Iranian protesters burn motorcycles and hold high photographs of opposition leader Mir Hussein Moussavi. Basij militia, the foot soldiers of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, bludgeon local residents with batons. Plumes of tear gas cloud the eyes of middle-aged women and young men alike. Black-clad riot police shoot the most vociferous and tell others to go home.

“I don’t want to beat people,” shouts one commander, according to New York Times columnist Roger Cohen, himself a tear gas victim.

“Join us! Join us!” The throngs of protesters focus their attention on the humanity of the guards, encouraging them to join their nascent movement for democracy.

The Iranian Revolution of 2009 does not look much like the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which overthrew the U.S.-backed Shah and established the Islamic Republic under the authority of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The modern version, by contrast, pits Moussavi, a former prime minister, and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a major player in the first revolution, against the nationalist Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of the theocracy. According to the cleric-run commission that governs elections in Iran, Ahmadinejad won reelection on June 13 with over 60 percent of the vote, even though pre-election polls showed Moussavi with a 15 point lead. Moussavi and the youth of Iran want the results thrown out.

While protesters and militia have battled in the streets for control of Tehran, and the Ayatollah has become increasingly acerbic in his public pronouncements on behalf of Ahmadinejad, President Barack Obama has finally gone public with his belief that the Iranian people deserve to have their voices heard. “The world is watching,” he said in a statement on June 20. “We call on the Iranian government to stop all violent and unjust actions against its own people. The universal rights to assembly and free speech must be respected, and the United States stands with all who seek to exercise those rights.”

Obama has rightly recognized that this moment must not be ignored.

We stand at a pivotal moment in history, one where the difference between dictatorship and democracy may lie in the anguished pleas of repressed young people via Twitter and Facebook. We stand at a crossroads between a tortured past of oppression and inequality and a future of justice and truth, when all people will recognize their shared humanity. We stand and bear witness to the ongoing struggle between those who bludgeon and arrest those who dare to dissent, and those who believe, as Martin Luther Kind did, that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Thirty years after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, another revolution has begun to unfold in the streets and alleys of Tehran.

What is so tragic about the beatings and the gassings and the arrests is that it did not have to be this way. In fact, “it wasn’t supposed to happen this way,” writes one Iranian student, who remained last nameless for fear of reprisal. “Until last week, Mr. Moussavi was a nondescript, if competent, politician. . . . Now, like us, Mr. Moussavi finds himself caught up in events that were unimaginable, each day’s march and protest more unthinkable than the one that came before.” But it did happen this way and we must lend our voices to the chorus of millions of Iranians who want their votes counted and their voices heard. They are saying to us, “Join us! Join us!”

The Iranian Revolution, version 2009, has begun.

Alan Kennedy-Shaffer is author of “The Obama Revolution.”

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