It's Not Easy Being Green - Kermit Joins the Protests

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Students Fight the Enemy of Freedom

Something is happening in Iran that defies the experts and expectations of the world. On Monday, December 7, (16 Azar, Persian Calendar), almost six months after the June 12 elections, the streets of major Iranian cities were filled with a Sea of Green-clad protesters. 16 Azar, National Student Day, is a day to commemorate the student activism that helped create modern Iran. Since the early 1930s, high school and college aged students have bee the backbone of change. Once again, students are leading the way in Iran. Yesterday, thousands of police and Basij (paramilitary thugs recruited by the regime) lined up on universities campuses, and thousands of students walked straight into their hate. What was supposed to be another day of protests, co opting government holidays to protest the oppressive regime, turned into something SO much larger. The result were protests not quite as large, but much more wide spread than even the protests right after the election.

The scale of the protests are only part of the story. What was supposed to be a day of protests turned into two days. What was supposed to be localized in Iran spread to the entire country. What was supposed to involve Iranian students sparked the Awakening of the Kurds. All of this even prompted the Ayatollah Makarem-Shirazi to say that the regime "should negotiate," with the opposition.

The Kurds are an interesting twist to this story. Large populations of Kurds live in Kurdistan, a region that includes parts of Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria. The Kurds have been a semiautonomous, highly oppressed group of people. They are part of a growing ethnic unrest in Iran, recognized by Time Magazine as one of the top 10 biggest unreported story of 2009. If these minority groups are now turning against the Iranian regime then civil war may very well be on the horizon there.

There are other reasons to be concerned about the regime there. Despite the fact that few know about it, American citizens are being attacked, their families and friends are being imprisoned without cause, our enemies are being equipped with some pretty serious weapons by a major nation-state, and we are letting our best chance to stop it slip away, one brutal beating at a time.

As the Ahmadinejad/Ayatollah Khamenei Regime is feeling increased pressure from the United States, Israel, and the rest of the world over its nuclear program, the government crackdown on its own citizens is becoming increasingly totalitarian. Iran has now started to "blackmail" Iranian expatriots, throwing friends and family of regime critics in prison. The government is even forcing people to log in to Facebook in order to get through airport security.

And while the regime is building nuclear capabilities, they are also supplying terrorist and militia forces, such as Hezbollah and Hamas, with weapons, a threat the world cannot long ignore. As the regime become less stabile, chaos could easily find a home within Iran's borders.

The time has come to discuss our options with Iran. The world cannot watch while their human rights violations are captured on Youtube (warning: Graphic material). Taking a wider view, Iran's refusal to cooperate on the nuclear issue should inspire our government to stand up in solidarity with these student protesters.

We cannot, and should not, commit US forces to a war in Iran, but there are other options. While Iran is stepping up their cyber attacks, we could use our own government capabilities to shut down government web sites, communications networks, and other vital systems. We could be supporting projects like Haystack in order to protect the identity of Iranian expatriots. The US needs to pressure Russia and China to move forward with sanctions. The regime needs to know that cooperating with the international community will pay, and fighting it will hurt.

Of course, it may be possible that the US government has already started its attack on the Iranian regime. Iran has accused the US and Israel of kidnapping one of their leading nuclear scientists.

Most of all, however, the government needs to acknowledge the Green Movement in Iran, honor the brave students who have fallen victim to the regime, and support the revolution. They are there, working to overthrow our worst enemy, and we're sitting back and watching them fall.

- Iranian university students under attack

- Awakening The Kurds -

- Informed Comment: Student Protests Erupt in Over a Dozen Iranian Cities

- Iran streets and campuses erupt in protest -- latimes.com

- FRONTLINE: Tehran Bureau: Students Day protests sweep campuses across Iran | PBS

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Clash with Basij's Soundtrack: "Death to the Dictator"

In Iran today, university students once again clashed with police and government loyalists to protest June's rigged election of Ahmadinejad. Despite assured resistance, these students continue to organize, continue to March, against an enemy of freedom and democracy.

Honor their bravery. Watch their protests below.



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Reporting in the Twitter Age

New Media: Reporting, Hype, or Hysteria?

