ABSTRACT
November 4th, 2009 is the 30th anniversary of the American Hostage Crisis, a turning point in Iranian history, the geopolitics of the region, and the US–Iran relations that have remained troubled ever since. If Americans are cursed with a very short memory, Iranians have been plagued with a prehistorical longevity to their recollections. The legitimate fear of a US-led coup on the model of 1953 resulted in an illegitimate breach of diplomatic immunity and the taking over of the US embassy and its staff on November 4th, 1979. The peripheral presence of one person in both these documents points to a central concern in the Iranian civil rights movement that commenced in the aftermath of the June 2009 presidential election. To avoid that dangerous route, we need to make a distinction between the nuclear ambitions of the Islamic Republic and the growing civil rights movement in Iran.
