That should read, He was named Time magazine’s “Man of the Year” in 1951.

It pains me to have to explain this to someone who appears to consider themselves an expert on injustice as it occurs in the nation of Iran, but after Iran threw the British out (without anybody having to die over it) for stealing their oil for about a century, they had an election. A free election. A fair election. They elected a man named Mohammed Mossadegh, widely beloved and generally considered incorruptible. He was named “Man of the Year” in 1951. People in Iran still carry his picture when they want to agitate for democracy, because memorializing him can be explained as a criticism of the West.

And then in 1953, the CIA’s Kermit Roosevelt engineered a coup against him and replaced Iran’s democracy with the Shah’s dictatorship. Anyone who doesn’t know that, imnsho, in unaware of the single biggest grudge that the Iranian public holds against the United States and any moralizings from us about a need for greater democracy.

“My point was that there have been a relatively few Americans who have acted dishonorably and illegally in Iraq.”

Except, you know, for the leadership of the U.S., who dishonorably, illegally and dishonestly started a war which has resulted in the death and dismemberment of thousands upon thousands of Iraqis and misery for those they left behind. And you clearly have no concept of how widespread abuse of the Iraqi people by either military personnel or U.S. contractors has been.

http://eteraz.wordpress.com/2006/10/04/stand-against-women-stoned-to-death-you-apathetic-monsters/

I’ve tried to address points

My point was that there have been a relatively few Americans who have acted dishonorably and illegally in Iraq, and that they are being punished for it, and that this is a long way from supporting your allegation that “their own goverment loots and pillages and rapes indiscriminantly”, by which I presume you mean the U.S. Government.

So do you care to address that point? Or do you consider that “These remarks are digusting in the extreme, and i’m not going to humour them with any kind of a serious response,” is addressing that point?

P.S. Your ‘understandings’ are off, and on balance the Iranian government is as responsive to it’s people’s wishes as the americans’(IMO)

Are none of the points that I presented as “I understand that …” factually correct? Are any of them?

Qgrrl:

Do you think it’s a coincidence that the latter half/bulk of this thread is talking about men’s roles in Iran?

Yes, I know that wasn’t directed at me, but I’ll jump in, anyway. In a word, “No.” In two words, “Hell, no.” Unlike the U.S., Iran has an established church and a theocracy., and the state church in Iran (and many other majority-Moslem countries) enforces a true patriarchy. Women have what rights and power the men in power decide to give them, and thus there’s no way to talk about women’s rights in Iran without talking about men.

Amp:

Sorry about the multiple postings. I got wound up a bit.

“Token right-winger”, eh? Hm …. I have a few reasons for being on here. I feel that I need to at least listen to people I disagree with, both to make sure I understand what they’re saying (as opposed to what people I may agree with *say* they’re saying) and to see the reasoning behind it. Also, maybe I’ll learn something. Just because I disagree with you on one issue doesn’t mean I’ll disagree on all issues. Another is that I get to see the spectrum of ideas; not everyone who has a particular opinion about one topic (e.g., abortion) all share the same opinion about another topic (e.g., illegal immigration), and I get an idea here of what that spread is.

When I criticize other countries’ treatment of women it is on this base level. Individual customs don’t matter relative to the deeper social myths and concepts of women that are fairly universal. Iran has it’s particular histories, stories, and customs. As does the US.

Fundamentally, however, both the West and Iran build their myth of woman around the belief that she is the embodiment of sin and the weakness/temptation of male flesh. When that changes, you, Masoud, might have a right to be offended. Until then, the only differences between US men and Iranian men are the superficial customs put in place to keep men in power, better educated, and more fully participatory in the government of their individual cultures.

So, yes, my gender - and the lies and brutality surrounding that gender - tie me to Iranian women in a way that you cannot be tied. That is the nature of gender. That is the nature of patriarchal power.

If you don’t like my assumptions of how Iranian women are treated, then change how they are treated instead of getting offended. Have them fully participate in your society and then we can talk more honestly.

I think this has to do with the *official* position that a country takes vs. what individual people do and believe, often in violation of the official policies and laws. Yes, India as a culture does horrible things to women and a large percentage of the people have really regressive views of and behaviour towards women and girls. However, the government and those writing the policies and the laws do their best to fight against this. They have laws against practically everything you listed. Of course, the local judge or policeman may not be at all interested in implementing the law. That’s a problem at an individual/cultural level, not at an institutional level. So, the misogyny in India is cultural more than institutional. And just like there are pockets of progressive culture in Iran, there are such in India. I know that growing up in India, I had it much better than many American girls. Not only did I get full encouragement to achieve in whichever field I wanted, but I also did not have the peer pressure to be pretty, please boys and be sexually objectified.

