Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Ganji: “Difficult Days” for Iranian Democracy Activists - The Middle East Blog - TIME, September 24, 2007

Ganji, a journalist who spent six years in prison for criticizing state repression, starts out with a strong rebuke of U.S. foreign policy toward Iran spanning the last 50 years. Writing “we categorically reject a military attack on Iran,” Ganji blasts Bush’s democracy funding and talk of attacking Iran for actually undercutting the credibility and work of Iranian democracy activists. He complains that Iran’s dispute with the West has deflected the U.N.’s attention from Iran’s internal repression and asks the world to condemn the regime’s human rights violations.

Like Gideon Levy, Amira Hass is not simply a great journalist. She is a great human being.

Amira Hass, Disrupting the separation policy, Haaretz, September 25, 2007

Last Friday morning, the eve of Yom Kippur, Machsom Watch activists had to spend hours making frantic telephone calls and using their connections with high-ranking officials to enable three sick people to traverse the Qalandiyah checkpoint and reach Jerusalem for urgent treatment. Media reports had promised that despite the hermetic closure, humanitarian cases would be allowed through the checkpoints, but by noon, most of those cases had given up and returned home.

In other cases, Machsom Watch’s female volunteers try to alert commanders when soldiers are harassing people passing through the checkpoints. Months of correspondence and requests, reports in Haaretz and monitoring by B’Tselem resulted in two commanders being removed from the Taysir checkpoint. This did not stop a soldier from harassing people at that checkpoint a few months later, nor did it prevent similar abusive conduct at other checkpoints.

It is important to recognize the anti-imperialist dimension of Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric and the way it resonates in the Muslim world–among Sunnis as well as Shiites. But this does not entail ignoring his attempts to deny or downplay the Holocaust and his nonsensical attempt to divert attention from the persecution of homosexuals in Iran by saying that there are no homosexuals in Iran.

Ahmadinejad hailed in Middle East - Los Angeles Times, September 25, 2007

CAIRO — Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a flinty populist in a zip-up jacket whose scathing rhetoric and defiance of Washington are often caricatured in the Western media, has transcended national and religious divides to become a folk hero across the Middle East.

The diminutive, at times inscrutable, president is a wellspring of stinging sound-bites and swagger for Muslims who complain that their leaders are too beholden to or frightened of the Bush administration. Ahmadinejad, who arrived in New York Sunday ahead of a U.N. General Assembly meeting, is an easily marketable commodity:a streetwise politician with nuclear ambitions and an open microphone.

“I like him a lot,” said Mahmoud Ali, a medical student in Cairo. “He’s trying to protect himself and his nation from the dangers around him. He makes me feel proud. He’s a symbol of Islam. He seems the only person capable of taking a stand against Israel and the West. Unfortunately, Egypt has gotten too comfortable with Washington.”

Ahmadinejad’s appeal is especially strong in Egypt, where he is compared to the late President Gamal Abdel Nasser, whose bold, yet doomed vision of pan-Arabism in the 1950s was also aimed at stemming Western influence. In the minds of many Egyptians, Iran’s quest to expand its nuclear program despite United Nations sanctions is similar to Nasser’s confrontation with the British and French over nationalizing the Suez Canal.

No matter how misguided those who advocate “regime change” in Iran may be, it must be acknowledged that President Ahmadinejad is vile.

Ahmadinejad, at Columbia, Parries and Puzzles - New York Times, September 25, 2007

He said that there were no homosexuals in Iran — not one — and that the Nazi slaughter of six million Jews should not be treated as fact, but theory, and therefore open to debate and more research.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, aired those and other bewildering thoughts in a two-hour verbal contest at Columbia University yesterday, providing some ammunition to people who said there was no point in inviting him to speak. Yet his appearance also offered evidence of why he is widely admired in the developing world for his defiance toward Western, especially American, power.In repeated clashes with his hosts, Mr. Ahmadinejad accused the United States of supporting terrorist groups, and characterized as hypocritical American and European efforts to rein in Iran’s nuclear ambitions.