Please forward the following message to the member of the British SWP:
I am indeed aware that Appiah, Bauman, Chakrabarty, Chomsky, Coetzee, Eco, Habermas, Kolakowski, Laclau, Mouffe, Nussbaum, Pamuk, Taylor, Todorov, Wallerstein, West, Zinn, and Žižek signed a statement supporting Ramin Jahanbegloo. Guess how I know -- because I personally approached each of them, on behalf of the Committee for Academic and Intellectual Freedom of the International Society for Iranian Studies, and asked for their signatures. "Leninology" seems not to have noticed my name atop that statement when it appeared in the New York Review of Books (www.nybooks.com/articles/19149) and openDemocracy (www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-irandemocracy/ openletter_3578.jsp). As much as it meant to me and my comrades on the Committee to have the signatures of the above (which is why I approached them), and as deeply as I appreciate their support, I would hardly characterize them as being "involved in campaigning on behalf of Iranian dissidents" merely for having added their signatures. One got the distinct impression that most of them had never heard of Ramin Jahanbegloo before -- which in no way diminishes them or the value of their support, but let's be clear about the difference between "campaigning" and agreeing to add your name to a statement.
By the way, with the exception of Žižek, it's worth noting that among the members of that group, it was decidedly the liberals rather than the Marxists who were already aware of Ramin -- Appiah, Habermas, Kolakowski, Nussbaum, Pamuk, Taylor, Todorov -- all non-Marxists (with the partial exception of Habermas, who remains one-part Marxist but is basically a liberal-internationalist social democrat). Žižek learned of Ramin from me, just a few weeks before signing the letter, as I had asked him to blurb my book, which contains my interview with Ramin. Chomsky knew Ramin well (Ramin has interviewed him twice) but is of course neither a Marxist nor a liberal.
In other words, the notion that large swaths of left-wing intellectuals in the west are actively campaigning on behalf of Iranian dissidents is simply absurd. It is a marginal cause at best. As I say in my book, conduct the following test: go to the websites of the most widely-read publications of the Left (New Left Review, Red Pepper, Z, CounterPunch, The Nation, The Progressive, In These Times, Mother Jones, CommonDreams.org, Indymedia, Monthly Review, Truthout, and so on), punch up the names of the Iranian dissidents I mention toward the end of Scott's interview with me, and see how many results you get. How many sympathetic profiles of, long-form interviews with, or even short articles about them will you find? I can save you the trouble, since I've done it: precious few.
Danny
Danny Postel Senior Editor openDemocracy (www.opendemocracy.net)