Posted by
EWRoss on Monday, June 29, 2009 8:00:00 AM
Just as “supreme leader” Ayatollah Khamenei’s security forces were massacring Iranian protesters on the streets and cutting off the flow of information from inside Iran, Michael Jackson’s tragic and untimely death eclipsed the story. The death a few days earlier of Neda Agha-Soltan, a beautiful young Iranian woman, shot while watching the protests and whose death captured imaginations and headlines around the world, was all but forgotten.
The intense examination of Jackson’s life and death eventually will subside; people will listen to his music and watch videos of his performances for generations. A few weeks or months from now, only Iranians and those people concerned about them may remember Neda. Michael and Neda came from two very different worlds, and in Michael Jackson’s world it appears there is far more sympathy for him than there is for young men and women dying on the streets of Iran for freedom and democracy.