Reyhaneh Jabbari’s emotional message to her mother before she was hanged for killing a man she accused of raping her

 

 

By National Post Staff October 27, 2014

 

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Reyhaneh Jabbari defends herself in court in 2008, during her trial for the murder of a former intelligence official at a court in Tehran. On Oct. 25, 2014, Iran hanged Jabbari.

A day after she was executed for premeditated murder, Reyhaneh Jabbari’s impassioned final message to her mother surfaced via a human rights group.
Jabbari — who was convicted in 2009 of murdering a former Iranian intelligence official she accused of raping her — was hanged on Saturday, despite calls from Amnesty International and United Nations to halt the execution. The official IRNA news agency quoted a statement issued by the Tehran Prosecutor Office Saturday that rejected the claim of attempted rape and said that all evidence proved that Jabbari had plotted to kill Morteza Abdolali Sarbandi in 2007, when she was 19.
On Sunday, the National Council of the Resistance of Iran posted this English translation of Ms. Jabbari’s last message to her mother, recorded in April:
Dear Sholeh, today I learned that it is now my turn to face Qisas (the Iranian regime’s law of retribution). I am hurt as to why you did not let me know yourself that I have reached the last page of the book of my life. Don’t you think that I should know? You know how ashamed I am that you are sad. Why did you not take the chance for me to kiss your hand and that of dad?
The world allowed me to live for 19 years. That ominous night it was I that should have been killed. My body would have been thrown in some corner of the city, and after a few days, the police would have taken you to the coroner’s office to identify my body and there you would also learn that I had been raped as well. The murderer would have never been found since we don’t have their wealth and their power. Then you would have continued your life suffering and ashamed, and a few years later you would have died of this suffering and that would have been that.
However, with that cursed blow the story changed. My body was not thrown aside, but into the grave of Evin Prison and its solitary wards, and now the grave-like prison of Shahr-e Ray. But give in to the fate and don’t complain. You know better that death is not the end of life.
You taught me that one comes to this world to gain an experience and learn a lesson and with each birth a responsibility is put on one’s shoulder. I learned that sometimes one has to fight. I do remember when you told me that the carriage man protested the man who was flogging me, but the flogger hit the lash on his head and face that ultimately led to his death. You told me that for creating a value one should persevere even if one dies.
You taught us that as we go to school one should be a lady in face of the quarrels and complaints. Do you remember how much you underlined the way we behave? Your experience was incorrect. When this incident happened, my teachings did not help me. Being presented in court made me appear as a cold-blooded murderer and a ruthless criminal. I shed no tears. I did not beg. I did not cry my head off since I trusted the law.

You taught me that one comes to this world to gain an experience and learn a lesson and with each birth a responsibility is put on one’s shoulder

But I was charged with being indifferent in face of a crime. You see, I didn’t even kill the mosquitoes and I threw away the cockroaches by taking them by their antennas. Now I have become a premeditated murderer. My treatment of the animals was interpreted as being inclined to be a boy and the judge didn’t even trouble himself to look at the fact that at the time of the incident I had long and polished nails.
How optimistic was he who expected justice from the judges! He never questioned the fact that my hands are not coarse like those of a sportswoman, especially a boxer. And this country that you planted its love in me never wanted me and no one supported me when under the blows of the interrogator I was crying out and I was hearing the most vulgar terms. When I shed the last sign of beauty from myself by shaving my hair I was rewarded: 11 days in solitary.
Dear Sholeh, don’t cry for what you are hearing. On the first day that in the police office an old unmarried agent hurt me for my nails I understood that beauty is not looked for in this era. The beauty of looks, beauty of thoughts and wishes, a beautiful handwriting, beauty of the eyes and vision, and even beauty of a nice voice.
My dear mother, my ideology has changed and you are not responsible for it. My words are unending and I gave it all to someone so that when I am executed without your presence and knowledge, it would be given to you. I left you much handwritten material as my heritage.
However, before my death I want something from you, that you have to provide for me with all your might and in any way that you can. In fact this is the only thing I want from this world, this country and you. I know you need time for this. Therefore, I am telling you part of my will sooner. Please don’t cry and listen. I want you to go to the court and tell them my request. I cannot write such a letter from inside the prison that would be approved by the head of prison; so once again you have to suffer because of me. It is the only thing that if even you beg for it I would not become upset although I have told you many times not to beg to save me from being executed.

The world did not love us. It did not want my fate. And now I am giving in to it and embrace the death.

