iranian Pop”, including
I’m delighted that Tiny Owl Publishing will be bringing us more translated Iranian children’s books in the coming months (although I do hope that future books will fully credit the illustrator and translator on the front cover of books, not just inside). What other unsung heroes in the international picture book world would you recommend I look out for – authors and illustrators who are famous in their home countries but who haven’t had wide recognition in the English speaking world?
Finally, you might notice things look a little different on the blog today. Over Christmas I updated the blog so that it should now be fully mobile-platform friendly; if you want to view this blog on your phone or tablet it should now be much easier to navigate and more pleasant to look at as the text and images are fully scalable. I’ll also take this opportunity to highlight Playing by the book can be found on twitter @playbythebook, Facebook, Pinterest and even (in a very small way) on Youtube – please feel free to follow me wherever it suits you.
Disclosure: I received a free review copy of The Little Black Fish from the publisher.
Pippa Goodhart said, on 1/5/2015 2:26:00 AM
Absolutely lovely to see your wonderful artwork of fishes and nets! I think this is an important book; full of potential for discussion and thought. I was lucky enough to work on the text for this edition of the story, and I can promise you that there are more excitingly illustrated Iranian stories to come from this new publisher!
Zoe said, on 1/5/2015 2:58:00 AM
Thanks Claire, yes, we were pretty pleased with the way they turned out. Having the idea to use scissors to cut the plasticine made all the difference.
Zoe said, on 1/5/2015 3:00:00 AM
I saw you’d been involved Pippa – how exciting! It’s a very lovely edition and I’m delighted to see it published. My dentist is from Iran and when I told him about the book he wax lyrical about his memories of it from his childhood.
While Iranian live-action cinema has achieved vast acclaim throughout the years, the country has yet to produce an animated feature that has made a similar impact on the international scene. That may change soon with multiple animated features currently in production and rapidly rising production standards.
Set in Tehran, Iran, this quite original tale is a reminder that story themes are universal. At times it has the feel of Cinderella with a cultural twist. Other times, it is reminiscent of Charles Perrault’s tale of the kindly sister and the bad-tempered sister, whose deeds have different outcomes.
Interesting animation is being produced everywhere you look nowadays. This evening, we’re delighted to present animated fragments from six different countries: Chile, Iran, UK, US, Japan and Spain. For more, visit the Animated Fragments archive.
“Lollypop Man—The Escape” (work-in-progress) by Estudio Pintamonos (Chile)
Hand-drawn development animation for Wreck-It Ralph to “explore animation possibilities before [Gene's] model and rig were finalised” by Sarah Airriess (US)
“Rithm loops” for an iPhone/iPad app by AllaKinda (Spain)
It’s the return of a readers’ favorite: Animated Fragments. These clips celebrate the briefest of the brief: short animated experiments, work-in-progress clips, advertising pieces, animated GIFs, trailers and and small pieces that otherwise wouldn’t have a home on Cartoon Brew. For more, visit the Animated Fragments archive.
These two pieces of animation from Iran caught me by surprise because they are so different from the rest of the animation I’ve seen from that country. The first is a commercial for Lina Luke snack food directed by Moin Samadi. It has been accepted into this year’s Annecy Animation Festival:
The next is an energetic and funny hand-drawn piece called Evolution by Mehdi Alibeygi.
“EVOLUTION” CREDITS
Director, Writer, Animator: Mehdi Alibeygi
Executive Producer: Moin Samadi
Sound and Music: Armin Bahari
Composite: Sare Shafipour
Logo Designer: Amin Maftoon
Produced by Raiavin Studio
Cyber attacks on Iran have been well publicised in the press and on Western television. General William Shelton, a top American cyber general, has now turned these attacks around saying that these events are giving Iran a strategic and tactical cyber advantage creating a very serious “force to be reckoned with.”
Since 2010, Iran’s infrastructure has been attacked hundreds of times by cyber viruses. To date the most documented and best known cyber attacks have been aimed at Iran and are known as cyber worms called Stuxnet. These electronic worms were used to attack Iranian nuclear power plants and connected systems. General Shelton, who heads up Air Force Space Command and Air Force cyber operations, gave a briefing to reporters in January 2013, where he said that the 2010 Stuxnet virus attack on Iran’s Natanz uranium processing plant had generated considered responses from Iran that have led to improved offensive and defensive cyber-capabilities.
