daniyeg [he/him]

no i meant the opposition to IRI. fascists and monarchists, MEK cultists, CIA plants. that opposition.

no problem, yapping without substance is my speciality, i guess you could call it thorough.

yapped about it here: https://hexbear.net/comment/6505868

and to answer the question no there’s no movement behind it besides IRGC/Basij. unfortunately the opposition has been successful into turning support for palestine into a political issue where if you support palestine you’re a hack and some paid shill for the government, so nobody does anything besides Basij. the letter itself is more of a formality rather than a piece of a larger coordinated campaign to bridge the gap between iranians and arabs.

first time i’ve been tagged in anything. hope it never happens again and i will be able to lurk in anonymity once more.

https://hexbear.net/comment/6505868

although im not quite sure if it’s the same letter or not, i found another article in Tasnim that attributes the letter to 7 Basij chapters in 7 top tehran universities which i won’t name but it’s basically the most prominent ones.

im afraid these things are almost just a formality. someone comes up with the idea, writes the letter perhaps with the help of a committee, then goes around Basij chapters asking if they are willing to put their name on it, sometimes collecting signatures from the members which are almost always compelled to sign it.

as for the translation it has the same meaning as the one in persian i suppose but the wording is different. it’s much shorter and uses different words and phrases that are associated with the conversation surrounding israel in english as opposed to persian. a small example would be mentioning normalisation instead of diplomacy in the original letter.

the other thing the translation is missing is the call to action which is “send your youth here to study for a not substantial fee to be independent”. there has been a lot of increase in the number of foreign students in iranian universities particularly from syria, iraq and yemen but also other islamic countries like palestine, nigera, sudan etc etc.

i don’t know about the process but i suspect there have been new programs to bring foreign students from friendly countries to iranian universities. i also don’t know how much they are charged and i suspect the force behind the new push has been ideological rather than profit seeking but still due to our weak currency charging them something like 1000$ per semester would still be 5 times more than what you would have to pay if you didn’t get in for free for domestic students.

although i agree with the letter’s sentiment it’s obvious what they are doing here. and to be frank our universities are not equipped at all to handle an influx of foreign students. aside from being short staffed, most professors can’t speak arabic at all and don’t know english really well. it’s one thing to be able to read papers (you could also get by with google translator or LLMs) and it’s another thing to teach in english. and most of the foreign students also don’t know english very well so you end up with this situation where everyone’s confused. there has also been no increase in resources or decrease in available domestic seats, which makes education quality suffer for everyone.

i also can’t verify the arabic translation since my arabic is very limited, but i don’t see any reason why it would be inaccurate.