Iranian despots take doctor from hospital bed

Houston Chronicle:

Ibrahim Yazdi was once a prominent Houston physician with a prestigious position at the Baylor College of Medicine. But 30 years ago, he left his comfortable life here to participate in a revolution halfway around the world in his native Iran.

Now as protests explode in Tehran, the 78-year-old is one of many reformist politicians in the Iranian government’s firing line.

A government-affiliated paramilitary group took Yazdi, who suffers from prostate cancer, from his hospital bed to a prison on Wednesday, family members said. Though he was released back to a hospital a day later, his family in the United States are worried about his health and what the Iranian government could do to him in coming days.

While the world watches the burgeoning reform movement in Iran, Yazdi’s arrest has rekindled a long-simmering debate among some in Houston’s Iranian-American community: What should Yazdi’s legacy here be?

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Yazdi, who rose to become a supervising pathologist at the Veterans Administration hospital in Houston, managed to keep his activities mostly quiet from the Americans he worked with. In a 1979 Time magazine article, colleagues described Yazdi simply as “pleasant, humanitarian and a good scientist.”

But he was intimately connected to politics back home in Iran. As the 1979 revolution approached, he joined the Ayatollah Khomeini and became a deputy prime minister and later the foreign minister.

And it was Yazdi’s ties with Khomeini that made him a controversial figure among some Iranian-Americans.

Many who were exiled after the revolution saw Yazdi as a traitor to the country because he supported the new regime, said Majid Mir at the Foundation for Iranian Studies in Bethesda, Md.

And conservatives in Iran, too, sometimes saw Yazdi as a threat. He had lived for years in the U.S. and some thought he was too close to Americans, Mir said.

Max Jameson, a prominent Houston Iranian-American who immigrated to the U.S. decades ago and whose Iranian name isMasood Jameos­sanaie, typifies the views of Yazdi’s opponents.

“He is the victim of his own beliefs,” Jameson said. “He was the man who paved the way for Khomeini’s return to the country. Yazdi has a total misunderstanding of democracy.”

After the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran by revolutionaries in 1979, Yazdi and several other government politicians resigned.

He then began his long journey as an opposition politician....

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The problem with being a true believer is that the other true believers may believe something else. The radical religious bigots of Iran are not above eating their own. What is very clear is that Iran is not a democracy that tolerates dissent.