[lbo-talk] Fwd: Why the left should take the Iran issue back from the neocons

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 2/14/07, Dwayne Monroe <idoru345 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> As far as I'm concerned, Postel makes his strongest
> point when he states:
>
> Antiwar activists and progressive intellectuals in the
> west should know, and be prepared to say
> extemporaneously in public debate, what the likes of
> Shirin Ebadi , Akbar Ganji , Emadeddin Baghi ,Abdollah
> Momeni , and Ramin Jahanbegloo think — most
> pressingly, what they think of a US military attack on
> Iran, but also what they think about the human rights
> situation in Iran, the nature of the Islamic Republic,
> and what members of global civil society can do to
> support them. Indeed we should be in conversation with
> them, and with many other Iranian progressives —
> writing articles about them, inviting them to speak at
> our universities, learning as much as we can about
> them.
>
>
> [...]
>
>
> It's almost impossible to argue with this.

But Danny Postel really means that "Antiwar activists and progressive
intellectuals in the west," even if they are themselves Iranians,
should speak about "the human rights situation in Iran, the nature of
the Islamic Republic, and what members of global civil society can do"
_only in a way that he approves_.  His conflict with Hoder
demonstrates that.

<http://hoder.com/weblog/archives/015697.shtml>
Neo-conservatives Love Danny Postel

When Danny Postel, an editor at openDemocracy who commissions most of
the articles on Iran there, published his personal attacks and unfair
accusations about me on oD, I was wondering how that article would be
used and by whom.

Mr. Postel, refusing to discuss my main points in a piece [LINK:
<http://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-irandemocracy/jahanbegloo_courage_3873.jsp>]
I wrote for oD on Ramin Jahanbegloo's release and its implications,
accused of me [LINK:
<http://209.85.135.104/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.opendemocracy.net%2Fdemocracy-irandemocracy%2Fjahanbegloo_postel_3930.jsp&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a>]
working for the Intelligence Ministry of Iran, by drawing a comparison
between me and a character in a Milan Kundra's novel and attacked
openDemocracy over giving a voice to opinons different than his.

Interestingly enough, the article written by Mr. Postel, a
self-proclaimed leftist liberal, has provided evidence [LINK:
<http://209.85.135.104/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.americanenterprise.org%2Fpublications%2FpubID.25243%2Cfilter.foreign%2Fpub_detail.asp&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a>]
for a serious neo-conservative researcher, Michael Rubin, who after
serving as a political adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority
in Baghdad and as an assistant on Iran and Iraq at Rumsfeld's office,
and the author of articles such as "Don't 'Engage' Rogue Regimes. What
we need is military might, not diplomatic talk," to dismiss me as a
reformer who think Bush has helped Ahmadinejad's election by actively
and bluntly promoting a boycott in Iran.

Unfortunately, this usually happens to journalists, such as Mr.
Postel, who market themselves as experts on a country or culture
without knowing a word of their language or even having spent a day
there: Their well-intended work is more useful to people they have
always opposed.

Most of the articles he has commissioned for oD have a strong
neo-conservative angle towards Iran and this obviously requires
another article which I'd have to write at some point.

Posted by hoder at December 23, 2006 03:02 PM| TrackBack
-- 
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>