There are two major sources of instantaneous news: Cable News (CNN, FOX, MSNBC) and the Internet. I've talked a lot over the last few months about how Twitter users, like myself, constantly scoop the major news sources. Part of this is because the mainstream media doesn't do a very good job of covering complex stories, and instead they rely on car chases and political gaffs to fill out their hours. Real, in depth reporting takes good sources and constant analysis, as well as constant disaggregation and explanation for the general public. In the case of the situation in Iran, live blogging (HuffingtonPost, NYTimes, LATimes) and the new social media (Facebook, Twitter, the blogosphere) have provided faster, more nuanced, deeper, and often more accurate news coverage than major media sources.

But a few events recently have highlighted some major problems in the way breaking news is covered by ALL media sources. Balloon boy showed that sexy video and lots of speculation can take the entire nation on a wild goose chase. However, compared to some news stories, the Balloon incident was NOTHING!

Reporting breaking news, like the tragic shooting at Fort Hood is a difficult, messy business. Technology allows us to instantly access information, before it is vetted or verified, and often without revealing the original source (at least initially). This is compounded by our lust for 24 hour, up-to-the-minute information (and entertainment... or infotainment). This means that because the media, including web 2.0 users, have information, they feel the desire and feel the obligation to disperse it as fast as possible. There are many reasons for this. Media is all about having the scoop, being first, finding information and attracting people to your blog/channel because you have the source. The technology of television, radio, and now the Internet also doesn't lend itself to "dead air." You have to get that info out, as quickly as possible. People want to know.

I deal with this problem when using Twitter to disseminate information on the Iranian Revolution, or any other developing story. Obviously, not all of the info on the Internet is accurate. Responsibility takes restraint. However, when the information doesn't seem right, like the reports that the Supreme Leader in Iran was dead, checking sources and being skeptical is easier. During that incident, the debate about the validity of the reports was happening simultaneously with the publishing of those reports. The buzz on Twitter proved that instantaneous information spreading world wide didn't necessarily mean that rumors were all-powerful. "Don't believe everything that you read" became the unspoken mantra of the moment.

The real problem occurs when the information involves panic. For instance, the reports during September 11th that there was a bomb exploding at the Capitol Building in D.C. spread quickly, and they matched the mood of the day. During many protests in Iran, rumors about specific threats or instances of violence spread quickly and were hard to verify, i.e., this story I Tweeted:

"Unconfirmed: RT Basij night attack -WATCH THIS! - PPL NOT SAFE AT THEIR OWN HOMES/APPTS EITHER: http://ow.ly/fKNU #IranElection #NEDA" 10:22 PM Jun 24th from web

Is this responsible reporting? Yes it is. All that has been urged is caution, the story has been flagged as unconfirmed, and this kind of fast reporting might have saved a life. Also, there is potential to follow up. With this post out there, the detective work would begin. Do I have another source I can trust that can confirm/deny this source? Is there a blog/newspaper report that can do the same? Does this fit with what I already know? Others are asking the same question, and eventually the story becomes confirmed, a falsehood is exposed, or the story fades into nothing. This kind of reporting is at least as responsible, and much faster, than cable news, plus it is often clear exactly where the blogger is getting his/her information, and how solid that information is.

The value of this new media is often scorned by the major media powers. Arianna Huffington has a new post about the struggle between old media moguls, such as Rupert Murdock, and the new media revolution. She points out the New York Times, a titan of journalism, both got the Iranian election story dead right (by using new media methods) AND dead wrong (using old media methods):

In fact, the new paradigm was illustrated perfectly by the New York Times, which covered the story both in the old way and the new way. The former came by way of executive editor Bill Keller who was in Tehran for the election. Three days after the fraudulent vote, and well after the street protests had been revved up and hundreds of videos had been uploaded and thousands of tweets had been posted, he reported: "With this election, Mr. Khamenei and [Mr. Ahmadinejad] appear to have neutralized for now the reform forces that they saw as a threat to their power, political analysts said."

Uh, not exactly.

At the same time, the Times also ran an aggregation blog by Robert Mackey that was, like the terrific one our national editor Nico Pitney did on HuffPost, a 24/7 nerve center of updates, video and tweets -- largely by citizen journalists.

By my accounts, the NYT live blog was one of the best sources of news from inside Iran for weeks.

