Category Archives: Iran

Laurence Jarvik wonders whether the sudden ratcheting up of the current Cartoon Offensive, which was just a local Danish phenomenon back in September 2005, isn’t perhaps being pushed by Iran in retaliation for pressure from the EU on its nuclear program.

Anyone who has seen the cartoons knows they are “tame” and not on their face offensive. Yet the organized and international nature of the protest would indicate state support as well as religious sensitivity. Given that the original offense took place four months ago, the outbreak of violence at this point raised the question:

What if this is a shot across the bow to the EU and the non-Muslim world that an attack on Iran could lead to the Muslim “street” exploding around the world?

Just a working hypothesis at this point–but all the more reason for the US and UK to take a stronger stand in support of the Danes, if true. For if this was a test, then the US and UK look like they have failed the test. They have been intimidated. And the Europeans, so far have not.

Which means military action, if it does take place, will require a great deal better diplomatic and public relations support than the Iraq war.

If you look where the principal violent outbreaks have occurred so far in the Middle East–in areas where Iranian allies remain most influential: Hamas in Gaza, the Assad regime in Damascus, and now possibly Hezbollah in Lebanon–Iran’s possible handiwork does seem likely.

Jarvik also links to the apparently newly assembled Mohammed Image Archive:

While the debate rages, an important point has been overlooked: despite the Islamic prohibition against depicting Mohammed under any circumstances, hundreds of paintings, drawings and other images of Mohammed have been created over the centuries, with nary a word of complaint from the Muslim world. The recent cartoons in Jyllands-Posten are nothing new; it’s just that no other images of Mohammed have ever been so widely publicized.

This page is an archive of numerous depictions of Mohammed, to serve as a reminder that such imagery has been part of Western and Islamic culture since the Middle Ages — and to serve as a resource for those interested in freedom of expression.

Personally, I think ridicule is one of the most potent weapons against religious totalitarianism. And I’m not inclined to feel very sensitive to the feelings of people who, in the name of religion, (a) burn embassies, (b) blow up infidels, and (c) demonstrate with signage that contains variations on the formula “Kill/Exterminate/Massacre/Behead Those Who Insult/Defame/Slander/Ridicule [Insert your religion here].”

And here’s a nice quote posted by Kansan Bart Hall on a long, fairly temperate, and sometimes thought-provoking comment thread on Winds of Change about the Cartoon Offensive.

“Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are not sure that we are doubly sure. Fundamentalism is, therefore, inevitable in an age which has destroyed so many certainties by which faith once expressed itself and upon which it relied.”

Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) [liberal theologian]

Persian blogfather Hossein Derakhshan (Hoder) was interviewed last week by Sueddeutsche Zeitung‘s youth e-zine, Jetzt.de, under the headline, Iranische Opposition ist im Netz. A translation is available on Hoder’s English-language blog: Editor: Myself.

Softskull Press‘s website offers a downloadable sample chapter of Paul Berman’s new book, Power and the Idealists (2005). The chapter is entitled “The Muslim World and the American Left.” One of the people it discusses is Azar Nafisi, the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran.

Nafisi is an Iranian, and she grew up in the gilded districts of Tehran under the shah during the nineteen-fifties and sixties—the daughter of Tehran’s mayor (though he ended up in jail, a matter of pride for the family), with distinguished and cultured ancestors tracing back eight hundred years. Somebody might object that, with her glorious background, Nafisi can hardly be regarded as typical of her part of the world. But who is typical of anything? The medieval ancestry might suggest, at the least, that here is someone with a sharp eye for Iranian traditions. Nafisi went abroad to study—and this, surely, was a typical thing to do, for the educated elite in what used to be called the Third World. She studied in Switzerland and Britain until the serendipities of life and love brought her, in the nineteen-seventies, to the University of Oklahoma, at Norman. She explored American literature at Norman—the only foreign student in the department. The American New Left was at high tide, and Oklahoma did not escape its many currents. All over the American university system in the seventies, clever left-wing students were organizing study groups to pore over the texts of Marx, Lenin, Mao, Lukacs, Debray, and the Frankfurt School—the alternative syllabus of the world of Marxism. These groups formed at Norman, too, and Nafisi took her place among them….