My kind mother, dear Sholeh, the one more dear to me than my life, I don’t want to rot under the soil. I don’t want my eye or my young heart to turn into dust. Beg so that it is arranged that as soon as I am hanged my heart, kidney, eye, bones and anything that can be transplanted be taken away from my body and given to someone who needs them as a gift. I don’t want the recipient know my name, buy me a bouquet, or even pray for me. I am telling you from the bottom of my heart that I don’t want to have a grave for you to come and mourn there and suffer. I don’t want you to wear black clothing for me. Do your best to forget my difficult days. Give me to the wind to take away.
The world did not love us. It did not want my fate. And now I am giving in to it and embrace the death. Because in the court of God I will charge the inspectors, I will charge inspector Shamlou, I will charge judge, and the judges of country’s Supreme Court that beat me up when I was awake and did not refrain from harassing me. In the court of the creator I will charge Dr. Farvandi, I will charge Qassem Shabani and all those that out of ignorance or with their lies wronged me and trampled on my rights and didn’t pay heed to the fact that sometimes what appears as reality is different from it.
Dear soft-hearted Sholeh, in the other world it is you and me who are the accusers and others who are the accused. Let’s see what God wants. I wanted to embrace you until I die. I love you.
Reyhaneh,
April 1, 2014

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reminds me of myself

Rypien never easy to read

By Tony Gallagher, The Province August 16, 2011

Read more: http://www.theprovince.com/Gallagher+Rypien+never+easy+read/5263391/story.html#ixzz1VGMMNnYb

Rick Rypien sports a cut eye during the game against the Ottawa Senators at General Motors Place on March 13, 2010 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Photograph by: Jeff Vinnick, NHLI via Getty Images

In this business, you get to know hockey players mostly through dressing-room conversations nowadays, and as such, that's the way I knew Rick Rypien.

Virtually any conversation one had with him gave you some idea of the struggles he went through in life, particularly when you linked any such discussions together.

He was so very different from most professional athletes that at times you genuinely wondered whether he even remotely liked playing hockey. And yet, at other times he seemed very happy, particularly when surrounded by teammates that obviously cared for him very much even if they couldn't seem to help him nearly as much as they would have liked.

The first time your agent met him was after his very first home triumph, which included a fight and a couple of big hits which led to a big Canuck victory on a team that was just beginning to become a good one, a sense that has basically encouraged every player in the room since it began. Strangely, Rypien was hiding in the corner of the old dressing room on the forwards' side next to the blackboard, quiet and down and not willing to look anyone in the eye. His face wanted to drop to the floor and it frequently did during the conversation, and at the time you just thought he was shy or had received some bad news off the ice perhaps. Not what you'd normally see after a game situation, particularly after a young player had just made a significant contribution to his team for the first time.

Fast forward to the beginning of training camp last season, and a sit-down chat I had with him as he looked ahead to this campaign which has just passed. He was absolutely a different person. He seemed very happy, very enthused about his life and his manner was absolutely mature in every way. He looked you straight in the eye, had lots to say including some very clear and excellent insight into his future given his skill set, and even though we all knew he had his issues, it looked like they might be behind him. Whatever medication they had cooked up to control his depression or bipolar difficulties was absolutely perfect; not too high so as to seem induced, but bang on. And thinking back as a father of young men virtually the same age, I remember being happy myself that he finally knew some happiness and peace in his life if even just for a while.

For before and after these times, there were reports of the poor fellow wandering around town by himself not knowing anyone who knew him, his world of loneliness something that would break the heart of any parent.

So when people talk about thoughts and prayers going out to the Rypien family, you really must say those prayers because they're going to need some help. Anyone thinking about this for one moment will know that.

Throughout his stints away from the Canucks when he was getting treatment, there would be frequent rumors about him being involved with drugs, which at the time at least was absolutely not the case. Both general manager Mike Gillis and his right-hand man Laurence Gilman were upset with those reports, Gillis saying in an off-the-record conversation at the time that Rick's problems weren't street drugs, but rather that like so many young people today who have been told to 'say no to drugs,' he wasn't comfortable taking the meds that had been prescribed.

Whatever ultimately caused this young man's death, those involved - including the family - should know that this wonderful guy did know some happiness in his life which ended not because they didn't do enough, but because the fellow upstairs decided to end his struggles down here and call him back. He had access to the best help that can be provided for his condition and yet still we are beset by this sadness.

But not Rick Rypien. His sadness is at an end, and our prayers should be such that he finds a place filled with eternal happiness.

© Copyright (c) The Province

CPP and retirement

Case 1 Assuming that Karen has worked for a net 29 years so far (this allows for a dropout of zero income years for childbearing and other factors) and contributed as much as required for the full CPP benefit, she should be able to get the maximum CPP benefit, currently $11,520 a year, if she retires at age 65 and works full-time until then. This is the simplest case.

