The revolution made a brief stop in Denver on Saturday. If the whole world wasn’t watching, many of those driving toward downtown on Lincoln around noon were at least inclined to peer out their windows, offer a thumbs up, or maybe a V-sign and honk their horns in support.
As political events go, it was a pretty easy sell. The crowd of people — maybe a couple hundred — were standing on the lawn and sidewalk near the state Capitol, waving Iranian flags, shouting in favor of democracy, one telling me that the Supreme Leader is an Orwellian joke, another holding up a sign calling for the United Nations to oversee a new election.
For those at the rally — nearly all of them Iranian, most with friends and family who live in Iran, some who live in Iran themselves — it was probably good to get out on a Saturday. It was a break from the new routine, days spent on Twitter or Facebook or watching CNN.
Babak Bahzadi, who helped organize the event, said what Iranians want from Americans is “moral support.”
“This government is not the same Islamic Republic you knew from a week ago,” said Bahzadi, a 41-year-old medical consultant who came to America 25 years ago. “It’s being slowly chipped away. Eighty percent of the power is in (Ayatollah Ali) Khamenei’s hands. If you change the constitution, if you change one of the pillars, you have a revolution. You don’t need bloodshed to have a revolution.
“Khamenei has lost his credibility with the people, even the religious people. This is the beginning of the end. That’s the best way to explain it — the beginning of the end.”
As they rallied in Denver, the streets in Tehran had erupted in chaos, and it was hard to tell if the violence was just beginning or how long it might last.
At Friday prayers, Khamenei had promised bloodshed if the protesters took to the streets again — and there was. Opposition leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi told a crowd he was prepared for martyrdom, and you can only wonder what comes next.
It’s not hard to find news of what has happened so far, despite the media restrictions in Iran. If you go to YouTube, you find grisly footage of a protester being shot, reportedly by the Basij militia, her friends frantic, blood pooling on her face.
A BBC reporter says he saw a protester shot on the street. Smoke from burning vehicles hangs above the city. The crisis has gone full-blown, and, in Washington, President Barack Obama has given up on modest restraint as a tactic.
I’m not nearly sophisticated enough in Iranian politics to know who exactly was represented at the Denver rally. There were many students. There were many women. There were some young people in masks. There were people wearing green. There weren’t many obviously religious people.
A big topic for discussion was whether Obama was showing enough support for the demonstrators. Sherry H. — like many at the rally, she didn’t want her last name used, fearing repercussions for relatives in Iran — was wearing a T-shirt with words in Farsi she loosely translated to mean, “Iran is my life.” She said Obama had gotten it exactly right. “He knows the regime wants to make this an American issue. It’s an Iranian issue.”
But Bahzadi wanted more. He said, “It is the responsibility of the free world to say, ‘Iranian people, we are behind you in your democratic movement.’ ”
This was before Obama had settled the issue, calling the Iranian reaction to Saturday’s protests “violent” and “unjust.”
Obama cited Martin Luther King’s words: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” He added, “And right now, we are bearing witness to the Iranian peoples’ belief in that truth.”
At the rally, there was much talk of justice. A woman named Nushin was talking about the surprising number of women who have taken to the streets in Tehran.
“It’s not just about a hijacked election,” she said. “For many women in Iran, it’s about women’s rights.”
She tells a story about visiting family in Iran 14 years ago when she was arrested, she said, because her hair stuck out from under her outfit.
“I was in a holding place with 70 or 80 women. Many had been there multiple times, some seven or eight. Because I was there for the first time, I didn’t get tortured. The rest of them, they were all beaten. I had to sit there and watch. It’s horrible, a 20-year-old woman — that’s what I was then — watching a 60-year-old woman get beaten.”
As we were talking, a scuffle broke out in the street. I was told later that a man had come by threatening to take names of those at the rally and send them back to Iran. He and another man began to fight. The cops came, and in what seemed like seconds, they were gone, with the man making the threat whisked away.
BK, as his friends call him, was watching. He’s a 27-year-old graduate student in bioengineering at the University of Denver who came here from Tehran about six months ago. He has been riveted to the news from back home.
He wakes up to Facebook each day, to the new photos, the latest news. He had been excited about the election, listening to the campaign speeches on his computer.
“When the election was stolen, people got angry,” he said. “Democracy is the issue there. It’s the only issue.”
His brother is one of the protesters. So are many of his friends.
“I wish I was there,” he said.
Instead, he was in Denver holding up a sign which showed photos of the protests in Tehran. Our Twittered, Facebooked world may be shrinking, but BK was still a half a world away from where he needed to be.
Mike Littwin writes Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-5428 or mlittwin@denverpost.com.