Student leftism back home in Iran grew noisier and more militant over the course of the seventies, agitating against the shah. The shah’s secret police, the Savak, cracked down, and students were killed in terrible massacres. And, as these grisly events took place far away in Iran, the Iranian students in America likewise grew noisier and more militant, and marched in picket lines that, as I remember well (from observing a demonstration in New York, not Oklahoma), were weirdly vehement, radiant with violence, and slightly mysterious, too, with the marchers’ faces wrapped in scarves to conceal their identities from the agents of the Savak and the FBI. Iranian students were especially active at Norman. They were fervent for Maoism. They hung out in the Norman student union, sipping coffee and Coke, and declaiming in favor of Stalin and, as Nafisi remembers, “the need to destroy once and for all the Trotskyites, the White Guards, the termites and poisonous rats who were bent on destroying the revolution.” This, too, expressed the spirit of the age….

In 1979 the revolution broke out for real—not in Oklahoma but in Iran. Nafisi completed her dissertation … [and] set out for Tehran—she and a good many other Iranian radicals, full of enthusiasm for the revolution and for their own opportunity to play a role. The Tehran airport was bedecked with slogans written in black and red: DEATH TO AMERICA! DOWN WITH IMPERIALISM & ZIONISM. She took a position as a professor of literature at University of Tehran, where the Marxists were especially strong. And yet, in those early days after the shah’s overthrow, to be alive was not necessarily bliss, nor was it Heaven to be young. The revolution came to power because Ayatollah Khomeini and his radical Islamists put together a broad front with the Iranian Communist Party (the Tudeh) and the Marxist Fedayin Organization, together with a couple of popular organizations that favored liberal democracy, and the mixture of mosques, Marxists, and liberals turned out to be powerful. The shah fled for his life. But Khomeini and his mullahs stood at the head of this absurdly wide United Front, and, once the mullahs had succeeded in establishing the United Front’s revolutionary government, they and their Marxist allies turned against the liberals and crushed them. Then the Islamists turned against the Marxists. A battle for control of the university and of every institution of Iranian life got underway—mullahs against Marxists and everyone else. And the Islamist victory, as it crept across the landscape, turned out to be dreadful.

Berman writes in a very blunt, engaging, and often poignant style, but everything he writes has the flavor of an epitaph.

In today’s New York Times, Robert D. Kaplan develops a point he made after last year’s Indian Ocean tsunami disaster.

With the global population now at six billion, humans are living in urban concentrations in an unprecedented number of seismically, climatically and environmentally fragile areas. The earthquake-stricken region of Pakistan saw a doubling of its population in recent decades, certainly a factor in the death toll of more than 20,000. The tsunami in Asia last December showed the risks to the rapidly growing cities along the Indian Ocean. China’s booming population occupies flood zones. Closer to home, cities like Memphis and St. Louis lie along the New Madrid fault line, responsible for a major earthquake nearly 200 years ago when those cities barely existed; and the hurricane zone along the southern Atlantic Coast and earthquake-prone areas of California continue to be developed. More human beings are going to be killed or made homeless by Mother Nature than ever in history.

When such disasters occur, security systems break down and lawlessness erupts. The first effect of the earthquake in the Pakistani town of Muzaffarabad was widespread looting – just as in New Orleans. Relief aid is undermined unless those who would help the victims can monopolize the use of force. That requires troops.

But even using our troops in our own country is controversial: the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 strictly limits the use of troops inside the United States. The Gulf Coast devastation has helped remind us that this law was enacted in a rural America at a time when natural disasters took a relatively small human toll, and such calamities were viewed more fatalistically.

In a nation and a world where mass media and the Internet spread the word of disaster so effectively, impassioned calls to do something can quickly erode constitutional concerns, political differences and worries over sovereignty. Just as Pakistan has now agreed to accept aid from its rival India, Iran accepted help from the United States Air Force after the earthquake in Bam in 2003. The very people who typically denounce the American military will surely be complaining about its absence should our troops not show up after a major natural calamity.

Indeed, because of our military’s ability to move quickly into new territory and establish security perimeters, it is emerging as the world’s most effective emergency relief organization. There is a saying among soldiers: amateurs discuss strategy, while professionals discuss logistics. And if disaster assistance is about anything, it’s about logistics – moving people, water, food, medical supplies and heavy equipment to save lives and communities. We also have our National Guard, which is made up primarily of men in their 30’s (many of whom are police officers and firefighters in civilian life) trained to deal effectively with the crowds of rowdy young men that tend to impede relief work.

via RealClearPolitics

In 1997, Robert Kaplan found the boundary that divides Cascadia into two nations to be a fading anachronism.

