Can you solve this? Interactive Campaign for the Right to Education in Iran

Having psychologically treated and worked on many refugee cases that have led to the arrest and torture of student activists and intellectuals in the academic setting in Iran... this particular campaign speaks to the core of this issue; the right to freedom of education in Iran. Watch the following two video's to find out more...the scope of the campaign shown in the second video seems to have an impressive and inspirational reach, again exemplifying people of all backgrounds coming together to support this very important core human rights issue for the people & youth of Iran.

Here are some great tips and ways to support and utilize this important Campaign:

Using Facebook, YouTube, and QR Codes the forces behind Can-You-Solve-This.org, a coalition between different organizations and individuals, have launched an interactive campaign in response to the Iranian governments practice of preventing different groups of people (activists, feminists, human rights defenders, religious minorities etc) from receiving a higher education.

The Challange

From Can-You-Solve-This.org

People all over the world consider access to education as a basic human right. In many places, opportunities for education and training are almost taken for granted, particularly when they are nearly free of charge.

When we truly consider where we would stand without having received the benefits of education, we immediately understand and recognize how important and essential education is for every successful professional career and work situation, as well as our effective participation in society. To be denied the right to education would result in disastrous consequences for both the individual and the society in which we live.

In Iran, the denial of education is a reality that many young people are being forced to accept as they are systematically being denied access to universities and institutions of higher learning. This is not because the institutions of learning are not available, but rather, because these young people have different political views, social affiliations or religious convictions.

The Iranian government systematically uses the exclusion from education as a means of their discrimination policy. Student activists, feminists, human rights defenders, blogger's, and members of ethnic and religious minorities are punished for their commitment to their beliefs by expulsion from, and non-admittance to, universities and institutions of higher learning.

Also adherents of the Baha'i Faith, who have since the beginning of the Islamic Revolution of Iran been subject to severe persecution and systematic denial of higher education recently witnessed the government cracked down on their “underground university” known as the Baha'i Institute for Higher Education (BIHE). The government confiscated all educational materials (computers, books, laboratories) and arrested many of the administrators and staff whose only crime is their dedication to educating young people and giving them a chance to have a future.

Also adherents of the Baha'i Faith, who have since the beginning of the Islamic

Revolution of Iran been subject to severe persecution and systematic denial

of higher education recently witnessed the government cracked down on

their “underground university” known as the Baha'i Institute for Higher Education

(BIHE). The government confiscated all educational materials (computers, books,

laboratories) and arrested many of the administrators and staff whose only crime

is their dedication to educating young people and giving them a chance to have a

future.

 Willfully denying these young people access to education interferes with their basic human rights and personal opportunities in life, and also contributes to the suffering of society as a whole.

The young people in Iran are facing an injustice we cannot choose to ignore. They urgently need the support of all those who want to see the right to education implemented throughout the world. It is our responsibility, as members of the global community, to ensure that this right is respected and that justice is adhered to.

The Players

The Iranian Government: Known to frequently violate human rights, in this case the right to education. More information of Iran's human rights record.

Iranian Students who are denied the right to education:  This group includes political activists, which are also known as the “starred” students as their university records were given a “star” to identify that they must be barred from continuing their studies. Activists may they be human rights defenders, women rights supporters or different forms of civic activists. Religious minorities, in particular member and children of members of the Bahai Faith. The Bahai faith is a religious group present in Iran. From Wikipedia, "Baha'i is a monotheistic religion founded by Bahá'u'lláh in 19th-century Persia, emphasizing the spiritual unity of all humankind. There are an estimated five to six million Bahá'ís around the world in more than 200 countries and territories."

CanYouSolveThis.org: A coalition of organizations inside and outside of Iran who have come together to bring awareness to this matter and speak up for the right of education for all in Iran.

The Tools and Tactics

Facebook: On their Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/canyousolvethis) they have created a custom welcome tab, that encourages visitors to "Like" the page and then gives them the basic information about the campaign. Here they ask you to click through to their website. 

