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TEHRAN: The gentle music piped around the Iranian capital’s latest cultural exhibition sounds innocent enough, until you listen to the lyrics.
“America, death to you. The blood of our youth is dripping from your nails.”
But the anti-US rhetoric echoing through the halls of the “First Perspective Exhibition on How to Avoid the Great Satan” appears to be falling on deaf ears.
As Iran prepares to mark on Monday the 23rd anniversary of the day when radical students turned hostage-takers overpowered guards at the US embassy in Tehran, few Iranians can muster much enthusiasm for bashing the Islamic Republic’s arch-foe.
“We don’t hate the Americans,” whispered Shafi, 33, one of seven guides who accompanied two reporters around the “Great Satan” exhibition in a Defence Ministry warehouse in northern Tehran. There were no other visitors.
“We want peace between America and Iran, not war,” he said, while one of his colleagues explained a colourful mural depicting Uncle Sam standing behind Saddam Hussein to portray Washington’s perceived support for the Iraqi president during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.
Worshippers at Friday prayer meetings across Iran still chant “Death to Israel! Death to America!” at specific points during the weekly sermons.
And thousands will gather at an official demonstration on Monday at the gates of the vast former US diplomatic compound to heap scorn on the so-called “Den of Spies”.
The embassy siege, in which 52 Americans were held for 444 days, prompted then US president Jimmy Carter to freeze Iranian assets and sever all diplomatic ties with Tehran.
“Never did we imagine that our act of protest would have a far reaching impact on the political history of our country, and of the region,” former hostage taker Massoumeh Ebtekar, now Iran’s vice-president, said in her 2000 account of the siege “Takeover in Tehran”.
THE SECOND REVOLUTION: Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founding father of the 1979 Islamic revolution, was reported to be initially unsure about the student’s action but changed his mind when he saw the crowds of demonstrators gathering in front of the embassy compound to voice their support for the takeover.
He hailed the students for launching “a second revolution, greater than the first.”
But as a recent opinion poll revealed, 23 years on most Iranians are tired of the hardline establishment’s determination to keep Iran isolated from the world superpower.
The survey showed almost three-quarters of Iranians want a resumption of some kind of dialogue with Washington. Moreover, despite Iran being lumped together with Iraq and North Korea in President George W. Bush’s “axis of evil”, the poll showed nearly half thought US policy on Iran was “to some extent correct”.
It was a like a red rag to a bull for Iran’s hardline clerical establishment which considers any mention of talks with Washington an anathema.
Despite protestations by President Mohammad Khatami’s moderate government, the head of the polling institute that carried out the survey has been thrown in jail awaiting trial on charges of fabricating the poll and espionage.
But the conservatives who draw moral support from Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and control Iran’s military, judiciary, broadcast media and powerful constitutional watchdogs are fighting a losing battle, analysts say.
“The incident over the poll is a classic example of the conservatives in denial,” said Ali Ansari, a lecturer in Middle East history at Durham University, England.
Unlike other countries in the region, “the people on the street in Iran are not anti-American. The anti-US slogans are totally out of tune with the people.”
COKE AND CDs: Thanks to the Internet and illegal satellite television US popular culture is king among young Iranians who are a vital constituency in a country where 70 per cent of the population is under 30 and has no real memory of the 1979 Islamic revolution or the US embassy siege.
Teenage boys sport baseball caps of US teams and eagerly swap illegal CDs of the latest music from the Billboard charts. Despite the international acclaim accorded to Iran’s burgeoning film makers, Hollywood movies are the top sellers in the thriving blackmarket in video rentals.
And while hardliners tried to ban the sale of Barbie dolls earlier this year because of their potential corrupting influence on young girls, the icons of American culture, Coca-Cola and Pepsi are now widely available and recording growing sales.
Khatami’s government may have been furious to be branded on a par with Saddam in Bush’s “axis of evil” speech, particularly after the important behind-the-scenes cooperation it provided Washington in toppling the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Despite persistent accusations by Washington that Iran has given safe haven to fleeing Al Qaeda fighters and is developing its own weapons of mass destruction — allegations which Tehran flatly denies — Iranian officials have recently spoken of a softer tone emerging from the United States.
Diplomats in Tehran have said that Washington has sent a message to Iran, by way of a third country, reassuring the government that Iran is not next on its “war on terror” list.
“America is not going to bomb a country where the people wear baseball caps and drink Coca-Cola,” one local analyst said. “You don’t bomb people who like you.”
SLOGANS APLENTY: Many of the radical students who stormed the US embassy 23 years ago are now Iran’s most vocal reformists and fully support Khatami’s policy of engagement with the West.
Back at the “Great Satan” exhibition there are slogans aplenty.
The exhibition contains a series of scenes “to show the new generation what crimes America has carried out in Iran and the rest of the world,” said Ali Mirzaei, one of the guides.
Another room attacks the symbols of Western cultural depravity such as CDs, gambling, drugs and even pet dogs.
In the room a male dummy, wearing a baseball cap and engrossed in a glossy magazine, is about to fall off a precipice.
“When young people are busy with the cultural distractions of the West they don’t have time to move with the (Islamic) revolution,” Mirzaei said.—Reuters
