Even thousands of miles away from Iran, Arash and Caspar have requested pseudonyms.

“I don’t have to get around [the censors],” Caspar, a graduate student in Washington State, says. “Just my friends.” Nonetheless, he asks to remain anonymous – a reminder that after the Western media has tired of its coverage of the Iranian revolution, its consequences and its legacy will remain.

The legacy of the protests – and the way that narrative is being shaped by the unquiet Americans and others covering them – are major concerns of these two men and thousands of young Iranian expatriates like them, caught between the freedoms they experience away from home and their devotion to the place from which they came.

Both Caspar and Arash, a graduate student who has lived in North America for the past four years, have taken active roles in informing others of the issues facing the Iranian opposition. But they have mixed feelings about the ownership the West has taken of the story and the single-minded coverage that has arisen. “I would expect more questions on the dynamics of the situation,” Caspar says. Adds Arash: “Even when I talk about the censorship and all those brutal actions imposed by the current Iranian government, privately, I don’t want…the Western media to use them to make pressure on Iran and the Iranian people.”

Arash and Caspar are, by their own admission, relatively privileged: they attend school in two of the wealthiest countries in the world, and unlike their friends at home, they are able to speak out without fear of violent repercussion. As a result, both have used their positions of power to spread the word about the reality of the Iranian situation to their friends and peers from a Persian perspective through the same tools that have gained so much press in recent weeks: Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, text messaging. And neither debates the central conceit of Western media coverage, that the election itself was fraudulent. Both assert that independent election observers were prevented from monitoring results. Arash, a Ph.D. candidate in computational biology, has been distributing graphs that show a statistically improbable regularity in the votes cast for Ahmedinejad.

Arash's graph depicts votes for each candidate, all of which should go through the graph's origin (when there are no votes cast nationally, there cannot be votes cast for an individual). One of the lines is far from it, and he views this as proof that the election results have been tampered with.

Both men, however, are worried about the impact of international media coverage on the situation. “I believe that the majority of (Western media outlets) are playing a destructive role in this situation,” explains Arash. “Unfortunately, the Iranian media always refers to the Western media as the ‘enemy,’ and given the history of colonialism in the past and all those sanctions and pressures on the Iranian community in these years, many people inside Iran do not trust the West or the Western media.” He adds, “My concern is mostly worrying that the coverage may make the situation worse. Not really focusing on why the election was actually a fraud, rather focusing on pro-defeated-candidate-demonstration was a bad strategy and coverage to begin with, I think.”

Caspar, too, is concerned with what he perceives as oversimplification of the issues at hand. In addition to the violent oppression being practiced, he says, “Nowadays Iran is experiencing quite a severe economic situation…[in part] because of the very wrong economic policies of the Ahmadinejad administration, who basically wasted money.” It’s not just open suffrage they’re demanding: they’re asking for “an end to unnecessary international conflicts…paying more respect to human rights and freedom of speech.” Arash explains it thus: “The young people…oppose the parental generation, which is also important.”

But when the media has left Iran, it is the impression that they will have left on the rest of the world that is of the most concern to Caspar and Arash. After they have finished their own grassroots campaigns, both men worry about what role will remain on the world stage for their country. “Let’s inform the world about what is happening in Iran,” says Caspar. But he immediately follows it with a sentiment rarely heard on cable news: what exists in their world besides violence. “I just want to mention that clashes and injustice is not the only thing that one can find in Iran,” he says. “I hope that our nation gets to pass this critical time successfully as soon as possible. Then we get the opportunity to share our amazing culture, nature and values with the world.”

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