 

More information about creating a custom welcome tab for your Facebook fan page: How To Create a Custom Welcome Tab on Facebook Fan Pages

Website:

After clicking through the custom Facebook tab you are taken to CanYouSolveThis.org where a video begins to play that explains why they have launched this campaign, i.e. What are the problems that Iranian students face when they are not conforming in their thoughts and beliefs and how is this campaign proposes to solve them. This video is also being promoted by the campaign on Facebook.

Following the video they have created a widget where you can choose which human rights expert you would like to contact. By clicking their name the widget auto-loads a prepared letter that you can simply sign your name to and email. (this section will be opened in the coming days to allow people to edit the letters or write your own letter from scratch).

Following the video they have created a widget where you can choose which human rights expert you would like to contact. By clicking their name the widget auto-loads a prepared letter that you can simply sign your name to and email. 

 

In order to build a widget like this you may need help from a coder. Don't know anyone? Post for help in the Movements.org Marketplace! (www.marketplace.movements.org).

QR Codes: In this case QR codes are used for both practical and attention grabbing purposes. Practically: the QR codes draw people to the campaign's website. Additionally QR codes are often used to build curiosity around a campaign. When someone walking down the street sees a QR code with a question, they want to know where the link will lead. Here are some images of where they've displayed the QR codes in the real world, in addition to sharing them on Facebook

Finally, they've made it very easy to share the website with your friends on Facebook and Twitter as well as included a widget so you can auto-copy the website's URL: 

Stumbling Blocks and Outcome

 Here are some common challenges with a campaign like this: 

1. Visibility: You need to get the campaign out to as many people as possible. How can you do this? 

Organically: Start sharing it yourself on Twitter and Facebook and encourage our friends and family to share as well. Remember: each person that shares taps into a new network, and this is how things go viral. A good way to begin this process is with a call to action email to close friends and supporters who are most likely to take action. 

Facebook Ads: If you have the budget, you can buy Facebook ad space. In this case they could use the QR code image as a click through link to the website to draw people in. Facebook Ads are great because they are easy to control, and its easy to target very specific demographics. In this case they could target people with interests in : Iran, Human Rights, Education, etc etc. 

2. Action: Sometimes really savvy chic campaigns grab peoples attention, but they just watch the video and don't follow through with the part where you are asking them to act. Its important to use visuals and language that stir up an emotional response in your viewer, so that they feel obligated to take part in the action component of the campaign. In this case writing letters to influencers. 

Source: Rachel Silver of Movement.org

 

Prominent Egyptian Female Scholars on the Egyptian Movement Inspired by Iran

                                          

Zahra's Paradise: Art & social change - using webcomics for the advancement of Human Rights in Iran

Inspirational and creative ! Utilizing the universal language of art to reach and empower the global collective by bringing awareness to the emerging Iranian narrative and current civil rights movement. The webcomic Zahra's Paradise, allows the reader a window through storytelling of the latest happening in Iran since the 2009 elections ! 

"So a Persian writer, an Arab artist and a Jewish editor walk into a room…

Sounds like the beginning of a bad joke. Actually, that’s something like the start of this unusual editorial adventure, the first of its kind. Here for your reading pleasure is an online, serial webcomic in English, Farsi, Arabic, French, Italian, Spanish, and Dutch—with more joining on the horizon. First Second books proudly presents Zahra’s Paradise by Amir and Khalil, together with Casterman in French and Dutch, Rizzoli Lizard in Italian, and Norma Editorial in Spanish.

Set in the aftermath of Iran’s fraudulent elections of 2009, Zahra’s Paradise is the fictional story of the search for Mehdi, a young protestor who has disappeared in the Islamic Republic’s gulags. Mehdi has vanished in an extrajudicial twilight zone where habeas corpus is suspended. What stops his memory from being obliterated is not the law. It is the grit and guts of a mother who refuses to surrender her son to fate and the tenacity of a brother—a blogger—who fuses culture and technology to explore and explode absence: the void in which Mehdi has vanished.

Zahra’s Paradise weaves together a composite of real people and events. As the world witnessed what could no longer be kept from view, through YouTube videos, on Twitter and in blogs, so this story came to be and had to be told.
The author Amir is an Iranian-American human rights activist, journalist and documentary filmmaker. He has lived and worked in the United States, Canada, Europe and Afghanistan. His essays and articles have appeared far and wide in the press.
Khalil’s work as a fine artist has been much praised. He sculpts and creates ceramics and has been cartooning since he was very young. Zahra’s Paradise is his first graphic novel.

