We reviewed the circumstances of the Iranian revolution’s particular success, the religious tradition filling the vacuum as other ideologies failed. Right after we watched the documentary on Khomeini the controversial Iranian president Ahmadinejad popped up in the news again. In a anti-racism conference the president attacked the state of Israel and the west saying that after World War II they "resorted to military aggression to make an entire nation homeless, on the pretext of Jewish sufferings and the ambiguous and dubious question of Holocaust". Anti- Western feeling in Iran is still apparently prevalent and the president seems to keep making inflammatory remarks against Israel that simply make the situation worse, only supporting anti-Semitic stereotype of the Middle East.
We discussed the novel Gate of the Gold Sun which I personally detested reading, though it made some good points overall. I better understood the reason for the writing style after the tradition he was following was mentioned in class. The novel gave the perspective of young Palestinian men fighting for a country they had never lived in, dealing with the failure of their ‘revolution’ from outside. The author seems to embrace victimhood for Palestinians, a topic that seems to come up a lot, while writing a political piece about resistance (sorry to repeat my comment from class, but I though it was important/odd part of the book). It was definitely helpful in understanding Palestinian perspective, but I think perhaps one novel with some Israeli perspective would be helpful, even though we are bombarded by it in the media.