No doubt because you have no good argument against it.
> : what good does it do Iranians,
> many of whom think things are rather bad in their country,
But do they constitute a majority in Iran?
> to have
> Western leftists saying things are pretty good in Iran? If George
> Bush wants to bomb Iran, then nothing you do or say will stop him -
> at the same time you discredit opposition to the attack by
> circulating apologetics. The bellicose will always say that antiwar
> forces are simply apologists for the enemy. Why make their job any
> easier? Why is it so hard to say that sanctions are criminal and will
> only make things worse than they already are for Iranians?
Why accept the terms of debate set by the bellicose, especially since the bellicose always say leftists engage in apologetics, _no matter what leftists say_, _no matter who they are_, unless leftists actually sign on to the empire's program?
You see, no one objects to sanctions on a country that is represented as a basket case (as the Right say), whose people are dying to overthrow their government (as dim bulbs among leftists, Iranian and Western, wishfully think). You may be surprised, but people do not defend a lost cause. I don't.
Get a clue from the Right's attack on Middle East Studies (cf. "US Commission on Civil Rights' 'Campus Anti-Semitism' Campaign," <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20070611/011617.html>) and other outposts of academia that some leftists have managed to conquer (it's ironic that the only institutions that leftists liberated through a "long march" in the USA exist in academia and mainline Protestantism). They are afraid of truthful representation of reality, as conscientious scholars (many of whom I have already cited here) have discovered.
Here's another example of such scholarship.
<http://www.anthrosource.net/doi/abs/10.1525/can.2006.21.4.570> Cultural Anthropology November 2006, Vol. 21, No. 4, pp. 570-602 Posted online on October 9, 2006. (doi:10.1525/can.2006.21.4.570)
The Measure of Mercy: Islamic Justice, Sovereign Power, and Human Rights in Iran
Arzoo Osanloo
University of Washington
Concepts: sovereign power, Islamic law, human rights, mercy, Iran, human, Justice, state, premodern, modern forms, suggests
In January 2000, Iranian government agents hailed a last-minute death sentence reprieve as an expression of Islamic human rights. Officials mobilized a native source of human rights in the invocation of mercy. For some, the proliferation of human rights norms situates a state in the fold of modernity, whereas the "spectacle of the scaffold" suggests a premodern demonstration of sovereign power. Through a study of sovereign power and human rights, this article questions the seemingly clear-cut divide between premodern and modern forms of justice and suggests that contemporary appeals to mercy as human rights should not be dismissed as being outside modern forms of state sovereignty.
<http://www.anthrosource.net/doi/abs/10.1525/ae.2006.33.2.191?prevSearch=%5Bauthor%3A+Osanloo%2CArzoo%5D> American Ethnologist May 2006, Vol. 33, No. 2, pp. 191-209 Posted online on April 21, 2006. (doi:10.1525/ae.2006.33.2.191)
Islamico-civil "rights talk": Women, subjectivity, and law in Iranian family court
ARZOO OSANLOO
Departments of Anthropology and Law, Societies, and Justice, University of Washington, M421 Denny Hall, Seattle, WA 98195
Concepts: rights talk, women, Islam, divorce, subjectivity, law, rights, Iranian, family courts, Islamic
Soon after the 1979 Iranian revolution, women's appeals for equal protection of their rights were deemed by supporters of the new government to be remnants of European–U.S. imperialism. Over two decades later, Iranian women are at the vanguard of reform, calling for their civil rights once again. Now, with republican ideals authenticated by Islam through Iran's innovative state, an Islamic republic, women push for tangible procedural process in reformulated Islamico-civil family courts that position them as individual rights-bearing citizens.
-- Yoshie