Which brings me to my next point: money. The struggle of newspapers is almost a cliche these days. However, online journalism like Huffingtonpost and Slate are booming. Just like the music industry has struggled with the adoption of new technology, the newspaper industry needs to realize that the idea of cutting down trees, printing news, transporting them all over, and having people buy your ENTIRE publication... these ideas a quaint at best. This isn't a green model, it isn't a fast model, and it isn't a new media model.

Paying for content is just as bad, or maybe worse, because it restricts the full capability of technology. Look at my blog: I link to and from dozens of news sources, hundreds of articles, on various subjects. I don't link to "nytimes.com," but rather I link to specific stories that support or add information to my posts. If I had to pay for online content like, say, the Wall Street Journal, then if I linked to a story I liked there, the only people who could follow the link would also have to pay for the WSJ. Why would I do that? I could probably find a respectable blogger who commented on the WSJ and link to them, which is free for both me and my readers. If online content was restricted by any sort of pay-for-content model, much of the purpose of viewing news online is lost. At least reading a paper newspaper makes you look smart, and you can wrap a fish in it or line a bird cage at the end of the process. Paid online content is just a foolish idea.

And it's a short lived idea. As older generations, newspaper generations, die off, and younger generations become a larger percentage of the populous, pay-for-content providers will find that their business model is a stop-gap to the inevitable dirt nap.

As Arianna Huffington points out, the problems with the media, through the 2000 and 2004 elections, to the coverage of the lead up to the Iraq War, to the legendary failure to predict the economic crisis, are now well known. She argues, however, that the bloggers, the real "pit bulls" of journalism, are changing the journalistic scene, and those who cling to the old media models better catch up with the Internet Age.

Huffington is right, Twitter can be reporting, new media sources and free content are the future... and my readers and I are on the leading edge of the revolution. Thanks, and congratulations! ♦DiggIt! ♦Add to del.icio.us ♦Add to Technorati Faves

Predator & Pray: Killing and Ideology in Afghanistan

I'll be honest, I'm terribly conflicted about Afghanistan.As far as I'm concerned, George Bush was planning to invade Iraq before he planned on attacking Al Qaeda. According to a new Senate report, because of this he never committed enough troops to complete our objectives in Afghanistan by capturing and dismantling Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. America was sold a war to stop those responsible for the 9/11 attacks. We were sold a sports car with no engine, nice outside but it doesn't do what it says it does. After initial failure, followed by at least 6 years of ignoring Afghanistan while focusing on an unjust war in Iraq, the bulk of our military campaign isn't even about terrorists, but rather preventing the resurgence of the Taliban, as my previous articles on Afghanistan argue.

None of this is Obama's fault. Most of this is Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld's fault, with the rest of the blame falling on the Congress who let them get away with this. So what should Obama do?

Tonight, Obama will unveil his plan for the war torn nation. It will entail sending 34,000 more troops, a similar strategy as the Iraq War's famous "surge." My problem with the surge wasn't that it wouldn't accomplish some goals, but that it was a temporary fix of a long term mess. I'll admit, the surge worked well for a short time, but the current problems in Iraq are being ignored by the press. The reality is that the problems in Iraq (not all of which are the fault of America) were not fixed, and the surge put American soldiers and Iraqi civilians at risk by adding ingredients to a spoiled cake. Did it work? Was it worth it?

Obama's decision to more boots on the ground is a desperate attempt to stabilize the region so that we can leave it, and it might be the only option he has left. The White House will surely make statements about timelines, deadlines, goals, road marks, and what not. Obama will claim that our commitment to Afghanistan is not without limits. However, he needs to remember that America has arguably NEVER won a counter insurgency. It's why we dropped the bomb on Japan, because the leadership believed that we were walking into an unconventional and unwinnable war that may have cost America millions of lives to fight. This is obviously a smaller scale, but Afghanistan is arguably less winnable that an invasion of Japan ever would have been.

