ROYA: Yes, of course.

LESLEY: Yes.

ROYA: It’s a gender apartheid. We don’t see it. One side isn’t black and the other side isn’t white. They all look like each other. But the truth is that the laws are apartheid laws, and the discrimination is apartheid – proportion discrimination in the eyes of the courts.

LESLEY: You were saying that the Theocracy, the idea that Mullahs and religious clerics would run the country, had already died as an ideal, in terms of idealism, in Iran.

ROYA: Certainly for Iranians.

LESLEY: On television people in the region are watching the clerics ordering the beating and shooting of their own citizens. How do you think that’s going to play out in terms of the sense of legitimacy for this kind of power and rule in other countries?

ROYA: Well I can tell you what the few messages that came through Facebook to me were, and I think those are really telling. About three days ago I got a message from someone in Iran. It was a posting saying, "Wait a minute. For 30 years we have been marching on the streets of Iran in support of the Palestinians saying that each time the Israelis attack the Palestinians here we were demonstrating against the Israeli attack on behalf of the Palestinians in Iran. So where are the Palestinians now that we’re under attack? Why aren’t they pouring into the streets to support us?"

LESLEY: Yes. Right. I hadn’t heard about that. I do know that the Israeli government is rooting for Ahmadinejad to remain in power because they feel that with him remaining in his role, Iran is a weakened state – within and without.

ROYA: I think that Israelis, much like a lot of the American policymakers, have consistently gotten Iran wrong, and this is yet another manifestation of how wrong they get it.

LESLEY: Why? You think with Ahmadinejad in power that Iran remains powerful?

ROYA: No. I think Ahmadinejad shouldn’t have run and I know for certain that he didn’t get elected. But I think an Iran with a Mousavi in power, with fair elections, a strong Iran, will make for a much better Middle East. The closer Iranians get to a fair government, the better off Israel is and the better off the region is. So I think Israelis think about this sort of backwards. They think that Ahmadinejad and the suffering of Iranians somehow is to the benefit of Israel and their policies, and I think that’s totally wrong.

LESLEY: I’ve organized my questions based on what I’ve been seeing and what I’ve been reading. I was wondering what I didn’t ask that you think is important for Americans to know. Tell us something that I wasn’t clever enough to think up as a question.

ROYA: I don’t like that question because I think you are clever enough … but I think one of the things that we haven’t done, which I wrote about last week in a piece, is that we cover inconsistently. When my brother came to the United States in the mid-’70s, people in New York asked him where he was from, and when he said Iran, no one understood where Iran was. And in his first week in America, he had to actually go buy a map so he could point to the country where he was coming from.

LESLEY: Obviously before the hostages.

ROYA: Exactly.

LESLEY: Right.

ROYA: And the hostages kind of catapulted Iran to the forefront of international attention. And then with the release of the hostages, Iran completely died from view. The hostages came home in ‘81 so for the following ten years or so, unless there was an Iran contra campaign or McFarland was taking a key or a cake to Iran we really didn’t cover Iran.