Zan, Zendeghi, Azadi
Netanyahu speaks, in Persian, of liberty; Kianoosh Sanjari protests regime with his life
When Prime Minister Netanyahu made his November 12 speech about a “free Iran” to the people of Iran, there was a line in the speech that I left out of the report here because I was on deadline and my language skills weren’t strong enough to parse it.
“I hear your whispers. Woman, Life, Freedom. Zan, Zendeghi, Azadi. Don’t lose hope,” Netanyahu said.
What is “Zan, Zendeghi, Azadi”?
That’s the Farsi for woman, life, freedom.
On X, Raylan Givens explains that it is “the slogan of the hijab protest that broke out in Iran about two years ago.”
Netanyahu seems serious about this. He rolled the idea out in his September 27, 2024 U.N. speech, in which he said, “Nations of the world should support the brave people of Iran who want to rid themselves of this evil regime.”
He followed up in a September 30, 2024, video address to the Iranian people, when he said in part, “When Iran is finally free and that moment will come a lot sooner than people think – everything will be different.”
On October 7, 2024, Reza Pahlevi, the son of the Shah of Iran, issued his own video: “This regime that has held us hostage for nearly half a century must go,” he said.
In his October 28, 2024 address to Knesset, Netanyahu spoke of “the future of the Middle East after the murderous arm of Iran and its murderous proxies is eradicated. Light will conquer darkness, good will overcome evil, the sanctity of life will prevail over the worship of death.”
And then came this week’s November 12 speech from Netanyahu: “Know that Israel and others in the free world stand with you,” he said. “I have no doubt that one day, in a free Iran, Israelis and Iranians will build together a future of prosperity and peace.”
I guess it’s possible Netanyahu is putting regime change on the table as a bargaining chip that he could agree to step back from if the Iranian regime stops funding Hamas and Hezbollah, stops pursuing nuclear weapons, and agrees to return the hostages and stop disrupting peace. But Iran would never do that.
It’s actually a gutsy move—at a moment when both Biden and Trump have put promotion of freedom and democracy abroad on the back burner and are essentially playing defense, Netanyahu is boldly going on offense against Ayatollah Khamenei’s regime. If he’s not serious about helping to make it happen, speaking publicly about it just will make him and Israel look impotent.
The day after Netanyahu gave his speech, an Iranian journalist and rights activist, Kianoosh Sanjari, “jumped to his death from a building in Tehran … in protest against Iran’s authoritarian rulers,” the U.S. government broadcaster VOA reports:
Sanjari, a 42-year-old Iranian, was a former journalist and rights activist who worked at VOA Persian’s Washington bureau from 2009 to 2013 before returning to Iran in 2016 to care for his parents.
Sanjari had been jailed in Iran for his activism before and after his work in the United States. He spoke publicly about how he suffered psychological harm from solitary confinement and other ill treatment by Iranian authorities.
In other words, even if it was a suicide and Sanjari jumped rather than being pushed, it was even so a kind of murder by the Iranian regime.
VOA Persian Service Director Leili Soltani wrote, “Kianoosh was only 17 when he was arrested, tortured and kept in solitary confinement. Though he is gone, his passion for freedom and human rights will live on.”
VOA quoted a State Department official who said, “His and other recent youth suicides in Iran indicate growing despondence on the part of Iranian youth with a regime that suppresses their most basic human rights.”
Leave it to the Biden-Blinken State Department to describe “growing despondence.”
In that context, Netanyahu’s plea for “Woman, Life, Freedom. Zan, Zendeghi, Azadi. Don’t lose hope,” is even more poignant and inspiring.
Let those inside and outside Iran know that one day— “a lot sooner than people think,” as Netanyahu put it— “Zan, Zendeghi, Azadi” will be known not as the slogan of a protest but as the motto of a new government in Iran.
Leave it to Israel—the country whose anthem is Hatikvah, the hope—to encourage hope in Iran.
Netanyahu’s Likud Party has roots in Menachem Begin’s party called Herut, which is Hebrew for freedom. Whether it is Herut in Hebrew or Azadi in Farsi, it is a universal value.
Moolenaar calls for tougher trade rules with China: The chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, John Moolenaar, Republican of Michigan, today introduced the Restoring Trade Fairness Act. The bill would revoke China’s Permanent Normal Trade Relations.
Senators Cotton, Rubio, and Hawley introduced companion legislation in the Senate earlier this year.
“Having permanent normal trade relations with China has failed our country, eroded our manufacturing base, and sent jobs to our foremost adversary,” Moolenaar said in introducing the bill. “At the same time, the CCP has taken advantage of our markets and betrayed the hopes of freedom and fair competition that were expected when its authoritarian regime was granted permanent normal trade relations more than 20 years ago.”
The bill would impose a new 35 percent minimum tariff on “non-strategic goods” and a new 100 percent minimum tariff on “strategic goods” imported to the U.S. from China, phased in over a five year period.
“China’s Permanent Normal Trade Relations status has enriched the Chinese Communist Party while costing the United States millions of jobs,” Senator Cotton said. “This comprehensive repeal of China’s PNTR status and reform of the U.S.-China trade relationship will protect American workers, enhance our national security, and end the Chinese Communists’ leverage over our economy.”
It’ll be interesting to see where this goes. I’m less excited about standalone tariff increases and more interested in Jackson-Vanik style linkage between trade and human rights, with a parallel strategy aimed at helping China free itself from Communist rule.
