[lbo-talk] "Islamofascism Awareness Week" (was Marjane Satrapi: Revolutionary Spirit)

Yoshie Furuhashi critical.montages at gmail.com
Tue Oct 23 07:42:14 PDT 2007


On 10/23/07, andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Do you dispute the factual accuracy of any of my
> aspersions on the government of the Islamic Republic
> of Iran?
>
> The rest of what you say is a lie and an evasion.
>
> I have never said anything about most Muslims than
> they are ordinary people like everyone else, some
> good, some indifferent, some not, most of whom, btw,
> want bourgeois wealth and comfort like practically
> everyone else on this planet who is in a position to
> conceive such a thing.

You said "clerics" (at <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20071022/020182.html>), not the Iranian government, thus making the claim applicable to Islam in general. But suppose you are to say instead that Iran's Islamic government "imposes Sharia law, stuffs the women into chadors, authorizes honor killings of raped women who disgrace their male relatives, beats clean-shaven men, hangs the queers and stone the adulterers, and builds a bomb" -- the statement will be still perfectly welcome at any "Islamofascism Awareness Week" event.* After all, the Right is now after Iran, not, for instance, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, or India (a Third World liberal democracy which too makes a part of sharia, Muslim personal laws, applicable -- see, for instance, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shah_Bano_case> and <http://law.emory.edu/IFL/legal/india.htm>, though it is said that ironically "Muslim personal law as it now stands [in India] owes much more to Anglo-Mohammedan law than it does to official Sharia (much less the Quran, only 'real' source of authority in Islam)": <http://www.lehigh.edu/~amsp/2004/07/personal-law-in-india-triple-talaq.html>).

I have given here much information, especially concerning the claim that Iran's government is hanging "the queers" but also on other subjects in your statement, that contradicts what you say are "facts."

Moreover, Iran's government is not a dictatorship, but an elected one, which questions the idea that what the government does is against the will of a majority of Iran's electorate, who had also voted for the constitution that made the post-Shah government an Islamic rather than secular one to begin with.** But it seems to me that nothing ever sinks into a closed mind -- that's just the way things ought to be according to the Right.

* E.g., <http://www.terrorismawareness.org/islamic-bigotry/80/islamic-bigotry-the-slaughter-of-4000-gays/> Islamic Bigotry: The Slaughter of 4,000 Gays By Robert Spencer

. . . the Islamic regime in Iran had killed them, since homosexuality can be a capital crime in that country. One notorious case occurred on July 19, 2005, when two teenage boys, Mahmoud Asgari, 14, and Ayaz Marhoni, 16, were hanged in a particularly brutal manner in Iran for the crime of homosexual activity. Although Iranian officials insisted that the death sentence was for the rape of a third boy, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, has said otherwise. But Asgari and Marhoni were not alone. According to the Iranian gay and lesbian rights group Homan, the Iranian government has put to death an estimated 4,000 homosexuals since 1980.

** As William O. Beeman wrote:

The very appellation "theocracy" is in itself misleading

and shows a poor understanding of the governmental

structure that was set up following the Iranian revolution

of 1978-1979. Moreover, contrary to neoconservative

implications, the original government of the Islamic

Republic of Iran was not "imposed" by anyone. It was

established through an electoral process following the

Iranian Revolution. Iranians may regret having ratified

the constitution they did, but they follow its provisions

assiduously. Every election in Iran in the last twenty

years has been free, and has followed the prescribed

electoral process to the letter. ("Elections and

Governmental Structure in Iran: Reform Lurks Under

the Flaws," Brown Journal of World Affairs 11.1, Fall

2004, pp. 2-3, <http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Anthropology/publications/Iranelections.pdf>) -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/>



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