Let's put the war in Afghanistan in perspective. Now that it isn't about 9/11, it is about fighting an organization, the Taliban, over ideological differences. The war is about defending a perceived ally, the Karzai regime. It is above all a war about not losing, because (so the thought goes) to lose would be to encourage militant Islamists everywhere to join a jihad against the United States. This Afghanistan War also needs to be put in perspective of a 30 year-old war between the United States of America and militant Islamists, a war that has claimed at least 10,325 American and 288,000 Muslim lives, most of them innocent bystanders. This is a complex, multilateral, unconventional war with many causes, routed deeply in historical conflict, cultural misunderstanding, religious intolerance, ignorance, revenge, an a global power struggle. It is a war that most in power won't acknowledge, and no one completely understands, and it is a war that no public official has developed a strategy to win. Obama's surge will commit more troops to this amorphous conflict, potentially escalating it permanently, or perhaps only temporarily to win a major victory for peace in the middle east. Either way, we have to find new weapons besides weapons to settle the conflicts between Islam and the Western World.

This will be one of the ultimate challenges to Obama and every world leader for the next century. We see problems, threats, suffering, and imbalance everywhere, and our governments respond with either indifference or defiant war making. In the 21st century, haven't we found a more effective way of shaping the global community. It was Eisenhower, after all, who said, "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed." Yet we continue to wage war, increasingly so in environments like Afghanistan, Somalia, Uganda, Iraq, and other locations where war seems to only make things worse, or at least not significantly better, than they were before.

A surge in Afghanistan might sounds like the best plan for victory in Afghanistan, but is it really the best plan for filling the world with peace, hope, and change? ♦DiggIt! ♦Add to del.icio.us ♦Add to Technorati Faves

Run the Church like a Methadone Clinic

The general idea is that when somebody seeks help for drug addiction, they've gotten to the point that they believe they can't do it all on their own. Sometimes, when a loved one is struggling with addiction, it becomes necessary to get them help, to give them access to resources that can help them, to help them with chores, errands, and finding work so that they can get on their feet again. Other times, when a person is unable or unwilling to change his life, it make become necessary, some believe, to cut them off; the thought is that if you have a relationship with someone and threaten to end it, this will eventually leave the individual with no choice but to turn things around. It's a tough decision, one that's made out of love, and one that I've tried (and failed) to make in the past.

I've know enough addicts in my life to know how NOT to run a methadone clinic, though. Can you imagine if a drug rehab tried to use that tactic. The sign on the door would read something like, "Hope Clinic: Those needing help kicking drugs, kick the drugs before entering." Obviously, the clinic would take the opposite approach, which is to say that it would offer teachers, counselors, doctors and other resources that would welcome people who need help.

We'd also never run a drug education program like this. We'd never tell kids that if you do drugs you are evil, and you can't associate with the school. Instead, we'd teach them about the dangers of drugs, and if necessary the ways to get free of addiction, in the hope that they would make good choices. A good drug ed program sells the idea of sobriety, and the dangers of drugs and addiction. The beets programs would realize that the culture that they operate within might not share those values, so the sales pitches would be made from an apologetic and educational position in order to convince those who didn't already agree that drugs were bad. If a drug education program only deterred those who didn't like the idea of taking drugs from taking drugs, would it be worth our money?

Now let's imagine that the "clinic" here is a church, and the "addiction" is sin. The church wants to educate people about the dangers of this addiction, to welcome them into its clinic and get those sinners the help that they need. It seems probable that a welcoming church would be a safe place for even those who disagree that their activity is a "sin," or else people whose lifestyles clashed with the church would never come in. They would never enter into dialogue or entertain the possibility that the church was right and their lives needed to change. An unwelcoming church would be like the meth clinic that only helped those who were already drug free, or the drug ed program that was only acceptable to sober kids. It just wouldn't work.

Guess what? The Catholic Church in America has become the unwelcoming meth lab of Christianity, and it isn't working. The public face, the political face, of the American Catholic Church has become boiled down to two issue: abortion, and gay marriage. Catholic bishops, publications, think tanks, and lobbyists have spent most of their cultural and political capital one these two issues, and it may just be destroying the church in America.

Right away, there should be an obvious and glaring problem. Abortion, according to Catholic thinking, is the cold-blooded murder of the unborn. Gay marriage is the state-sanctioned sex for reasons other than procreation. Somehow, these two issues share the stage and have become synonymous with the public face of Catholicism in this nation. Sex and murder... the mouthpieces of the Catholic Church seems more like a sizzling Broadway musical than a religious organization dedicated to the continuing mission of Jesus Christ, guiding the moral compass of the world, and the betterment of all humanity.

