Death and the Maiden

Foreign affairs are really not what Cafe Expresso's all about, but, in a way there is a connexion as St. Paul’s is the only Anglican church in downtown Tehran. This is part of the diocese of Jerusalem ( I think).

Last week, we witnessed the senseless murder of Neda Agha Soltan on the streets of Tehran. This brutal killing of a young woman has shocked us to our very core. Now it appears that her family are being hounded by the Iranian regime. Already hagiographied by the media as the "Angel of Freedom" this kind of mythologising bodes ill for the regime.

I really don’t think anything could have prepared us for this kind of existential evil. What is signally obnoxious is that the regime purports to be theocratic. Ali Khamenei’s provenance as an Ayatolah is of course a moot point: but now, for the first time, he has crossed the line of no return by legitimising state sanctioned murder he has moved from being head of state to something altogether more venal.

What we can do to assist our Anglican brethren who are now by proxy in the firing line of Khamenie’s predictable xenophobic hatred of Britain, I do not know.

What we see in Iran is what we have come to see in all dictatorships: the blaming of external forces as the way to go when your regime you seek to impose stands revealed in singularity as act of evil: another black hole in which whole societies are eventually consumed. We pray for Iran.