Case 2 If she ceases work at 60 next year and applies for benefits at the same time, she will lose 31.2% (60 months times next year’s pre-65 penalty rate of 0.52% per month for each month prior to age 65) and so receive an annual CPP benefit of $7,926 a year.

Case 3 If she were to apply for benefits at age 70, having retired at 65, she would get $16,358 a year based on a new boost in benefits that will give another 42% more than the age 65 benefit as a reward for waiting five years.

For people who are very ill, the answer is simple.

December 08, 2010 08:00 PM

C&L's Late Nite Music Club With John Lennon

By Jared Shade Reynolds

Crossposted from Late Nite Music Club

Genre: John Lennon

Title: In My Life

Rest In Peace.

By Jared Shade Reynolds

Crossposted from Late Nite Music Club

Genre: John Lennon

Title: In My Life

Rest In Peace.

interview Meridith Whitney

Drink. Trade. Refill. Lose $10 Million.

By JULIA WERDIGIER

Published: June 30, 2010

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LONDON — Alcohol-induced behavior has produced many unintended consequences, but pushing up the global price of oil and losing $10 million must rank among the most novel.

Britain’s financial regulator disclosed on Tuesday that Steven Noel Perkins, a former oil futures broker, single-handedly engineered a jump in the price of oil a year ago and cost his firm millions of dollars with a string of unauthorized trades after a weekend of heavy drinking.

Mr. Perkins had just returned from a liquor-soaked golf weekend with colleagues in June of last year when he sat down in front of his laptop at his home east of London and started to place bets on Brent crude futures, according to a report by the Financial Services Authority. He continued to drink and place bets through the night, and by the morning of June 30, Mr. Perkins had placed more than $520 million worth of trades, at one point pushing the price of oil to $73.05, an eight-month high. The trades by Mr. Perkins were the main reason the price gained about $1.65 a barrel in just over two hours in the middle of the night, according to the report.

“Mr. Perkins’s explanation for his trading on 29 and 30 June is that he was drunk,” the F.S.A. said. “He claims to have limited recollection of events on Monday and claims to have been in an alcohol-induced blackout at the time he traded.”

Just before 7 a.m., Mr. Perkins realized what he had done and tried to unwind his positions. To gain time he sent a text message to his boss at PVM Oil Futures saying that a relative was ill and he would not be in the office that day.

When a back-office clerk called Mr. Perkins at 7:45 a.m. on June 30 to ask for details about the trades, Mr. Perkins lied and said he made them on behalf of a client. PVM takes commissions on fulfilling orders from its clients, which are banks and other institutions, and does not trade for itself.

But by 10 a.m., PVM, where Mr. Perkins had worked since 1998, had discovered that his trades were unauthorized and suspended his access to the trading system. The trades cost PVM almost $10 million, the company said last year.

The F.S.A. fined Mr. Perkins about $107,600, for market abuse and barred him from working in the financial services industry for at least five years.

The regulator reduced the fine from about $224,000 to avoid causing Mr. Perkins “serious financial hardship.”

Mr. Perkins joined a rehabilitation program last year and has stopped drinking, the F.S.A. said.

Nietzsche: A Philosophy in Context

By FRANCIS FUKUYAMA

Published: April 29, 2010

One of the pitfalls of writing a biography of a great philosopher is the temptation to reduce important ideas to mere psychology, an outgrowth of some fluke in the philosopher’s personal development. Julian Young, a professor at the University of Auckland and Wake Forest University, has for the most part avoided this trap by writing a “philosophical” biography of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) in which the life story provides context but ultimately not explanation for the ideas. In so doing he has provided a serious and readable, if not exactly ground-breaking, introduction to Nietzsche’s “philosophy with a hammer.”

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Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Friedrich Nietzsche circa 1890.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

A Philosophical Biography

By Julian Young

Illustrated. 649 pp. Cambridge University Press. $45

Context is particularly important in Nie­tzsche’s case because his life story was so dramatic. The young Friedrich (or Fritz, as he was known) was, by all accounts, simply the most brilliant student any of his formidable professors had ever encountered, going all the way back to his boarding school days at Pforta. His teacher of classical philology at Leipzig, Friedrich Ritschl, said that in his 39 years of teaching he had “never known a young man who has matured so early.” Nie­tzsche was awarded a doctorate at age 24 and a professorship at the University of Basel the same year; he was promoted to full professor at 25 — a feat not even Larry Summers could duplicate.