YET WHEN I went to dinner at the Portland home of an Iranian immigrant, Jim (Jamsheed) Ameri, it was as if Sousa’s patriotic march music had jumped in volume, as if mid century Industrial Age America had never receded. Jim is a real estate developer and lives with his wife, Goli, in Tigard, on the southwestern fringe of Portland, in an opulent home at the head of the Willamette Valley. From their impeccable lawn, punctuated with majestic Douglas firs in a fine, pellucid mist, the valley, its homes and its gardens, unfurled. This was the bountiful Pacific Northwest as seen by the first pioneers, now savored by this latest migration of Oregon settlers. Jim and Goli had invited a number of their Iranian friends to dinner to discuss their experiences as very successful immigrants in America.

Sipping drinks on the porch in the sunset, Farsheed Shomloo, an immigration lawyer, pointed to a book on the patio table and told Jim, “You should read this new book about Iran, it’s really interesting.” Jim replied:

“I don’t want to read it. I know the outcome already. In Iran, there is beautiful poetry and everything turns out a disaster. Here the poetry is not so beautiful, but people are free to discover the best in themselves; that’s why America has happy endings. Here it’s a negative system: there is no entrenched depotism, no will to dominate. We immigrants can remake the whole country if we want to. It’s ours for the taking, as if there is a perpetual clean slate where nobody is ever owed anything. I’ll tell you, the Iranian revolution was a disaster for Iran and a success for America, because it brought a lot of talented, ambitious Iranians here. Every time there is a disaster in the Third World, it’s a good thing for America, since the best of the middle class finds its way here.”

Farsheed agreed. “What is this country that sucks you up and draws out the best in you, and allows you for the first time to be yourself?” he asked passionately. “Periodically I reread the Constitution. I am amazed. What is this incredible system built by pessimists, yet built so as to unleash the human spirit? You know why I chose to live in Oregon? I looked in a book and saw that there was no sales tax here. In Iran I was oppressed by taxes and everything else. At the University of Oregon in Eugene I used to participate in protests against the shah [in the 1970s]. Then I realized that nobody in Oregon gave a damn about the shah or about me protesting. I was free to criticize U.S. government policy, and nobody cared! You cannot imagine what a revelation that was for somebody from Iran. That’s when I stopped focusing on Iran and truly became an American.”

SOURCE: An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America’s Future, by Robert D. Kaplan (Vintage, 1998), pp. 336-337

But look at it from the point of view of someone whose principal involvement in politics is to participate in protest demonstrations and political fund-raising. How discouraging is it to stage more demonstrations and raise more money and still lose elections? Free to protest, and nobody cares!

Another article by Matt Welch in the June 2004 issue of The Walrus, under the headline Editing the Enemy: Censorship: The Next Generation, spells out some of the stupid side-effects of a new U.S. policy designed to embargo trade in information as well as goods.

Since September, 2003, it has been official U.S. policy that any American editor publishing a piece of writing that originated from a country under a full trade embargo — meaning Iran, Cuba, Libya or Sudan — is expressly prohibited from engaging in “activities such as the reordering of paragraphs or sentences, correction of syntax, grammar, and replacement of inappropriate words.”

In other words, use a blue pencil, go to jail — for up to ten years (and be subject to a maximum fine of $500,000).

Until recently, it was a restriction that most publishers either didn’t know about, or quietly accepted. On September 30, 2003, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), which is the arm of the Treasury Department charged with enforcing the 1917 Trading With the Enemy Act, informed the world’s largest engineering association, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), that articles from Iran (and, therefore, from other fully embargoed countries) could be published in the U.S. only if they could be printed with no additional editing or even illustration….

The Institute complied, and stopped editing all published material originating in Iran. Word travelled over the technical-publishing grapevine, and several small journals stopped accepting Iranian manuscripts altogether.

Then on January 23, the Association of American Publishers (AAP) issued a detailed legal analysis arguing that OFAC’s new rules violated not only the First Amendment of the Constitution, but Congress’s 1988 Berman Amendment, and the 1994 Free Trade in Ideas Amendment, which specifically allow for the exchange of informational materials with countries under embargo….

The Iranian exile community, which numbers in the hundreds of thousands here in “Tehrangeles,” were only in late March beginning to grasp that these restrictions, if fully enforced, could prevent dissident writers from having their work published in the U.S., and inflict chilling damage on the burgeoning academic field of Iranian Studies. “It’s just a blanket-type thing covering all written pieces in all domains? Wow, I mean it doesn’t make any sense to me,” said Hossein Ziai, director of UCLA’s Iranian Studies program, which he describes as “one of the largest in North America, if not the largest.”

“How can you translate without copy editing?” Ziai asked, posing one of the vexing questions OFAC has yet to clarify.