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The Iranian government fielded an impressive squad of angry, hungry, Jew-hating fanatics. What of the opposition? Their counterprotest, centered slightly north and east of the main event, has attracted ample coverage from many sources, who offered reports that to my eyes, on the fringes of the counterprotest, sound plausible and accurate. I did not see Muhammad Khatami shoved to the ground, or any of the other more dramatic scenes of thuggery. Around Haft-e Tir, the government did break out the batons and beat protesters at the fringes, but mostly they seemed to have learned the lesson that by isolating the protesters to a few small areas they could avoid the spectacle of outright violence.

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.

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.

Traffic 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.

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.