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.

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.

Peter Galbraith, The Victor?, TomDispatch, 9/18/2007, and NYRB, Oct. 11, 2007

In his continuing effort to bolster support for the Iraq war, President Bush traveled to Reno, Nevada, on August 28 to speak to the annual convention of the American Legion. He emphatically warned of the Iranian threat should the United States withdraw from Iraq. Said the President, “For all those who ask whether the fight in Iraq is worth it, imagine an Iraq where militia groups backed by Iran control large parts of the country.”

On the same day, in the southern Iraqi city of Karbala, the Mahdi Army, a militia loyal to the radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, battled government security forces around the shrine of Imam Hussein, one of Shiite Islam’s holiest places. A million pilgrims were in the city and fifty-one died.

The U.S. did not directly intervene, but American jets flew overhead in support of the government security forces. As elsewhere in the south, those Iraqi forces are dominated by the Badr Organization, a militia founded, trained, armed, and financed by Iran. When U.S. forces ousted Saddam’s regime from the south in early April 2003, the Badr Organization infiltrated from Iran to fill the void left by the Bush administration’s failure to plan for security and governance in post-invasion Iraq.

Held in My Homeland - washingtonpost.com, September 16, 2007

On May 8, I was arrested by agents of Iran’s intelligence ministry on suspicion of working to destabilize the Islamic Republic. For the next 105 days, this cell in Ward 209 of Tehran’s Evin Prison would be my “home.”

…I dreamed of my leisurely Sunday morning coffee with my husband, Shaul, and my weekend dinners with my daughter, Haleh, and my grandchildren….

Late in the afternoon of Aug. 23, my senior interrogator came to Evin and told me to pack my things. I was free to go. Ten days later I had my passport, and on Sept. 3, I boarded an Austrian Airlines flight for Vienna.

Freed Scholar Recounts Time In Iranian Prison - washingtonpost.com, September 4, 2007

Seeing the sliver of a new moon from her cell became the marker of Haleh Esfandiari’s solitary confinement, thousands of miles from home and facing an uncertain future.

“I was sitting in my cell and through the bars I saw it and I said, Oh, my God, there is the moon, ” said the Washington scholar, who was allowed to leave Iran early yesterday after being detained there for eight months by authorities who said she was a national security threat. “A month later I saw the moon again, and then I saw it a third time. It was quite tough. I was lonely and anxious.”

The Bush administration’s efforts to blame its problems in Iraq are ludicrous. But the Islamic Republic of Iran does deserve harsh criticism for its bigotry and human rights abuses. Middle East experts who condemn the demonization of Muslims in the West should also condemn the demonization of Westerners by Muslims.

For Iran’s Shiites, a Celebration of Faith and Waiting - New York Times
And there was the booth set up to warn people about “Satan worshipers.” There was a Jewish star at the entrance, posted atop a replica of what was supposed to be the Washington Monument which also was described as a satanic symbol because it is shaped as an obelisk.

There was also a movie concerning “perverted cults,” which focused on the Bahai faith.