Amir and Khalil have long dreamed up projects together, but Zahra’s Paradise draws on their talents as though they’ve been preparing for it all their lives—and through it, they answer the calling of their times.

The authors have chosen anonymity for obvious political reasons."

http://www.zahrasparadise.com/lang/en/about

Snippet from an interview with one of the creators - brilliant !!! :

What do you think is the role and potential of webcomics and comic books to tell stories that matter and create social change and reforms?

Amir: Boundless! The potential of webcomics to generate social change is phenomenal -- limited only by our imagination. And the web. Let's face it, cartoons are a universal language and the web is the universal medium. All the traditional barriers to social change are collapsing -- time, space, language -- just don't separate us any more. We can experience an event in Iran--happy or sad--around the world in a nanosecond. We can read a comic, together, around the world, at once in twelve languages.

Mark, our editor deserves all the credit for marrying Zahra's Paradise to the power and potential of the web. I will promise you one thing -- as far as social change and human rights in Iran is concerned, we will use Zahra's Paradise to explore every possibility and we'll do everything we can to push the limits of language, media and our imagination. Already, Zahra's Paradise is allowing us to create a network among human rights activists and organizations. Each and every one of our readers is participating in this process, and God knows what kind of creativity they will unleash.

found @ http://geek-news.mtv.com/2010/12/10/zahras-paradise-using-webcomics-as-a-force-for-human-rights/)

A Poem by an American Blogger : inspired by Ahmed Batabi's famous photo...

Coming across this poem was a touching reminder of the interconnectedness of all beings in time of despair and pain and most importantly in engaging hope. The world is watching....and feeling the Iranian voice emerge...In the words of Alex Gray.."The infinite vibratory levels, the dimensions of interconnectedness are without end. There is nothing independent. All beings and things are residents in your awareness"......Shall we never forget that freedom isn't free and keep the fire of hope, passion and resilience alive and well for our beloved Iran....

For the young man of 18 Tir

Before my mind, your image burns,

young man from Tehran,

with that band of mourning

on your arm.

Resolutely,

you hold above your head

a bloody tee shirt.

Someone has suffered in that shirt.

Someone you know

has shed that blood.

And you risk your own life now

to hold it up before the world,

to let it call out -

Hear our pain

See our wounds

Feel our deaths

Bear witness for us

Do not let us die unmourned.

We wanted just to live.

We did not have that choice.

Do not turn away from us now.

We know it is hard to look,

But see us. We need you

To remember.

So I promise now,

I see.

I grieve your pain.

I will not let the enormity of it

Put you out of my heart -

You remain there.

It is where you belong.

That is where we all belong -

in each others' hearts.

So I pray

that the violence will cease

And that some day

we all find the path

to nurturing,

in each others' hearts.

Peg Fisher

July 5, 14 Tir, 2009

The positive side effects of what is happening in Iran - A commentary on Iran's Civil rights movement & how it has dramtically changed the Middle East

By Hamid Dabashi

Special to CNN

Hamid Dabashi is the author of "Iran: A People Interrupted." He is Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York. His Web site is http://www.hamiddabashi.com/

