Lux Lucet

Hundreds of protesters stormed the US embassy compound in Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone [Khalid Mohammed/AP Photo]

• Psalm 120:7

It seemed like déjà vu.  Watching video of angry protesters storming the American embassy in Baghdad on Tuesday, I couldn’t help but recall similar scenes from 1979.  I was thirteen when angry crowds of demonstrators took to the streets against the Shah of Iran, swept the Ayatollah Khomeini to power in that nation, and captured the American embassy in Tehran, holding fifty-two American hostages for 444 days.

There was, as you may suppose, a good deal of anger directed at Iran from the American public.  Pictures of the scowling Ayatollah, a man whose menacing face seemed to be everywhere, served to drive home the seriousness of the ongoing hostage crisis.

For my part, I recall not so much being angry with Iran as I was puzzled by the whole affair.  Here were people on the other side of the world, in a country I had barely heard of, marching, burning American flags and calling America the Great Satan.   The whole thing just seemed bizarre to me.  As far as I was aware, I had never harmed an Iranian, nor did I harbor anything like hatred for the Iranian people.  So why did these people, seemingly out of the blue, one day start proclaiming how much they hated my country?  It was as if Iran was a nation full of nothing but lunatics.  At least that’s how it appeared to me at the time.

Sometimes I wonder how those too young to have lived through the Iran hostage crisis view that event.  Do Millennials or Gen-Z even know about it?  If so, do they realize how big a deal it was at the time?  This one event dominated the news for over a year.  It even spawned a new news program on ABC called Nightline hosted by Ted Koppel and dedicated to providing the latest hostage crisis updates.  If memory serves, it used to come on weeknights at 11:30 pm after the local evening news.

That was then.

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