It would be great to think that intelligent and ambitious Iranian women could escape the fate of Parvaneh Majd Eskandari, stabbed sixty times for her work as a dissident.
And, of course, they can. Anousheh Ansari, who left Iran as a sixteen year old to escape the Ayatollah's revolution, has been such a success as an entrepreneur in America that she is now worth an estimated $180 million. Certainly she was able to afford the price of a ten day trip into space, likely to have been around $20 million.
CNN suggested that she originally wanted to wear both the Iranian and American flags on her spacesuit, but removed the Iranian flag when both the Russian and American governments objected. This seems unlikely. It is of no concern of the US government what a US citizen wears as a foreign tourist. But, if true, this is crazy. Why should the US object to an Iranian-American showing the world that the American dream works - even for Iranian born women.