In December 2012, the Stuxnet virus returned and hit computer and energy operations and companies in the southern Hormozgan region. Shelton claimed that Iran’s improved cyber defense capability had helped Iran protect it against subsequent attacks on oil terminals and other manufacturing plants. This new capability, he believed, will subsequently be used by Iran against its enemies in the near future. “They are going to be a force to be reckoned with,” said General Shelton, “with the potential capabilities that they will develop over the years.” At present he stated that America had over six thousand cyber specialists employed to monitor, analyse and counter cyber attacks, and he was intending to employ another thousand specialists over the next twelve months to improve America’s effectiveness in this vital area.
Moreover, assassinations and assassination attempts in conjunction with cyber attacks are thought to be part of an integrated plan of attacks on Iran’s nuclear research and manufacturing capabilities. A year ago on 11 January 2012, Ahmadi Roshan, a 32-year-old Iranian scientist, and his driver were both killed when a motorcyclist attached a bomb to their car as they were driving. So far these attacks, which seem to form part of the broader cyber-related strategy aimed at Iran’s nuclear program, have successfully killed five Iranian nuclear scientists in the last two years according to FARS, a Tehran news agency. However, in January 2013, the Iranian Intelligence Minister Heydar Moslehi claimed that his organisation had stopped a number of attempts to kill nuclear scientists so it is uncertain which reports are accurate.
These attacks on Iran’s electronic systems represent only a very small amount of the current cyber attack and threat capability. Increasingly, all governments and corporations must respond to the cyber reality. With an interconnected world, cyber attacks on infrastructure have become frequent and damaging. Cyber crime is costing businesses billions of pounds although they tend to keep quiet about the attacks. (The BBC reported that UK cyber crime costs £27bn a year.) Efforts to get a grip on the problem had been hampered by firms who don’t want to admit they had been the victims of attacks for fear of “reputational damage”. Baroness Neville-Jones, Prime Minister David Cameron, and Foreign Secretary William Hague met the bosses of some of Britain’s biggest businesses, including Barclays, HSBC, Tesco and BA, to urge them to take the problem more seriously.
In September 2012, a hacker called vorVzakone posted a message on a Russian online forum saying that a malevolent Trojan, called Project Blitzkrieg, was capable of attacking the American financial industry, that it had already critically affected up to five hundred American targets, and that it had stolen over five million dollars. “This attack combines both a technical, innovative backend with the tactics of a successful, organized cybercrime movement,” a McAfee report explained, adding that the next target would probably be investment banks.
Hackers, apparently working independently as criminal gangs, have grown in their specialization faster than most police and government intelligence organisations would have believed possible. Yet cyber hackers working for governments have targeted everything from computer systems to power plants from the US to Iran, Europe to China, Australia and beyond. These civil servant hackers are often employed by governments to help fulfill a strategy, to change information and publicity, or to gain information and bring systems down.
One example comes from Ray Boisvert, who recently retired from the post of Assistant Director of Intelligence for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. He believes the current capabilities of most governments is not enough to counter the current cyber threats. He said that cyber threats were fundamentally undermining Canada’s “future prosperity as a nation.” He stated there is a lack of response on three levels. First from government and corporate policy-makers who do not, in his opinion, understand the technical complexities of digital telecommunications security. Second the government has not invested enough to protect Canada’s communications and electricity systems from cyber attacks. Third, he thought there was an inherent corporate shortsightedness regarding protecting Canada’s communications infrastructure.
The cyber issue is growing and will become a rising threat to governments and corporations. It may require a serious attack such as a massive electricity system shut down before a full government response is played out.
Alfred Rolington is the author of Strategic Intelligence for the 21st Century: The Mosaic Method, an industry insider’s assessment of current intelligence methods and offers a new strategic model, directed toward the police, military, and intelligence agencies. He was formerly CEO of Jane’s Information Group, responsible for such publications as Jane’s Defense Review and Jane’s Police Review, as well as CEO for Oxford Analytica. He has over thirty years’ experience of analytical publishing and media companies, producing information and intelligence for commerce, law enforcement, the, military and government. He has written about and given lectures on intelligence and strategic planning to Cambridge, Oxford, and Harvard Universities, and to organisations such as Thomson Reuters, the CIA, SIS (MI6), NATO Headquarters, and GCHQ.
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Subscribe to only law and politics articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS. Image credits: Information Systems Technician 2nd Class Ryan Allshouse uses the intrusion detection system to monitor unclassified network activity from the automated data processing workspace. As a work of the U.S. federal government, the image is in the public domain via Wikimedia Commons; Maps and charts are scanned from “Atlas of the Middle East”, published in January 1993 by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
A protestor holds a picture of a blood spattered Neda Agha-Soltan and another of a woman, Neda Soltani, who was widely misidentified as Neda Agha-Soltan.
It was agonizing, just a few weeks before publication of Martyrdom: A Very Short Introduction, to discover that there was a minor mistake in one of the captions. Especially frustrating, as it was too late to make the necessary correction to the first print run, though it will be repaired when the book is reprinted. New research had revealed the original mistake. The inaccuracy we had been given had circulated the web and had been published by numerous press agencies and journalists too. What precisely was wrong?
To answer this question it is necessary to go back to Iran. During one of the demonstrations in Tehran following the contested re-election of President Ahmadinejad in 2009, a young woman (Neda Agha-Soltan) stepped out of the car for some fresh air. A few moments later she was shot. As she lay on the ground dying her last moments were captured on film. These graphic pictures were then posted online. Within a few days these images had gone global. Soon demonstrators were using her blood-spattered face on posters protesting against the Iranian regime. Even though she had not intended to be a martyr, her death was turned into a martyrdom in Iran and around the world.
Many reports also placed another photo, purportedly of her looking healthy and flourishing, alongside the one of her bloodied face. It turns out that this was not actually her face but an image taken from the Facebook page of another Iranian with a similar name, Neda Soltani. This woman is still alive, but being incorrectly identified as the martyr has radically changed her life. She later described on BBC World Service (Outlook, 2 October 2012) and on BBC Radio 4 (Woman’s Hour, 22 October 2012)how she received hate mail and pressure from the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence to support the claim that the other Neda was never killed. The visual error made it almost impossible for Soltani to stay in her home country. She fled Iran and was recently granted asylum in Germany. Neda Soltani has even written a book, entitled My Stolen Face, about her experience of being mistaken for a martyr.
The caption should therefore read something like: ‘A protestor holds a picture of a blood spattered Neda Agha-Soltan and another of a woman, Neda Soltani, who was widely misidentified as Neda Agha-Soltan.’ This mistake underlines how significant the role is of those who are left behind after a death. Martyrs are made. They are rarely, if ever, born. Communities remember, preserve, and elaborate upon fatal stories, sometimes turning them into martyrdoms. Neda’s actual death was commonly contested. Some members of the Iranian government described it as the result of a foreign conspiracy, while many others saw her as an innocent martyr. For these protestors she represents the tip of an iceberg of individuals who have recently lost their lives, their freedom, or their relatives in Iran. As such her death became the symbol of a wider protest movement.
This was also the case in several North African countries during the so-called Arab Spring. In Tunisia, in Algeria, and in Egypt the death of an individual was put to use soon after their passing. This is by no means a new phenomenon. Ancient, medieval, and early modern martyrdom stories are still retold, even if they were not captured on film. Tales of martyrdom have been regularly reiterated and amplified through a wide range of media. Woodcuts of martyrdoms from the sixteenth century, gruesome paintings from the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, photographs of executions from the nineteenth century, and fictional or documentary films from the twentieth century all contribute to the making of martyrs. Inevitably, martyrdom stories are elaborated upon. Like a shipwreck at the bottom of the ocean, they collect barnacles of additional detail. These details may be rooted in history,unintentional mistakes, or simply fictional leaps of the imagination. There is an ongoing debate, for example, around Neda’s life and death. Was she a protestor? How old was she when she died? Who killed her? Was she a martyr?
Martyrdoms commonly attract controversy. One person’s ‘martyr’ is another person’s ‘accidental death’ or ‘suicide bomber’ or ‘terrorist’. One community’s ‘heroic saint’ who died a martyr’s death is another’s ‘pseudo-martyr’ who wasted their life for a false set of beliefs. Martyrs can become the subject of political debate as well as religious devotion. The remains of a well-known martyr can be viewed as holy or in some way sacred. At least one Russian czar, two English kings, and a French monarch have all been described after their death as martyrs.
Neda was neither royalty nor politician. She had a relatively ordinary life, but an extraordinary death. Neda is like so many other individuals who are turned into martyrs: it is by their demise that they are often remembered. In this way even the most ordinary individual can become a martyr to the living after their deaths. Preserving their memory becomes a communal practice, taking place on canvas, in stone, and most recently online. Interpretations, elaborations, and mistakes commonly cluster around martyrdom narratives. These memories can be used both to incite violence and to promote peace. How martyrs are made, remembered, and then used remains the responsibility of the living.
Jolyon Mitchell is Professor of Communications, Arts and Religion, Director of the Centre for Theology and Public Issues (CTPI) and Deputy Director of the Institute for the Advanced Study in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh. He is author and editor of a wide range of books including most recently: Promoting Peace, Inciting Violence: The Role of Religion and Media (2012); and Martyrdom: A Very Short Introduction (2012).
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Image credit: A protestor holds a picture of a blood spattered Neda Agha-Soltan and another of a woman, Neda Soltani, who was widely misidentified as Neda Agha-Soltan, used in full page context of p.49, Martyrdom: A Very Short Introduction, by Jolyon Mitchell. Image courtesy of Getty Images.
Retold by Alexis York Lumbard, illustrated by Demi, The Conference of the Bird Wisdom Tales, 2012.
Ages: 7 +
Artist Demi has provided a lavish visual feast to illustrate Alexis York Lumbard‘s adaptation of a Sufi classic, The Conference of the Birds. Farid al-Din Attar’s 12th century Persian poem presents an analogy of the human spiritual quest through the quest of thirty birds (si morge in Persian) to find Simorgh, a phoenix-like enlightened being reputedly residing on a faraway holy mountain. They are led by a hoopoe, the long-beaked, apricot-crested bird with dramatic black and white markings that is legendary in desert countries for finding underground water.
Along the way, various birds suffer the same setbacks human beings do on their spiritual paths: in Lumbard’s text, the duck procrastinates; the parrot is attached to her gems; the finch fears a storm; the partridge becomes impatient; the hawk forges ahead and gets lost. With the hoopoe’s encouragement, presented in verse, each bird lets go of whatever obstacle is in its way.
“So do not let your many doubts
Destroy this golden chance.
Release their hold upon you now,
and to your King advance!”
Demi’s vivid water colors and lively lines reveal quirky individual bird personalities and egos as she renders the birds overcoming trepidation in response to the hoopoe’s admonishments. Her paintings, on pale or midnight blue washes, are framed with gold borders that depict in tiny images characteristic postures of the particular bird in question. Young children can intuit an inspiring story from the illustrations alone.
In traditional versions, the birds arrive at the holy mountain to find not Simorgh, but a reflecting pool in which they see themselves. The story subtly suggests that one finds the infinite in the particular, the holy in the very self that seeks the Other. Lumbard has appended a page to her version in which the sun on the water transforms the birds’ reflections into dazzling light. “In this moment of silence when no thoughts…passed before their minds, the birds found themselves in the loving embrace of God, their true King.”
Islamic scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr‘s introduction offers background on the original Persian poem. Parents and teachers who prefer that young readers realize for themselves the profound wordless insights of this enduring story may find, for example, Peter Sis‘ beautifully printed 2011 version more to their liking; but many others will appreciate Lumbard’s explication and look forward to her continued project of providing children with books of spiritual guidance.
Charlotte Richardson
August 2012
NB: Read our interview with Demi here and view our gallery of her work here.
0 Comments on Week-end Book Review: The Conference of the Birds by Alexis York Lumbard, illustrated by Demi as of 1/1/1900
Simon “Sion” Ebrahimi is a retired Iranian Jewish accountant and author who was held hostage for many months in his office in Tehran during the Iranian revolution. Simon’s office was located across the street from the U.S. Embassy. In November 1979, when the embassy was taken over by armed revolutionary thugs, Simon and his partners were also held hostage inside their offices by his armed employees. Now in his seventies, he resides in Los Angeles and has penned a fictional, multi-generational family saga loosely based on his family’s life in Iran.
Please tell everyone a little about yourself, Simon
Simon: I was born and raised in Jewbareh, the Jewish ghetto of Esfahan, Iran. I studied management and finance in England before returning to Iran, where I was a partner to an international accounting firm. In 1979, I was taken hostage by my employees at the same time as the American Embassy compound was overtaken by the Islamic Republic. I left Iran with my wife and two daughters after the revolution to settle in Los Angeles, California. For over fifteen years, I was the editor of Shofar, a monthly magazine published both in English and Farsi by the Iranian American Jewish Federation, with an international readership of about fifty thousand. I have also had popular television and radio programs in the Persian media.
When did the writing bug bite, and in what genre(s)?
Simon: Although I was an economist by profession, writing had always been the passion of my life. I began with short stories and ended up writing a multi-generational family saga of five generations of Iranian Jews. Veiled Romance is the last of the five generations; the other four are waiting in the line.
When you started writing, what goals did you want to accomplish? Is there a message you want readers to grasp?
Simon: For as long as I remember, I’ve been writing. Once you commit your feelings and thoughts to paper and people read and appreciate it, you’ve already accomplished your goal. Iranian Jews have over 2500 years of history in Persia which is unknown to many. If you’re curious about the life stories of a Jewish minority in Iran, you are my reader.
Briefly tell us about your latest book. Is it part of a series or stand-alone?
Simon: The novel Veiled Romance begins as Leila Omid writes her memoirs from an Iranian prison. As she struggles to survive in hellish conditions, she sets down the story of how she was educated in the United States, where she met and fell in love with Cyrus, a fellow Iranian Jewish student. Separated for years, they were reunited in Tehran and their love was rekindled, but when the revolution erupted Cyrus was taken hostage by Islamic fundamentalists and … Well, please go to my website (www.Simon-Writes.com), read the first two chapters of the book and if you’re interested, buy the book (either on the site or Amazon) and read the rest.
What’s the hook for the book?
Simon: An Iranian young, American educated, brilliant woman, in love, writing her memoirs from Islamic Republic jail.
How do you develop characters? Setting?
Simon: By making them learn from their experiences. Setting? What better than having been taken hostage during the American Embassy hostage taking in Tehran (which is what exactly happened to me.)
The Hans Christian Andersen Award, considered the most prestigious international children’s literature award, is given biennially by the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) to a living author and illustrator whose complete works have made lasting contributions to children's literature. The winners for the 2012 award will be announced on Monday, March 19 at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair. Among the five short-listed authors and five short-listed illustrators selected from 57 candidates submitted by 32 national sections of the IBBY is Iran's Mohammad Ali Beniasadi. Congratulations! :o)
The other Asian candidates were writers Masamoto Nasu (Japan), Sun-mi Hwang (Republic of Korea), and Sevim Ak (Turkey), and illustrators Satoshi Kako (Japan), Seong-Chan Hong (Republic of Korea), and Feridun Oral (Turkey).
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The 2012 Bologna Ragazzi Awards for the best children's books in terms of graphic and editorial design have been announced. Champagne, cake, confetti, coffee, and CONGRATULATIONS go to:
New Horizons - Mentions
Misunderstanding, written by Farideh Khalatbaree and illustrated by Ali Boozari (Shabaviz Publishing Company, Tehran – Iran)
Waterlife, written and illustrated by Rambharos Jha (Tara Books, Chennai – India)
Opera Prima - Winner
Tabati, written by Nadine R. L. Touma and illustrated by Lara Assouad Khoury (Dar Onboz, Beirut - Lebanon)
Opera Prima - Mention
Grimmie's White Canvas, written and illustrated by Hyunjoo Lee (Sang Publishing, Seoul – Republic of Korea)
Thanks to my friend Jules, one of the Ragazzi jurors, for this information!
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Turan Mirhadi, veteran researcher and co-founder of the Children's Book Council, was honored during a ceremony held at the Center for the Great Islamic Encyclopedia last week.
Organized by the Women's Association of History Researchers, a group of literati including the Iranian Children's Book Council director Nushafarin Ansari, library science expert Zohreh Qaini and professor at the University of Tehran Abbas Horri attended the ceremony held on Wednesday.
By Professor Louis René Beres and General John T. Chain (USAF/ret.)
In world politics, irrational does not mean “crazy.” It does mean valuing certain goals or objectives even more highly than national survival. In such rare but not unprecedented circumstances, the irrational country leadership may still maintain a distinct rank-order of preferences. Unlike trying to influence a “crazy” state, therefore, it is possible to effectively deter an irrational adversary.
Iran is not a “crazy,” or wholly unpredictable, state. Although it is conceivable that Iran’s political and clerical leaders could sometime welcome the Shiite apocalypse more highly than avoiding military destruction, they could also remain subject to alternative deterrent threats. Faced with such circumstances, Israel could plan on basing stable and long-term deterrence of an already-nuclear Iran upon various unorthodox threats of reprisal or punishment. Israel’s only other fully rational option could be a prompt and still-purposeful preemption.
At the time this photo was made, smoke billowed 20,000 feet above Hiroshima while smoke from the burst of the first atomic bomb had spread over 10,000 feet on the target at the base of the rising column (6 August 1945).
Today, a nuclear Iran appears almost a fait accompli. For Israel, soon to be deprived of any cost-effective preemption options, this means forging a strategy to coexist or “live with” a nuclear Iran. Such an essential strategy of nuclear deterrence would call for reduced ambiguity about certain of its strategic forces; enhanced and partially disclosed nuclear targeting options; substantial and partially disclosed programs for active defenses; recognizable steps to ensure the survivability of its nuclear retaliatory forces; and, to bring all of these elements together in a coherent mission plan, a comprehensive strategic doctrine.
Additionally, because of the prospect of Iranian irrationality, Israel’s military planners will have to identify suitable ways of ensuring that even a nuclear “suicide state” could be deterred. Such a perilous threat may be very small, but, with Iran’s particular Shiite eschatology, it might not be negligible. And while the probability of having to face such an irrational enemy state would probably be very low, the disutility or expected harm of any single deterrence failure could be very high.
Israel needs to maintain and strengthen its plans for ballistic missile defense, both the Arrow system, and also Iron Dome, a lower-altitude interceptor designed to guard against shorter-range rocket attacks from Lebanon and Gaza. These systems, including Magic Wand, which is still in the development phase, will inevitably have leakage. It follows that their principal benefit would ultimately lie in enhanced deterrence, rather than in any added physical protection.
A newly-nuclear Iran, if still rational, would need steadily increasing numbers of offensive missiles in order to achieve a sufficiently destructive first-strike capability against Israel. There could come a time, however, when Iran would be able to deploy more than a small number of nuclear-tipped missiles. Should that happen, Arrow, Iron Dome and, potentially, Magic Wand, could cease being critical enhancements of Israeli nuclear de
0 Comments on Israel and Iran at the eleventh hour as of 2/23/2012 5:27:00 AM
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Retold by Alexis York Lumbard, illustrated by Demi,
Anyone who saw the terror on the faces of the people fleeing the attacks in Paris last week will agree that terrorism is the right word to describe the barbaric suicide bombings and the shooting of civilians that awful Friday night. The term terrorism, though once rare, has become tragically common in the twenty-first century.
The post The meaning of “terrorism” appeared first on OUPblog.
On 6 November 2015, the New York Times featured a poignant five-minute documentary called “A Conversation About Growing Up Black,” produced by Joe Brewster and Perri Peltz. Brewster and Peltz present Rakesh, Miles, Malek, Marvin, Shaquille, Bisa, Jumoke, Maddox, and Myles. The youngest are 10 and the eldest is 25 years old.
The post Correcting the conversation about race appeared first on OUPblog.
On a blustery St. Martin’s Eve in 1619, a twenty-three year old French gentleman soldier in the service of Maximilian of Bavaria was billeted near Ulm, Germany. Having recently quit his military service under Maurice of Nassau, he was new to the Bavarian army and a stranger to the area.
The post The phosphene dreams of a young Christian soldier appeared first on OUPblog.
Not so long ago, we ‘went to the pictures’ (or ‘the movies’) and now they tend to come to us. For many people, visiting a cinema to see films is no longer their principal means of access to the work of film-makers. But however we see them, it’s the seeing as much as the hearing of Shakespeare in this medium that counts. Or rather, it's the interplay between the two.
The post Going to the pictures with Shakespeare appeared first on OUPblog.
In July 1867 the British historian Edward Augustus Freeman was in the thick of writing his epic History of the Norman Conquest. Ever a stickler for detail, he wrote to the geologist William Boyd Dawkins asking for help establishing where exactly in Pevensey soon-to-be King Harold disembarked in 1052.
The post Time and tide (and mammoths) appeared first on OUPblog.
Sometimes, especially in humankind's most urgent matters of life and death, truth may emerge through paradox. In this connection, one may usefully recall the illuminating work of Jorge Luis Borges. In one of his most ingenious parables, the often mystical Argentine writer, who once wished openly that he had been born a Jew, examines the bewildering calculations of a condemned man.
The post Thinking the worst: an inglorious survival posture for Israel appeared first on OUPblog.
Food lovers with a soft spot for New York City gastronomy congregated to celebrate the upcoming book Savoring Gotham: A Food Lover's Companion to New York City, edited by Andrew F. Smith.
The post To Savor Gotham: book launch appeared first on OUPblog.
Health care reform in the United States has promoted policies and practices that are evidence-based. Prevention, diagnoses, and treatment decisions are to be guided by the best available empirical evidence. Decisions about what treatments are to be provided are to be informed by findings of randomized, controlled, research studies when such evidence is available.
The post Should social work be evidence-based? appeared first on OUPblog.