In Iran, the misogyny is not only cultural but encoded in the policies and laws. There are some areas where the misogyny is not as bad as in other countries, but overall Iran has a much greater backing for misogyny at the institutional level than do other misogynistic countries.

Do we then talk about women-hating America? women-hating Britain? have we?

People on this blog do it all the time.

Anything that challenges their views of Iranian women as uneducated subservient victims is either shallow or a distraction.

I may answer in more detail later, but first I want to ask: Who here, specifically, has suggested that they consider all Iranian women to be “uneducated subservient vicitms”? What comment numbers are you referring to, please?

Because although I don’t deny that the stereotype exists, I don’t think anyone at this blog has said or implied that.

I am not trying to deny, or deflect attention away from any of the injustices against women or minorities in Iran. The fundemental question raised in the original post, is whether Iran is ‘women-hating’, not whether so-and-so law is outrageous, or a particular custom is patriarchal, it is about applying a hateful label to a huge entity. I have a couple of problems with this.

The first is consistency. The US and it’s European partners have had a demonstrably worse effect on women in the middle east by supporting autocratic regimes with much worse records, who are immune to internal reform, and turning women’s rights into a political football. Do we then talk about women-hating America? women-hating Britain? have we? Well most here aknowledge how all societies are inherently patriarcal, but somehow I don’t think that’s quite what anyone was getting at in the original post/first ten comments. The implication was that Iran somehow breaks the bank, otherwise there would be no story.

The Iranian regime is one of the more progressive forces for women’s rights in the middle east, the true culprit, and again i’m not trying to deflect attention away from anything happening in Iran, are the patrons of virtually every other regime/network/religious sect in the region, i.e. the US/great britain. Misunderstanding this point would be catastrophic.

My next gripe is, and i’m not being trying to be over dramatic, the inherent racism(sexism?) of some of the posters in trying to explain away every fact thrown at them. Anything that challenges their views of Iranian women as uneducated subservient victims is either shallow or a distraction. Some people really need to get a grip. As I said before some people talk more than they should considering what they know.

The last point i’m going to make here is the complete lack of reference to or direction from any Iranian groups or intiatives in this whole discussion. Fasulo had a passing reference to the Communist Workers Party(i’m pretty sure that’s expat), but absoloutely nothing since, and there is huge activist in Iran. That’s how I know your not really working twoards their freedom, but rather what you think their freedom should be. That’s dangerous.

What your whole point here is taken straight from Uncle Joe’s Talking Point Memo To Western Useful Idiots — see, the West is bad in some aspects too, therefore you can’t criticize us!

That conviction was about as fair as some of the more publicized trials that happen in Iran, I’m not going to get into the specifics here, but i’m sure you can google the details on his murder(and that of other black leaders), if you had any interest in knowing. The Governator explicitly listed the dedication of his book as the main reason not to grant him a pardon, as it shows he has no remorse.

I only brought it up because the comparison I made, which was challenged (in quite a subversive manner, I was talking about the responsiveness of the government not the fairness of the justice system), was between Iran and the US.

Masoud:

The Shahnameh is tough, thanks for asking, tougher than both the Gulistan and Bustan, of which I have done significant portions. I will soon be posting sections of the Shahnameh “in progress” on my blog.

I also wanted to say this to you. You have responded in this thread to criticisms of Iran—and I leave aside my own truly deserving gaffe, though that seems to have been, reasonably, one of the things that touched you off—with comments like this:

Anyone who’s actually met any significant crossection of the women of iran really would have no concerns about their future and wouldn’t waste his/her own time offering high-and-mighty condemnations and deplorations while their own goverment loots and pillages and rapes indiscriminatly and the people to whome this government is responsible to do nothing but fall over one another to ’support the troops’.

and this:

Dunno, maybe the same group the us panders to when it excecutes Tookie Williams for having the gall to dedicate a book to black leaders murdered by the state?

It is a tactic not dissimilar, if my memory serves me correctly, from the one used against Jimmy Carter during the “hostage crisis.” (I am using scare quotes because that’s what we call it here; it was perceived very differently in Iran.) At that time, someone from Iran—I don’t remember who—made a point of saying that the US had no right to say anything about injustice anywhere else because of the racism (and I think it was only racism that was referred to) that existed, and of course continues to exist, here.