The prominence of abortion as a primary concern is understandable (note, this article is not about defending or attacking the Catholic Church's teachings or the morality/permission on either the abortion or gay rights issues). According to the church, abortion is the murder of innocents who cannot protect themselves. However, it is convenient that abortion also concerns the result of behavior that the church condemns as immoral. In other words, the church has been too silent on other examples of the murder of innocent folk who cannot defend themselves. Catholic Just War Theory, for example, is the attempt to distinguish murder from justified conflict. Pope John Paul II condemned the invasion of Iraq in 2003 as unjust. Under Catholic doctrine, deaths as a result of an unjust war could easily be considered murder. In fact, approximately 100,000 civilians and 4365 U.S. servicemen have been killed since 2003. Politicians who have supported perceived pro-abortion bills, or who are pro gay marriage, have been denied Eucharist in the past. Have any U.S. bishops denied Catholic supporters of the Iraq invasion the Eucharist? I haven't heard of any.

And I'm glad, because when the Catholic Church singles out public individuals on single issues and mixes politics and religion, the Catholic church does itself more harm than good. This is precisely the problem.Instead of fighting the issues amongst the entire body of followers, teaching the moral lessons, acknowledging and working through the complexities and external factors, and attempting to fix broken systems, it is easier to single out high profiles folk, like Ted Kennedy, and crucify him for all to see.

I've read the entire New Testament, and while I'm certainly no expert I don't seem to remember any examples of the Christians crucifying the Romans. In fact, I do remember some chapters that discuss Jesus eating and associating with sinners. I bet you that He had better tact than your average bishop, or He would wind up on the uninvited list pretty quickly. You don't teach by browbeating the students. You don't convert by condemning the sinners. That doesn't mean you have to compromising beliefs, or cave in. Caving in is easy, relativism is easy, shunning a single individual is easy. Teaching? Now that's hard.

Now, look at this latest problem (which Stephen Colbert explains in my previous blog post). In Washington D.C., a recent bill would recognize and permit gay marriages in the District, and all the legal rights associated with it. This bill would exempt religious organizations from "having to marry same-sex couples, promote same-sex marriage or rent church property to them for receptions or other affairs. (source: NYTimes.com)" However, church organizations would have to extend same-sex marriage benefits to couples who qualified. As a result, Catholic Charities, which uses some government funding for some of its projects, has decided that it would rather stop helping the poor so it doesn't have to comply with this law.

The problem is that there are MANY other options. First of all, church organizations could allow all of their employees to designate a spousal equivalent to receive spousal benefits. This would allow Catholic organizations to comply with the law without acknowledging gay marriage or abandoning their mission to help the poor, and it might just provide some health care in the process.

There's also the perception that because Catholic money might go towards a cause that is objectionable to the church's teachings, that the only option is to take the ball and run home. But there isn't a direct cause and effect relationship here. Just because a gay couple receives, or doesn't receive, health care benefits, would they stop being gay or having gay sexual relations? Nope. However, Catholic money goes towards payroll taxes of their employees, and some of those taxes pay for bombs and bullets who kill civilians. I don't hear any bishops refusing to pay taxes.

What's my point? First of all, the priorities of the Catholic church in this country are so lopsided that it is crippling their mission to the poor, to social justice, and to educating and caring for the flock. Secondly, there are ways for the church to stand up against issues that it deems immoral or dangerous without shutting down the conversation.

But my most important point is that the focus on these two issues has poisoned the water hole. It has made too many Catholics robots who operate on two cylinders and ignore all other issues all the time. We have serious problems in this country, and many Catholics could be part of the solutions, but we've become stuck.

I'd like to discuss this more in future posts. My next post on this issue will talk about the false prioritization of the anti gay marriage movement, about how Jesus doesn't talk about gays and bishops and Catholic think tanks talk about little else. I'm also trying to start a conversation about what the Catholic Church should be focused on instead, and how progress can be made on many, many issues without compromising core beliefs.

Catholic? Gay? Poor? Let me know what you think about the current quagmire in DC. Leave some comments below, and remember: be nice. ♦DiggIt! ♦Add to del.icio.us ♦Add to Technorati Faves

Catholic Church Throwing Baby Out with Bath Water

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
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This is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. More on this later... ♦DiggIt! ♦Add to del.icio.us ♦Add to Technorati Faves