Hamid Dabashi says the Iran civil rights protests have drastically changed the politics of the Middle East.
(CNN) -- Whatever the end result of the current electoral crisis in Iran, the dramatic rise of national politics has already cast a long and enduring shadow over the geopolitics of the region. No country can go back to business as usual. The climate has changed -- for good.
Before the June 2009 presidential election, the realpolitik of the region had placed Iran, Syria, the Palestinian Hamas, the Lebanese Hezbollah and the Iraqi Mahdi Army on one side of the geopolitical divide, and U.S. and its regional allies on another. With an extended foot in Venezuela, Iran had even a claim on the backyard of the United States.
In this precarious condition, the Islamic Republic emerged, not out of its own capacities, but by virtue of serious follies that President George W. Bush had committed in its neighborhood as a regional "superpower." The presidential election of June 2009 suddenly has made that geopolitics something of an archeological relic.
With the commencement of the civil rights movement in Iran in June 2009, the moral map of the Middle East is being changed right in front of our eyes, with the democratic will of one nation having thrown a monkey wrench into the geopolitics of the region. The moving pictures of Iranians flooding colorfully into the streets have forever altered the visual vocabulary of the global perception of "the Middle East."
Tehran, I believe, is ground zero of a civil rights movement that will leave no Muslim or Arab country, or even Israel, untouched.
"The unrest in Iran," the prominent Israeli columnist Gideon Levy of Haaretz said recently, "makes me green with envy."
However things may turn out, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad comes back to the global scene with a lame-duck presidency that may last anywhere from few months if the mounting opposition succeeds in demanding a new election, or else go to a full term if it fails..
In either case, there is a domino effect of Ahmadinejad's weakened second-term presidency in the region.
Syria's position in its immediate regional context is seriously compromised. The rushed and injudicious siding of Hezbollah's Hassan Nasrallah with Ahmadinejad has wedded the fate of the Lebanese group with that of the discredited Iranian president.
Hamas would now be more inclined to strike a deal with Fatah and join President Obama's renewed peace process. And the Mahdi Army now has to fend for itself in more pronouncedly Iraqi (even nationalist) terms, making easier for the U.S. military to leave.
The domino effect, however, is not limited to the allies of the Islamic Republic and extends well into the domains of its nemesis, for now the options available to the United States and its regional allies regarding Iran's nuclear ambitions have also become categorically compromised.
The feasibility of an economic blockade or a military strike has become increasingly difficult to sell to the international community. The heroic fate of young Iranian men and women has become a global concern. How can you starve Neda Agha-Soltan's soul-mates, or even worse, bomb them?
We have to start thinking of a new term for "the Middle East." It is central, but to no one's East or West. The Green Movement has re-centered the world.
As Obama wisely keeps Ahmadinejad at an arm's length and as his task in securing a just and lasting peace between Palestinians and Israelis has just been made much easier, let it be known that this is the gift that thousands of young and old Iranian men and women have just handed him.
A severe crackdown has dampened the spirit of the civil rights movement in Iran. Scores of peaceful demonstrators have been killed or injured, and hundreds of civic leaders and public intellectuals have been arrested.
The leaders of the Green Movement are being accused of treason and threatened with execution. Human rights organizations are deeply troubled, and even worse news might still be in the offing.
But the morning has broken, and there is much that a simple march of the youth in the United States and around the globe, particularly across the Arab and the Muslim world, all brandishing a green bandana, can do for their momentarily silenced brothers and sisters in Iran.
They have sung their native song. They are awaiting the global chorus.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Hamid Dabashi.

The word "Iran" has become a verb

"According to a recent blog entry posted on the Huffington Post by a New York City high school teacher, “Iran” has now become a verb. Point being, even these students who get very small amounts of news equate "Iranian" with bravery and I completely agree, and wish I had that kind of intestinal fortitude. You have our greatest admiration and respect! " [Iranian.com]

Below is the text of the blog entry:


FOR ANY IRANIANS:

"I teach at a NYC high school, and recently one student stood up to our very intimidating principal, (something that almost never happens). When he did not get permission for what he intended another student said "Let's go Iranian on him." By that he meant organize a protest. And so now they "IRAN" anything they want to change. So it has become a verb now and to "Iran" the situation is to stand up to authority, well at least here in this corner of the universe. And it is a huge bonus for me because I cannot usually get them to even pay attention to another part of the world."

The Global effects of the Iranian Protests - inspiring Change in China

Our revolutionary fervor and passion for justice in Iran is infectious and powerful and the ripple of its effects are seen here in the other day in China. China has demanded the post-election conflict in Iran be censored (more on the censorship story here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x5885596)

And this is why...Check this protest out in china the other day - its amazing how people are fighting back and literally scare the riot police away !!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5K7U-TFDY0

The bloodshed in Iran is not invain as it is inspiring movements & change across the globe !!!
Remember for all of us to know here in the states & abroad to continue keeping our spirits high, our activism strong and consciousness elevated for our brave amazing sisters & brothers in Iran...our hope is there hope....we are all in this together to the end....Viva La Revolucion !!!