An interesting possibility has come up. It turns out Tehran is both a Sister City of Los Angeles, and a Mayors for Peace city, which LA is, too. So there is a double bond. I think we should try to bring in Tehran as a separate group in our dialog.
From what I gather, LAANDC participants generally feel we need a breakthrough in U.S. / Iranian relations and that this is now possible with Pres. Obama's expressed openness to dialog with Iran.
It seems possible and even likely that we can find participants for the dialog through official channels, such as Sister Cities. According to a May 10th article in the Tehran Times, Iran is calling for nuclear disarmament. And here is a link to a fascinating sermon by one of the leading Ayatollahs in Iran, the Friday Prayer leader of Tehran, in which he declares that "the massacre of innocents is wrong...The very idea of an atom bomb is forbidden." That sermon was from Nov 9, 2007.
Our dialog software has the important capability of being able to break out the separate cities, so that each city has its own "voice". When we bring in Tehran as a separate city, we will configure the dialog to have alternating "unity" and "diversity" rounds. In the "diversity" rounds, each city will elect its own message. In the "unity" rounds, Los Angeles and Tehran will together elect a single message. This alternation is conducive to the development of consensus. LA and Tehran will not confront each other, but rather the relationship between the two cities will be mediated by the unity round expressions of their common humanity.
Perhaps our biggest hurdle is getting the dialog software ready for multi-lingual exchange. We have a large Iranian population here in the LA area, so we can probably recruit translators. Even without adding the multi-lingual capability, we have a challenge to make the software more user-friendly. Towards this end it is important that we continue to keep the current dialog going, and that current participants communicate their difficulties with the software and ideas for improvement to rogereaton@earthlink.net - please mention "Nuclear Disarmament" in the title of your message.
This coming September 12 - that is a Saturday, at noon at the IGM Art Gallery in East LA, there will be a Global Forum on Peace and Security: Democracy and Iran Today. Under discussion will be the role of the Iranian diaspora, citizen peace building, and the possible use of our dialog to create a Track III diplomacy bridge between LA and Tehran.
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