This is a small point. I have mentioned the funny hats, the parade of uniforms, the howling masses seeking to be heard and then entertained. What kept the event from being even more like a carnival or state fair (think Shriners, Boy Scouts, crowds at a sideshow) was the total absence of food, let alone Cokes and funnel cakes. Quds Day fell, as it does every year, on the last Friday in Ramadan. Pervading this fiesta of Palestinian solidarity and anti-Semitism was hunger and thirst.
Ayatollah Khomeini started Quds Day in 1979, during a period of Israeli bombing in southern Lebanon and acute anti-Israeli sentiment among Shia. He explicitly intended the selection of the last Friday in Ramadan--a month recognized as holy by Muslims of all sects--to unite Sunnis and Shia behind a single banner. That Khomeini himself originally hoisted that banner would, not coincidentally, establish him as first among equals in the Muslim defiance of Israel and the West.
But that timing also guarantees that all observant protesters will be out with growling stomachs and parched mouths, famished and peevish after nearly a month of daytime fasting. At this year's march, the weather was hot and dry. I witnessed a government-sponsored march in Iran once before, in 2004, on the occasion of the Islamic Republic's 25th anniversary. Food was not only available but paid for by the government: Revolutionary Guards threw juice boxes and plastic-wrapped muffins from the backs of trucks, to keep the energy up among the marchers. And the energy was indeed much higher then than at this year's Quds Day.
Death to America: 2004.
Why does this matter? The fasting certainly helped change the tone of things, keying down the energy but also keying up the bitterness, the anger, the irritability. Year by year, the lunar and Islamic calendars trot forward by a couple weeks, so next year's Quds Day will be hotter and the day of fasting longer. And the year after that even more so. I look forward to seeing if these conditions make any difference.
(This is an account of the Quds Day rally in Tehran. Click here for all parts of the series.)
At a stand just off Enqelab, near the center of the Quds Day rally, a very active desk gave away and sold postcards and memorabilia about the Palestinian cause, and about the perfidy of the Israelis. For about $1.50 I bought Holocaust, a book of illustrations by the Iranian political cartoonist Maziar Bijani, whose work the organizers sold proudly. I reproduce a few key images below. Think of it as an anti-Maus.
Read MoreTraffic diminishes on Ferdowsi Street every Friday morning, and especially during Ramadan. But only on a strange and special Friday does it decline to almost nothing, as it did today. Normally it is one of those traffic-menaced central Tehran boulevards where drivers cut each other off for sport, and where pedestrians who missed the Iran-Iraq War can satisfy their urges for martyrdom. Today its car traffic was mostly blocked off, and all the pedestrians had already gone up to Enqelab Street, the main drag of the Quds Day parade.
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TEHRAN -- Slightly over a month ago, anti-government protesters (the ones not yet in prison, or murdered) went back to the streets of Tehran, in a counter-protest against a government-orchestrated parade. The protesters wore easily identifiable green, so they knew that if Basij militiamen wanted to bust their heads, their colors would mark clearly which heads to bust. And bust they did. Media and cell-phone cameras captured images of young revolutionaries thwacked in the street and bleeding, and stories of the violence ran all over the Web and in print. My colleagues Jeffrey Goldberg and Andrew Sullivan were especially thrilled, and read the day's events as signs of a movement bloodied but unbowed.
Read MorePALENQUE -- Last month, Mexico decriminalized possession and use of small amounts of pot, heroin, methamphetamine, and acid. You still can't buy or sell drugs, and if you have more than a very small amount you can still get in serious trouble. At Room for Debate, the New York Times has asked five luminaries to give opinions on this move. Some are insightful. I could weigh in with an opinion, too, but since this blog is a reported one, I instead procured a bag of psilocybin mushrooms and ate them in my hotel room, to experience a newly semi-legal Mexican high myself.
Read MoreMEXICO CITY to VILLAHERMOSA -- With few exceptions, a warlord is someone who controls a stretch of road and can, with the threat of force, extract tolls from anyone who uses it. That definition serves well in Afghanistan, where the Taliban rose to popularity in part because they subdued the warlords and made the Kandahar-to-Kabul highway something other than a suicide rally where every few miles lurked another unpredictable suzerain of the road.
Read MoreIn my previous post I wondered why almost no one copies Mexico City's signature crime, the "express kidnapping," in the U.S. and in big and chaotic cities like Cairo. Via Reihan and a worried Matt Yglesias, Noel Maurer explains:
Read MoreMEXICO CITY -- Since Cairo is the foreign city I know best, I often see its image in other world capitals. Usually those kinships present themselves in little flashes here and there, reminders that when you gather a few million people in one place they are certain to organize themselves in predictable and familiar ways. But in Mexico City, the resemblances are not fleeting; they are ubiquitous, even uncanny.
Read MoreSAN LUIS POTOSI to MEXICO CITY -- Along the highway to Mexico City, placards every few miles advertise the availability of "tuna" -- which puzzled me, till I put my brain into Spanish mode and figured out the vendors were selling not tuna but prickly pear or cactus fig. They also sell peaches, as well as fresh strawberries and cream. I tried the last of these, with no ill effects (yet).
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