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The BBC has a remarkable interview with the mother of Neda Agha Soltan, the 27-year-old Iranian woman whose death June 20 was captured on video, and who became an important symbol of the growing resistance to the mullahs' regime.

The conclusion of the interview is deeply bittersweet:

I don't want people to forget her. People - Iranians - have all been very supportive. They come to me and congratulate me for having had such a brave daughter.

And now I want you to do something for me. I want you, on my behalf, to thank everyone around the world, Iranians and non Iranians, people from every country and culture, people who in their own way, their own tradition, have mourned my child… everyone who lit a candle for her - every musician, who wrote songs for her, who wrote poems about her… you know, Neda loved the arts and music. I want to thank all of them.

I want to thank politicians and leaders, from every country, at all levels, who remembered my child.

Her death has been so painful - words can never describe my true feelings. But knowing that the world cried for her… that has comforted me.

I am proud of her. The world sees her as a symbol, and that makes me happy.

Neda has become a symbol not just of the struggle in Iran, I think, but of the sacrifices being made by young people around the world working for justice. It may be a small consolation, but her daughter's spirit is with us all.

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Huckabee seems to have forgotten that most militaries have something a little larger than muskets to fight with these days. He apparently thinks arming the Iranians to the hilt and turning Iran into the wild, wild west would make things better over there. I don't think arming the citizens with guns is going to do them a whole lot of good trying to go up against that country's military force. They'd just be getting out bigger weapons to slaughter them with and more of them would end up dying. And while we're on the subject, just who do you think Jesus would arm Huck?

Huckabee: Well across America we celebrate this day as our nation’s 233rd birthday, and what a wonderful country. We ought to never take for granted our freedom, nor forget the depth of sacrifice for those that have given it to us. Just watch the events in Iran and breathe deep the air of freedom that you have. And we know the shot that murdered the twenty six old Neda Agha-Soltan has been called the shot heard round the world.

That’s a reference of course to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem commemorating the battle at the Concord Bridge in 1775, which begins:

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.

But there’s a huge difference between these two shots. A difference not just in hundreds of years and thousands of miles. The shot that took Neda was for brutality and darkness. It was fired not just to stop her young heart, but to destroy the demand for dignity and fairness. The Battle of Concord ended differently from the battle and the events five years earlier when Americans had thrown snowballs at the British and five Americans ended up dead. That confrontation became known as the Boston Mascare.

Now what’s the difference between a masacre and a battle? Well I’ll tell ya’. Guns. Some of us fail to understand that our 1st Amendment right to speak and assemble is meaningless without our 2nd Amendment right to bear arms. We don’t make the connection sometimes.

Without the 2nd Amendment there are no battles, just masacres. That’s why I don’t understand some people in groups who are so gung-ho on the 1st Amendment, but the 2nd Amendment, not so much. Some don’t seem to believe that we have an indivdual right to bear arms and the founding fathers wanted to make certain that what ever happened in this country, we would be prepared to protect our freedom like the Minutemen, and not be reduced to pathetic victims throwing snowballs or chunks of cement like the poor souls in Iran.

Forewarned about the danger of tyranny is forearmed against it. Unarmed, is simply dead. As long as evil exists the shots will continue to be heard around the world and as free men and women, we need to do everything we can to ensure that they echo the Battle of Concord, and not the masacre of Tehran.

The thought that what is happening in Iran is so much more than a mere election has struck many of us as self-evident. Would they show this ferocious courage simply for a fixed election? I don't think so. And others, much more learned express it better.

Hamid Dabashi, Kevorkian professor of Iranian studies and comparative literature at Columbia University:

I see the moment we are witnessing as a civil rights movement rather than a push to topple the regime. If Rosa Parks was the American “mother of the civil rights movement,” the young woman who was killed point blank in the course of a demonstration, Neda Agha-Soltan, might very well emerge as its Iranian granddaughter.

....
It seems to me that these brave young men and women have picked up their hand-held cameras to shoot those shaky shots, looking in their streets and alleys for their Martin Luther King. They are well aware of Mir Hossein Moussavi’s flaws, past and present. But like the color of green, the very figure of Moussavi has become, it seems to me, a collective construction of their desires for a peaceful, nonviolent attainment of civil and women’s rights. They are facing an army of firearms and fanaticism with chanting poetry and waving their green bandannas. I thought my generation had courage to take up arms against tyranny. Now I tremble with shame in the face of their bravery.

The idea of "Neda", apart from the young woman herself who was murdered on the street, suggests to me Women's rights, above all. The suppression, even the targeting of women protestors of any age, is perhaps the greatest threat to the orthodoxy under which Iran is governed.

Iranian Nobel Peace laureate Shirin Ebadi put it this way:

Many fear that a second term for a man first elected in 2005 in part on a platform of restoring "Islamic values" will only prove worse than the first.

"The root of the current unrest is the people's dissatisfaction and frustration at their plight going back before the election. Because women are the most dissatisfied people in society, that is why their presence is more prominent."

The video above was taken from an Iranian YouTube video, Neda ye Sarzamin. I could find no translation for it, except that it is a tribute to Neda Agha Soltan. I've added some pictures to make my point.

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President Barack Obama told CNN's Suzanne Malveaux that he found the video of a murdered Iranian woman to be "heartbreaking." A video showing the death of Neda Agha-Soltan has been widely circulated on the internet as a symbol of Iran's crackdown on protesters.