Oct. 5, 2006
 
EDITORIAL: Slipping Away from the Ayatollahs
 
By Dale McFeatters
Scripps Howard News Service
 
What's striking about even a casual perusal of Web sites about Iran, and there are a lot of them, is how much of that nation's popular culture -- music, books, film -- exists outside of Iran proper.
 
The bleak, joyless hand of the ruling ayatollahs hasn't succeeded in suppressing Iran's lively and inventive culture, only moving it somewhere else, including the United States and especially Los Angeles.
 
But now it seems that Iranians, with their money and their desire to live free of a meddling theocracy, are decamping for locales close to home. The exodus has been given additional impetus from Iran's near-moribund economy with high inflation and unemployment and a lack of foreign investment.
 
The Associated Press featured Iran's resort island of Kish, where women can bare their arms, ride a bike, go swimming, frolic on the beach with their husbands and even let their head scarves slip, conduct frowned on by the religious police on the mainland. It is an attempt to compete with the attractions of the United Arab Emirates, and especially Dubai, a short hop across the Persian Gulf.
 
According to the AP, "Iranian parliamentarian Hadi Haqshenas recently complained that Iran's overweening economic rules had triggered the exodus.
 
"'The booming economy in the U.A.E. is a direct consequence of Iran's failed policies' in economics and trade, Haqshenas told the English-language paper Iran News. 'Since these wrongheaded policies won't be reversed any time soon, we can expect the U.A.E. to attract many of our specialists, medical doctors, engineers and other experts.' "
 
Quite a departure it is, too. According to the Iranian press, 400,000 Iranians live in the U.A.E. Iranians have registered 6,500 companies in Dubai alone and will have invested $300 billion there by the end of the year. Just letting middle-class Iranians have a little well-regulated fun on Kish isn't likely to reverse that.
 
And it makes for an embarrassing travel slogan: "See Iran at its best. Visit Dubai."
 
Contact Dale McFeatters at McFeattersD@SHNS.com. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.shns.com