Adding insult to injury, Islam has powerful and unwitting allies in the masses of good-hearted gullible Americans who bend over backwards to protect the long cherished principle of religious freedom. And it is this magnificent provision of our society that made Hillary Clinton, for example, reissue a visa to the likes of Tariq Ramadan who come to exploit the benign provisions of a benevolent system for establishing Islamic enslavement.
Well, gullible Americans, what do you think?
Read it all here. And also, check out this provocative cartoon from his website. So again, is this fair or unfair? Accurate or not?
5 comments:
These sentiments are more common amongst Iranians than one might realise. They are the result of 33 years of the Islamic Republic, where modern (Soviet style) methods have been used to enforce Islam, and they have the same effect as same Soviet methods had in enforcing Communism--cynicism and despair.
You know, I'm curious to the degree that the aversion to Islam found among many educated Iranians today is specifically on account of their post-revolution experience. That is, the main expressions of this Islam aversion- nostalgia for Zoroastrianism, secular hedonism or leftism, curiosity about Christianity, Baha'ism, vague Sufism- were also quite visible under the Shah, under whom secularism and nostalgia for Zoroastrianism were encouraged. I have yet to see much disillusionment with Islam among the less-educated Iranians I've met...
As for discussions of Islam like the one found here and in your previous link to the one in FrontPage Magazine, the arguments made are for the most part, I think, substantial. But, criticism of Islam in the English-speaking world generally takes place within discourses that are far, far to the political right of the mainstream. The raging Zionism that is the motivation for things like FrontPage and Jihad Watch also does much to discredit them in the eyes of someone who is not a believer in that cause.
Critical views of Islam must first of all be detached from right-wing weirdness before they can ever receive a fair hearing in the wider public....
Samn and Dan, have been digging more into Iranian Christianity, do check out the article I just linked to. It is really about Iranian Christians apart from some of the political weirdness which Samn rightly worries about.
Question: have either of you been to Iran? I have not, but would love to some day. Easier said than done, of course...
To answer your direct question, AD, no, they've come to me.
I have a friend who managed to get in a tour of Iran (he was the only American.) His account reminds me of tours Intourist used to organise of the old Soviet Union: they shepherd you very closely.
My passport is American, so never any luck with an Iranian visa... I've had some colleagues get visas for government-sponsored academic conferences or through family connections, but it's been extremely hard for an American to get a visa without such connections for at least 10 years now, it seems... This must lead to a distortion of perception about Iran, because the Iranians one meets in the US or Western Europe (or even to some degree in Beirut, the Gulf, or the Caucasus) are very rarely working class, and even more rarely from a rural background.... But all I have to go on is anecdotal experience, I guess like anyone else...
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