This week’s Washington Times column:
Last Tuesday as I was driving home from a screening of “The Stoning of Soraya M.,” a profoundly moving and eerily timely drama that comes out Friday, I found myself stuck in a bizarre late-night traffic jam thinking of ways to spread the word about this potentially transformative movie that thrusts its audience into the day’s headlines and draws attention to the plight of those who could potentially topple Iran’s cruel and menacing theocracy.With an LAPD helicopter hovering above me in the night sky, I called home to ask my wife why our neighborhood was cordoned off, with traffic enforcement redirecting cars around the perimeter of the Los Angeles Federal Building. She couldn’t find anything on TV. When I reached home, I discovered via Twitter that thousands of Iranian-Americans, plentiful in West Los Angeles since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, were demonstrating solidarity with family and friends in Tehran by protesting the rigged Iranian election results and drawing attention to the regime’s long-standing human rights abuses.
The closure of a segment of Wilshire Boulevard, a key east-west artery, spoke to the urgency and magnitude of the situation.
“The Stoning of Soraya M.” has the capacity to become a symbol for the Iranian counterrevolution. Its gripping narrative and unforgettable, graphic ending will open the eyes of Westerners who have only intellectualized the plight of many women in the Middle East and perhaps will influence those who have stood on the sidelines while these atrocities continue.
If properly promoted through the online social media that is informing the world and fueling mass demonstrations, this film could become a catalytic phenomenon where the new and old media organically work together to affect political and social change.
Co-written and directed by Iranian-American Cyrus Nowrasteh, and based on the 1994 novel by French-Iranian journalist Freidoune Sahebjam, “The Stoning of Soraya M.” focuses our eyes on the human rights injustices and theocratic tyranny.
You can read the column in full here.
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