The Difference....The Slim Difference

mehdikazemi
Originally uploaded by Randuwa

With an ability to communicate across cities, nations, continents in seconds via cell phone, TV, radio, computer screens -- we live in a time when information challenges our capacity to comprehend the world around us. Ideas, experiences, events enter our minds and we scarcely have time to integrate them before the next onslaught of data.

So how do we make sense of life in 2008. What matters? What do we care about?

More than ever we must seek and trust in an anchor in truth. In all directions we see truth maligned and co-opted to mean a blind following of lies. We see this in Politics. We see this in Religion.

Truth is used as an excuse to foment evils like death, torture, hatred. None of which is truth. Truth is the purest form of self-actualization. Truth unleashed allows each of us to live life in the open with honesty and integrity. Truth (like LOVE) defeats fear and all it's minions, while those who twist truth into doctrinal imperatives designed to control others with fear neither understand truth or love.

No where is this paradigm more evident than in the story of Mehdi Kazemi.

From a recent article posted on the BBC:



"Iranian Refugee Is Granted Asylum"

Mehdi Kazemi is granted asylum in the UK. Mehdi, now 20, was studying in the UK when Parham (his boyfriend) was arrested for the crime of homosexuality by the Iranian government. Mehdi was named by his boyfriend and warned he was liable to arrest on his planned return. The UK Home Office denied him asylum [despite a thoughtful campaign by human rights campaigners] - because it was said he had overstayed his student visa and was therefore not seen as genuinely seeking asylum. So he escaped to the Netherlands. That's where it gets complicated.

Under EU asylum rules, generally someone seeking asylum is required to apply in the member state first entered. That meant, Dutch judges ruled, that he had to return to the UK - and the risk of being deported to the place where he was at risk of losing his life. Mehdi's case has attracted international attention.

Mehdi was informed that Parham, his boyfriend, was executed in Iran in 2006.

[I can only hope that somehow and in some way, Parham's martyrdom is memorialized as a testamony to TRUTH......]