Thursday, June 4, 2009

More About The Prisoner of Teheran Marina Nemat

1. As I read more chapters of the book I found some answers why most are intolerant. These include:

a) We are just ignorant about the issues and yet we are compelled to make wrong decision. For example, when the ex Minister of Education, was furious about Prof. Shahari's critic of the NST news, he was utterly ignorant of what Shaharir criticised. Yet he was because people around him advised him to.

b) We have own own personal agenda an yet we made the wrong decision. For example, when an ex TNC questioned the 12 lecturers who were said to be anti-government, he had his personal agenda of wanting to please the Minister and hoping to go up the ladder of power one way or the other.

c) We were just followers and yet we did what we did. For example, when the BTN officers interrogated and belittled the other officers, they were just idiots who were supposed to do just that. Just like the police officers who blown the Mongolian woman.

d) We wanted to be part of a system and yet we derailed our own principles. For example, some of us wanted to gain favour from the power that be, we just be part of the system .... be a member of UMNO or be an UMNO sympathisers, for instance, could take you up favourably be it in police force, army, ministries and even in universities.

2. These are a couple of observations that I could make after reading 17 Chapters of the above book written after the Iran Revolution.

3. When I was at Reading during the Iranian Revolution, my Persian friends talked so much good about Ayatollah Khoemeini even though they didn't know much about him as he was in exile in Paris, yet they expected so much of him. They were probably right as the Shah of Iran then was bad. When I met the same Iranian friend in Sydney in 1981, he told me the two era were not much different. The Iranians were still suffering from interrogation, execution and intolerance. If this could happened in Iran, why can't these also happen in modern Malaysia.

4. That is why I had wished ISA be abolished.

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