horse shit.
On Thurs. I read Danny Postel's pamphlet, Reading Legitimation Crisis in Tehran. One of the things he points out, which every other author I read pointed out (Nafisi, Moaveni, Ebadi) is that they (Iranian intellectuals opposed to the current regime) _do_ want the support of U.S. leftists. They don't want us to shut up. They _want_ us to pay attention. They _want_ us to read their books, blogs, magazines, journals. They want our fucking solidarity in the form of *attention*.
They want, at the very least, our intellectual support, interest, concern, sympathy. They want us to do constructive things -- like help disseminate their ideas, engage them critically where their views are centered, but dialogically and where u.s. left intellectuals are centered, aren't hegemonic. They want us to bring them on speaking tours, raise money for publications that they can't produce in Iran, etc. and so forth.
They want us to listen to them and "what they are dreaming of" while we try to avoid making the mistake Foucault did where he projected the trajectory of his life's thought on the Iranian Revolution and came up with a pretty skewed understanding of the Iranian revolution.
And they want us to fight passionately against any attempt by the u.s. to invade Iran or engage in subversive regime change.
Specifically, among the many outspoken Iranian intellectuals, leftist, progressives, Liberals, Shirin Ebadi captures what almost all of them want from us in the passage below. If you are a fan of allowing oppressed people to articulate their own needs and desires and then, as a leftist who must help them advance these desires (such as your comments about black men and women, and women), then it makes no sense to shut up when the people who lay their lives on the line every day don't want us to.
"She has spoken out in no uncertain terms against the Iraq War, the detainee base at Guantánamo, and the torture inflicted by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib--and has made it utterly clear that she opposes any US intervention in Iran. And yet, at a public event for her book in London, an antiwar activist instructed her that she should not denounce Iran's human rights record--indeed not discuss it at all--explaining that doing so only plays into the hands of the warmongers and fuels the fires of imperialism. Ebadi upbraided her would-be sage in the strongest possible terms. Leaning over the lectern and waving her finger at the activist, she made plain that any antiwar movement that advocates silence in the face of tyranny, for whatever reason, could count her out. "
"let's be civil and nice, but not to the point of obeying the rules of debate as defined by liberal blackmail (in which, discomfort caused by a challenge is seen as some vague form of harassment)."
-- Dwayne Monroe, 11/19/08
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws