Iran's Antigone, Haleh Sahabi, falls. A reflection:
The Islamic Republic is a republic of death and dying, a republic of fear of the living and thriving. Haleh Sahabi did not break any law to honour her father's right to a dignified burial. She exposed the banality of the evil that rules over some seventy-odd million human beings, a banality that has not even the decency of allowing a dignified burial of an 81-year-old father, without causing the death of her mourning daughter too.
Ezzatollah Sahabi lived a long and fulfilling life. Haleh Sahabi was cut down halfway through her dignified extension of her father's causes into unchartered territories. Antigone defied a human law to observe a divine mandate, a moral commandment. Haleh Sahabi defied the ghoulish last shrieks of a dying theocracy to lay the foundation of a new ennobling legend for her people: The legend of Haleh Sahabi – the daughter who did not allow the body of her noble father stolen by ignoble fiends.
How many brute and cruel tyrants have come and gone? But we only remember the glorious, the defiant, the courageous Antigone.
In the understandable enthusiasm for and focus on the Arab Awakening, please don't forget Iran. That was where fear first failed, where hope first emerged, and where evil still reigns.
The Dish 