NPR Is unlistenable: Even if you think, as I do, that President Trump’s personnel picks so far have been a mixed bag, with some strong picks and a few head-scratchers, NPR’s coverage is just ridiculous. Here is NPR’s “All Things Considered” segment from today on Trump’s nominee to be Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth. It is from NPR’s “domestic extremism correspondent,” Odette Yousef, who goes on about the supposed overlap between Hegseth’s ideas and a “neonazi mass shooter who killed scores.”
“They’ve highlighted his connections to David Horowitz, a prominent American Islamophobe. …Hegseth has also spoken about rebuilding the so-called Third Temple in Jerusalem, which would involve destroying the third holiest site in Islam,” she reports.
Horowitz isn’t given an opportunity to respond to this description of him, and what “connections” there are between Hegseth and Horowitz are left unexplained. It’s just a guilt-by-association smear.
If there’s any “rebuilding” of the Temple in Jerusalem it would be a rebuilding of the first or second temples, which were destroyed. A Third Temple wouldn’t be “rebuilt” it would be built for the first time, because there have only been two. Jews routinely pray for the rebuilding of the temple “speedily in our days.” Perhaps it could be done without destroying Muslim holy sites—the biblical description of the messianic age involves plenty of peace, too.
Anyway, the idea that a cent of taxpayer dollars is going to pump out this nonsense really rankles. If Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are looking to cut wasteful government spending with their new “DOGE”—Department of Government Efficiency—whatever is going into public radio would be a fine place to begin.
David Brooks on how the Ivy League ruined America: David Brooks has an Atlantic essay that is a little facile and not entirely right about solutions but that also makes some good diagnostic and descriptive points that directionally match some of my recent observations.
He writes, “People raised in this sorting system tend to become risk-averse, consumed by the fear that a single failure will send them tumbling out of the race. At the core of the game is the assumption that the essence of life fulfillment is career success. The system has become so instrumentalized—How can this help me succeed?—that deeper questions about meaning or purpose are off the table, questions like: How do I become a generous human being? How do I lead a life of meaning? How do I build good character?”
Brooks suggests “change how we define merit” redefining it to emphasize “curiosity,” “a sense of drive and mission,” “social intelligence” and “agility.” He suggests reorganizing schools to emphasize project-based learning and also “reviving vocational education, making national service mandatory, creating social-capital programs, and developing a smarter industrial policy.”
“We want a meritocracy that will help each person identify, nurture, and pursue the ruling passion of their soul,” he writes.
The use of “we” in essays like this— “we want,” “we define”—is like fingernails on a chalkboard, because the “we”—readers of the Atlantic, panelists at the Aspen Ideas Festival—so often lack the humility to understand that these trends are driven not by the central planning of government or Big Philanthropy but by the spontaneous order of decentralized decisions. Plenty of successful organizations, schools, religions, and families are already defining merit in the directions that Brooks suggests, and some of them have chosen, at various times along the way, to opt out of the rat-race that Brooks describes.
I take some satisfaction in having beaten Brooks by a few days to mentioning the point about curiosity. Back on November 7, before Brooks’s essay was published, I wrote here at The Editors, “Curiosity is underemphasized as a public virtue in America these days, and I am glad to see Weingarten mentioning it.”
Ted Olson: The New York Sun (“A Constitutional Hero” ) and the Wall Street Journal (“Theodore Olson, 1940-2024”) both have fine editorials about Ted Olson. The Journal also has a nice article from Gordon Crovitz:
“When Olson died, he was working on a memoir. He recalled how debating in college prepared him to litigate hard cases. “Understanding the reasoning and facts on the other side allows the formation of coherent, persuasive responses. It also encourages us to respond without anger and hostility by making it so much harder to revile those views or the individuals expressing them,” he wrote. “Knowing the other side promotes civility, respect, and invariably more effective argumentation.”
I wasn’t close to Olson but am pretty sure I once went to a Federalist Society barbecue event in his backyard. I find his story a reminder that for all the talk about the rule of law and how we have a government of laws, the rule of law itself depends on and is strengthened by lawyers, like Olson, who devote careers to energetic and thoughtful advocacy and to training and cultivating other professionals. Without such souls, the law would be just a bunch of words.
Israel defense spending: A useful source of information about the Middle East war has been the online video briefing of Israel’s Defense and Security Forum. Today’s speaker was David Weinberg, who spoke of how Israel’s defense spending will increase to 7.5 percent of GDP from 5 percent of GDP as the country tries to make more arms domestically so that it is not dependent on foreign countries. That will come at some cost to spending on health, education, and welfare, he said. The recommendations are coming from a committee headed by a longtime Israeli civil servant, Jacob Nagel. U.S. defense spending is at about 3.4 percent of GDP, far below Cold War levels.
Rachel Goldberg-Polin on the lost art of respectfulness: Hersh’s mother writes: “The nugget of wisdom my mother taught me when I was young keeps nudging at my hip, with its hands raised, wanting to be picked up, asking for attention. Her friend Danny shared the idea that if we always treat the person next to us as if they are the Messiah, in disguise as a regular person, we will be careful with how we speak and what we do in their presence. And if they choose not to reveal themselves in our lifetime, it will not matter, because we will have behaved respectfully and carefully to that regular person next to us. This is the most decent thing we can do in this complex and loud world piled with confusion and brokenness. Let us work on the lost art of respectfulness.”
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