we are all Iranians

Sometimes (and quite often) I wonder whether the “international scientific community” can do anything useful at all. Useful and noble. The recent editorial in Nature suggest that it can, actually that it has to.

The international scientific community has been laggard and passive in responding to the current situation <in Iran>. But Iranian scientists say that the solidarity of the international academic and scientific community is needed now more than ever.

Research bodies and universities — and perhaps a few Nobel laureates — need to speak out louder. They should encourage, rather than discourage, collaboration, and replace past discrimination by welcoming Iranian researchers and students.

Iran is not the only country in the region where human rights and democracy are violated; and the West has hypocritically been relatively silent on similar abuses by several of its allies in the Middle East. But in Iran at least, the country’s long traditions of democracy, education and free thinking — suppressed for decades by the regime, and in particular the current hard-line leadership — are now out in the open.