Iran’s President Ahmadinejad proved to be the toast of progressive students at Columbia University on his recent visit to the USA.
According to encouraging accounts in today’s newspapers of student riots in Iran against him, many progressive university students in that country would also like to toast their president too, despite their religious convictions precluding them from ever touching a drop of alcohol.
Certainly a student-led protest movement there would be a preferable and far less bloody way to effect much needed regime-change in Iran than military action. Sadly, however, it may well yet have to come to the latter option if all else fails to secure such change in the near future.
Comments (2)
What those in Western academia who fete Ahmadinejad fail to realise is that he and his regime are denying access to higher education to those they disapprove of, especially the Baha'is.
Recent documents from various Iranian authorities that have come to light clearly show that Baha'is are denied access to higher education (and have been since 1979) purely on the grounds of their religious identity and in pursuance of a policy established by the Iranian Supreme Revolutionary Cultural Council in 1991 (and approved by both Khamenei and Rafsanjani) to stifle the Iranian Baha'i community.
Regardless of one's views of the Baha'i Faith as a religion, there is a systematic and widespread violation of the Baha'is' human rights (and the rights of other groups and minorities) that must not be covered up or allowed to go unprotested, no matter how much Ahmadinejad and his representatives deny that any such thing is going on.
That Western universities, which rightly call for academic freedom and which depend on people's freedom of access to higher education, should give platforms to those who deny that right to anyone, is disgraceful.
Posted by Barney Leith | October 9, 2007 5:50 PM
Posted on October 9, 2007 17:50
What is truly loathsome is the sinister reverse bigotry of the left. Where once the narrow-minded gave support to home-grown "strongmen", the new fascists of multiculturalism back dictators from abroad. No criminal regime is too malodorous for them, so long as it is sufficiently hostile to the west and today this involves opposition to concepts such as reason and objectivity. It seems that "human rights" abuses are to be held against western society alone, so Guantanamo Bay is publicised to the point of weariness whilst the outrages of African or Arab dictators are permitted as expressions of cultural difference. It is about time that western society woke up to the real threat represented by these people. Those students who feted the disgusting Ahmadinejad should be named and shamed as the partisans of torture and racial hatred.
Posted by Simon Denis | October 9, 2007 12:41 PM
Posted on October 9, 2007 12:41