In a brief departure from my Middle East/South Asia blogging, I covered the death of the King of Pop here in Los Angeles yesterday for Polaris Images and the Huffington Post. I’ve never covered a non-political related event before but Jackson was a global star and it’s not the usual utterly vapid entertainment story. His early career and style shaped the lives on many from Brentwood to Bahrain.
Today I heard on NPR that some of Jackson’s most infamous concert gear would be on display at the Grammy Award museum downtown. With the help of the museum’s PR person, I was able to get access to a limited display to photograph including the white suit Jackson wore on the Thriller album cover.
Mir Hussein Mousavi is refusing to back down from an implacable Ayatollah Ali al-Khamenei. The Mullahs in Qom and the Assembly of Experts are under immense pressure to conclude the most chaotic episode in Iran’s revolutionary history. They may have just gotten their accidental reprieve as the celebrity website TMZ reports that Michael Jackson has just died here in Los Angeles and the world’s media will have to swing it’s attention deficit plagued pendulum from the streets of Tehran to Westwood.
NYT journo David Rohde escaped from a Haqqani network compound in North Waziristan this weekend after being taken hostage in Afghanistan’s Logar Province last November on his way to interview a Taleban commander. The commander set up Rohde, his driver and fixer in a ruse by granting him a faux interview request meant to entrap him. I have an uncredited quote on the Daily Beast about it here. Another colleague has a story about Rohde’s captivity and a semi-secret video that aired on Al Jazeera here which was later kept quiet.
As we all know it looks like Khamenei chose not to follow my advice for his Friday sermon last week. He may need to simply drop the velayat-e-faqih act and take the quietest stance of fellow Iranian and Grand Ayatollah, Ali al-Sistani in neighboring Iraq.
I posted a piece addressed to Ayatollah Khamenei last night on the HP here.
According to the Guardian, during the called-for day of mourning, protests are not letting up from Kurdistan to Baluchistan and Ahmadinejad has not been spotted since Monday’s meeting of the the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Yekaterinberg. Today, the arm and headbands morphed from green to black in memory of those killed in the demo’s thus far. The democracy movement now appears to have gained enough momentum that real change may be afoot. It is up to the strength of the masses of the people at this point. Obama has not and really does not have a place to interject in Iran’s internal dynamics. People in the East have a long memory and if Baghdadis can bitterly compare the American sacking of Saddam Hussein to Hulagu Khan’s destruction of the libraries of the Abbasid Caliphate in 1258, then certainly Iranians will recall Operation Ajax just fifty-six years ago.
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