Glimpses of lives lost and tears of endless sorrow.Rage, too, which fills the hollowness in the heart, for now. The inchoate impotence of a diaspora community — and the broader world — in the stunned aftermath of a bungled missile strike all but written off as “unintentional.”As long as such weapons of destruction are manufactured, they will be used. Somebody will flip a switch — perhaps a jittery young man with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, on anti-aircraft missile battery detail — and an instrument of death streaks into the sky, locked on to a doomed civilian aircraft. A catastrophe arising from mere seconds to decide. No fail-safe.Hence the existential terror of a nuclear-armed Iran in the tinderbox of the Middle East. A control and command structure of precarious fallibility.Beneath the deceit and obfuscation that finally gave way to admission of guilt couched in profound regret — I don’t doubt the sincerity — is the frailty of human error. But also the volatility of a renegade regime.“Now that Iran has admitted responsibility, we must ensure that the regime is held to account for what they have done,” Michael Parsa, Conservative MPP and former director of the Iranian Canadian Congress, told a memorial service on Sunday for victims of Flight 752. That brought the entire capacity audience at University of Toronto’s Convocation Hall to its roused feet.“We will not rest until justice is served.”Out of anger comes purpose, he said, quoting the great Persian philosopher Rumi. “Don’t run away from grief, o’ soul. Look for the remedy inside the pain. Because the rose came from the thorn and the ruby from a stone.”But there’s so much pain, immeasurable, cascading from the Wednesday shootdown of that Ukrainian passenger jet less than two minutes after takeoff at Tehran Imam Khomeini International Airport, just as the plane’s fiery remains ...
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