From a very early age, however, ­Nie­tzsche was afflicted with a host of maladies, including blinding headaches that would last for days, problems with his digestion that would leave him vomiting and bedridden, and a progressive blindness that allowed him to read, painfully, for only a couple of hours a day. So debilitating did these symptoms become that he was forced to give up his professorship at age 34, after which he withdrew into a solitary and nomadic life, traveling between Switzerland and the South of France in search of a climate that would marginally ease his suffering. His great works were written in the few days of lucidity that were permitted him between long bouts of physical disability, “On the Genealogy of Morals” having been composed for the most part in a mere three weeks in 1887.

One of the central concepts in Nie­tzsche’s philosophy was the “eternal return of the same,” that is, the need to affirm the value of one’s life in every single detail as something to be repeated endlessly through time. Given the sheer torture of his physical existence, such an affirmation was testimony to Nietzsche’s own gigantic will — a will that transformed into madness when he collapsed on a Turin sidewalk in January 1889 with delusions that he had become a world-creating God.

Young resorts to purely psychological explanation primarily on the subject of Nie­tzsche’s attitude toward women. He notes that Nietzsche had a large circle of highly intelligent and forceful female friends, and that many could be regarded as early feminists. As a Basel professor Nietzsche took a minority stand favoring admission of women to the doctoral program. But after his disastrous courtship of Lou Salomé, whose affections were stolen by Nietzsche’s close friend Paul Rée, he came to regard feminism as one of the most disastrous byproducts of modernity, and women as needing (in the words of a character in “Zarathustra”) “the whip.”

The most serious issue raised in this or any other study of Nietzsche concerns the nature of his politico-cultural program, the “transvaluation of all values,” that was to take place in the wake of the death of Christianity. Young properly criticizes attempts by the Nazis to appropriate Nie­tzsche as one of their own. He points out that despite some casual anti-Semitism in his early years, the older Nietzsche became a principled anti-anti-Semite, an opponent of Bismarck and a critic of the German chauvinism that emerged after the Reich was unified in 1871.

Nietzsche, however, hoped for a future hierarchical society in which the labor of the many would support the greatness of the few, one in which the cultural cacophony of contemporary liberal societies would be replaced by the solidarity of a single, common culture. Young argues that this was not really a political project, and that the Übermensch at the top of the pyramid should be thought of less as a Hitler-like dictator and more as a spiritual leader, whom he compares variously to the Dalai Lama or Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei. Cultural conformity was not, for Young’s Nietzsche, something to be enforced through political power, but rather something generated spontaneously through communal participation in art, much as the ancient Greek polis had been bound together through the common performance of tragedy.

This then explains the central role that music played in his philosophy. Nietzsche, a talented pianist and occasional composer, had great hopes that Richard Wagner’s music might somehow serve as the foundation for a refounding of German culture on the basis of a unifying art, and for that reason he entered eagerly into the circle of Wagner and his wife, Cosima. He broke with the composer not because he ceased to believe in the project, but because he felt that Wagner himself was too crude an individual to implement it.

But understanding Nietzsche’s project as a cultural rather than a political one should not blind us to its terrible implications. For while one might be able to create a small-scale community based on common and voluntary commitment to art, as Wagner sought to do in Bayreuth, scaling up such a project to society as a whole, with all its de facto diversity, would require dictatorial political power. The mystical origins of Nietzsche’s Dionysian community are an open invitation to the unleashing of irrational passion that is perfectly happy to squander the life of any individual standing in its way. Ayatollah Khamenei is indeed a much better model of Nietzsche’s future leader than the power­less Dalai Lama.

Young’s biography illustrates concepts from Nietzsche’s books with examples drawn from the contemporary world, so one finds Diana, Princess of Wales; “The Truman Show”; and the Iraq war popping up in incongruous places. Some of these are helpful, but many simply detract from the book’s seriousness, like the dozen or so references to global warming scattered through the text.

Whether we acknowledge it or not, we continue to live within the intellectual shadow cast by Nietzsche. Postmodernism, deconstructionism, cultural relativism, the “free spirit” scorning bourgeois morality, even New Age festivals like Burning Man can all ultimately be traced to him. There is a line running from “Beyond Good and Evil” to Justice Anthony Kennedy’s assertion (in Planned Parenthood v. Casey) that liberty is “the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe and of the mystery of human life.”

Young appropriately underlines the notion that postmodernism, with its embrace of diversity in values, is no different from the 19th-century modernism that Nie­tzsche hated. He would not have cele­brated alternative lifestyles, non-­Western cultures or the right of every fourth grader to be his or her own value-creator. Acknowledgment of the death of God is a bomb that blows up many things, not just oppressive traditionalism, but also values like compassion and the equality of human dignity on which support for a tolerant liberal political order is based. This then is the Nie­tzschean dead end from which Western philosophy has still not emerged.

Francis Fukuyama is a professor of inter­national political economy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.