BBC News – Five Minutes With: Omid Djalili.

Celebrities and news-makers are grilled by Matthew Stadlen in exactly five minutes in a series for the BBC News website.

This week, comedian and actor Omid Djalili talks to Matt about getting nerves on stage, playing with cultural stereotypes, how an exploding goldfish helped his early career – and tells Matt he would have bullied him at school.

(He also talks about his Baha’i faith.)

Related posts:

“Shaherezad in Santa Monica” at the Annenberg Beach House

Here are some sources for following the Iranian election results and protests. 

Up-to-the-minute: See Twitter – the trending tag #IranElection is on fire – click that link and you’ll get a firehose of news (and some rumors) from people inside Iran and out. Also follow twitter.com/TehranBureau and twitter.com/Change_for_Iran and twitter.com/mousavi1388. The same sort of rapid, crowd-sourced spread of news is happening with Iranians on Facebook.

Photos: The Mousavi campaign’s Flickr feed, TehranLive.org, the NYT, the LAT.

News: BBC Persian and live BBC Persian TV. Andrew Sullivan’s blog on The Atlantic website, The Daily Dish. And Tehran Bureau is cranking out thoughtful, illuminating pieces even as they post constant updates from inside Iran.

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BBC News – Five Minutes With: Omid Djalili

The Fruit House

A couple of months ago, right around Norooz, I played tour guide to a food writer, Sara Dickerman, who was working on a story about Tehrangeles’s culinary offerings for the New York Times. We went to House of Kabob and Q Market in Reseda, and Mashti Malone in Hollywood. It was fun and delicious, and she was really cool and open and excited about Persian food and culture. She asked great questions and wanted to try everything.

The story was published today (“Persian Cooking Finds a Home in Los Angeles“). Sara’s a fantastic writer and she did such a great job of capturing the food and people of Tehrangeles. I love that Persian food is finally getting the press and props it deserves, and I love that Sara wrote about the Valley and included House of Kabob, my favorite Persian restaurant anywhere, and I love the above photo of its owner, Agha Mehdi, who has the best mustache in the world. 

Anyway, I think this is so exciting. Please also check out the cute slideshow by Stephanie Diani that will warm your heart.

Benazir Bhutto, formerly two-time prime minister of Pakistan and part of a prominent political family, was assassinated today in Islamabad. She recently returned to the country after nine years of self-exile related to charges of alleged corruption (which caused her removal from office and were dropped for her return). Bhutto is half Iranian; her mother, Nusrat, is of Iranian Kurdish heritage. Benazir was the first woman to be elected head of a Muslim state, and not one short on controversy. But the violence against her is terrible and it’s sad to see her homeland in disarray.

Here are two bios.

Earlier this month, the New York Times wrote a story about the best travel destinations for the next year. And guess what? We’re number 18! Pretty awesome, right? The story mentions Distant Horizons as a good tour provider (word is that it’s hard to get a visa otherwise, if you don’t have an Iranian passport). Update: it’s actually only hard to get that visa if you have an American passport; thanks, ec!

(Image: Greg Von Doersten, NYT)

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The Fruit House

(Thanks to Sam for the link!)

Are you suggesting that veiling and unveiling women are equally reductive? I disagree. We have to look at ourselves here also. Why do all the women get plastic surgery? Why? Why? Why should we look like some freaks with big lips that look like an anus? What is so sexy about that? What is sexy about having something that looks like a goose anus?

I never really thought about goose anatomy. I looked when I was on a farm in France.

Atta girl, Marjane!

The title and previews for this show seem to beat war drums; I’m encouraged only by the fact that PBS is airing this special. PBS has a long history of being even-handed in its political coverage and I will reserve judgment until I’ve watched the program in its entirety.

Local listings can be found on the website. If you miss the program it can be viewed online as well. From the PBS Frontline website:

As the United States and Iran are locked in a battle for power and influence across the Middle East — with the fear of an Iranian nuclear weapon looming in the background — FRONTLINE gains unprecedented access to the Iranian hard-liners shaping government policy. In Showdown with Iran, airing Tuesday, October 23, 2007, at 9 P.M. ET on PBS (check local listings), FRONTLINE examines how U.S. efforts to install democracy in Iraq have served to strengthen Iran’s position as an emerging power in the Middle East.

“You will not find a single instance in which a country has inflicted harm on us and we have left it without a response,” deputy head of Iran’s National Security Council Mohammad Jafari tells FRONTLINE in his first television interview. “So if the United States makes such a mistake, they should know that we will definitely respond. And we don’t make threats.”

There are increasing signs that the Bush administration is seriously considering military action before it leaves office if Tehran continues to defy U.N. demands that it cease enriching uranium for its nuclear program — a program the Iranians insist is for peaceful purposes. “The president has said repeatedly that it is unacceptable for Iran to have nuclear weapons,” former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton tells FRONTLINE. “If action is not taken in terms of regime change or, if need be, the use of military force, the question of when Iran achieves nuclear weapons is entirely in Iran’s own hands. And that is extraordinarily undesirable.”

But Richard Armitage, President Bush’s former deputy secretary of state, warns, “It would be the worst of worlds for an outgoing administration to start a conflict.”

After 9/11, the Bush administration hoped to drive a wedge between Iran’s people and their Islamic rulers by installing democracies on two of Iran’s borders. “If things had gone better in Iraq,” says Hillary Mann, the Iran expert on the National Security Council during the run-up to the war, “then yeah, I think Iran was next.”

“I think Iran is more secure now, courtesy of the United States,” Bolton says. “We have removed the Taliban regime from Afghanistan, which they viewed as a mortal threat. We have removed Saddam Hussein in Iraq, which they viewed as a mortal threat.”

Before invading Iraq, the Bush administration rebuffed a series of overtures from Iran’s reformist government — among them offers to help the U.S. stabilize Iraq after the invasion — which culminated in a secret proposal for a grand bargain resolving all outstanding issues between the U.S. and Iran, including Iran’s support for terrorism and its nuclear program. The U.S., which had branded Iran part of the “axis of evil,” decided on a confrontational approach.

Vali Nasr, author of The Shia Revival, believes the Bush administration’s confrontational approach discredited Iran’s reformists and inadvertently helped bring the new hard-line government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power. “The wars of 2001 and 2003 have fundamentally changed the Middle East to Iran’s advantage,” he says. “The dam that was containing Iran has been broken.”