The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> My trip to Iran

My trip to Iran
Posted by Jeffrey (Guest) - Wednesday, May 4 2016, 23:35:10 (UTC)
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Hi All,

I hope you guys are doing well. I've just returned from a two week trip to Iran. We went all over the country with 17 people (a diverse group including 2 Persians, 1 Afghani, 1 Syrian, 1 Chaldean-Assxtian, and many Americans of mixed whiter-European descent).

In my life, being born and raised in Michigan, I've had this urge to return to Iraq to see the land that created my ancestry. In fact, in college I was in the initial stages of planning a trip with David/Tiglath of Australia when the USA (USA! USA!) decided to bomb and destroy Iraq a second time. Now that it's unsafe, I can't go back, but an opportunity arose to visit Iran and I seized it.

Iran is a really interesting country. The people are overwhelmingly polite (think Taroof on steroids), and they really love Americans. I've been to France, South Korea, Thailand, and Mexico, and I have to say the amount of kindness that the Iranians expressed towards our group far outweighs that which I have experienced in other countries. In each of the 8 small villages, towns, and cities that we visited, perfect strangers approached us when they heard us speaking non-British English and introduced themselves. They said things like, "We love America, even though our government tells us not to", "Thank you so much for visiting", "Welcome to Iran". We encountered overflowing positivity.

One funny thing that I've never experienced, is when somebody asked me where I was from (this happened several times) and I replied with "Detroit, Michigan", they shrugged their shoulders and looked at me with confusion. Never heard of Detroit? Then, somebody in our tour group reminded me that Iran makes their own automobiles. Another member of our tour group told me that, in a somewhat counter-intuitive way, the sanctions have helped Iran build up their own cottage industries, manufacturing, and to be more self-sufficient.

The country isn't perfect, don't get me wrong. Women still have to wear a head scarf, etc. On the last day of our trip, the tour organizer asked the 6 women if they minded wearing the head scarf terribly for two weeks. Their answer? "Not a huge deal, it was definitely worth it."

We saw the crown jewels, in the basement vault of the Iran Central Bank. My friend has seen royal jewels in 4 European countries (including England), and he said Iran has the most impressive collection in the world by far. A two bedroom apartment in Tehran costs $1,000,000 USD. There are cranes building skyscrapers everywhere in Tehran! We went to museums, including the Water Museum, the Persian Carpet Museum, and of course sites like Persepolis. In retrospect, I imagine Iran today is a lot like Iraq was before the USA (USA! USA!) decided to bomb it the first time, before the USA provided chemical weapons to Saddam Hussein to fight the Iranians.

We went to the Iran-Iraq was museum, very sad and tragic. I was almost sick to my stomach, as any human being should be when they see the effects of pointless war. What made me particularly angry is that my tax dollars fund these immoral, illegal mulitary-industrial-complex wars. Anybody that thinks this is not about oil or the military-industrial complex should read recent headlines, such as "US President Barack Obama is demanding that Israel use US aid solely for purchasing weapons and systems from US arms companies."

Incidentally, on the plane I watched a European news station interview Madeline Albright. Of course, they asked her, "How could you live with yourself after saying that the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children was worth it?", and she responded by saying that it was a "stupid thing to say" and went on about how "Saddam was the one who killed those children, not the sanctions". Keep telling yourself that, you devil.

And then there's the whole situation with April Glaspie, the US Ambassador to Iraq, effectively giving Saddam the green light to invade Kuwait.

Anyhow, I digress. If you guys would like to see some photos from my travels, please feel free to visit my site: http://jja-travels.tumblr.com/

I'll try to upload more photos when I get some time.



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