With all due respect, this kind of tactic is a cop out. First, it assumes a double standard on the part of those doing the criticizing, that, in other words, the people critiquing Iran do not also critique and actively oppose what goes on here in the US. Not only is this not necessarily the case, but it happens, as far as I know, especially not to be the case on this blog.(The double-standard Natasha was talking about in her post was different and had to do with how people selectively label what goes on in other countries based on the messages we get in the media.)

Second, it is a way of not seeing, of making invisible, commonalities between and among the various forms of injustice in both countries. I am thinking here specifically of women’s issues. Iran, like the US, like pretty much every other country in the world, is a patriarchy and the oppressive injustices, the oppression that women suffer in all of those countries are part of system that transcends national boundaries, legal systems and identities. This is one of the most powerful insights of feminist analysis.

Third, it conflates governmental positions with the positions of individual people and/or it essentializes imperialism/nationalism/colonialism/pick-your-ism by asserting that someone who lives in a country that is, say, imperialist cannot speak outside of her or his country’s imperialism. The Iranian women’s NGOs that you refer to in one of your earlier posts were making a statement about the US government when they excluded the US interest group from their meeting; they were not, at least I assume they were not, making a statement about whether the individual people in the interest group might or might not have something useful to contribute about women in Iran.

Now, having said all this, I also have to say that it is, absolutely, the responsibility of people like me to speak responsibly and accurately (and, again, I use what I wrote as the perfect example of what not to do), but the fact that people do not always speak responsibly and accurately, or that they ask pointed questions in response to a statement you make, as Robert did, does not make it any less of a cop out to respond by deflecting attention away from the question itself and towards what, in your opinion, the asker should be paying attention to instead.

Okay, I need to go back to grading papers, so let me say this, Masoud: I respect the intensity and the passion with which you responded to what I wrote, and I respect what I take to be your insistence that people who want to talk about Iran should know something more than what we hear and read here in the US. I just today had a very long and frustrating conversation with a student who cannot wait—I am paraphrasing his words—until there is enough evidence that Iran is building a nuclear weapon for Israel to ask us for and be granted permission to bomb whatever facility it is where Iran is making it. I do not want to turn this discussion into one about Iran’s nuclear ambitions; I bring this up only as a way of saying that I agree with you on this: the ignorance that makes you so angry is pervasive. I just think the tactics of your response are counterproductive.

As for all the hostility, I agree it is unfortunate, not at all mysterious though.

Dunno, maybe the same group the us panders to when it excecutes Tookie Williams for having the gall to dedicate a book to black leaders murdered by the state?

Actually, Tookie Williams was executed because he was found guilty of multiple murders.

Instead of responding, you just bring up new “bad things” about US, hoping that it will distract everyone from the issue of Iran.

Not to make a big thing about this, but my ‘contempt’ has been strictly reactionary, I’ve tired to adress points and not even name people, whenever possible.
To all:
About the whole ‘nuts’ thing: I apologize.

The younger Pahlavi seems a reasonable sort, but of course it’s hard to tell. There’s probably too much justified hard feeling among older Iranians against the days of the Shah for him to ever take power, though. And that’s probably not a bad thing; the concept that the people can kick out a royal family, and keep them kicked, is a concept that can use some reinforcing.

But there are other royal families, and other people who could fill the role that the monarch plays in such a system. Obviously that would be something for the Iranian people to arrange among themselves, if they even want to go in that direction; I’m merely a friendly outsider dismayed at the hostility between our two nations.

Both RonF and Robert are what I think of as the token right-wingers here, yes. Try not to call them or any of the other folks here “nuts.” (Particularly since you took it upon yourself to criticize Q Grrl’s language).

So far, you seem like a “anyone who disagrees with me is a jerk who I will treat with contempt” sort of person; that’s not acceptable behavior on this blog. Please read the moderation goals , if you haven’t already.

Ron F: 10 of the last 16 comments left on this thread, were left by you. There’s no set rule about number of posts, but at the same time, please try to avoid posting so often that you dominate the discussion here.

When the government of Iran executes rape victims, which group’s wishes is it responding to?

Dunno, maybe the same group the us panders to when it excecutes Tookie Williams for having the gall to dedicate a book to black leaders murdered by the state?

Spare me the ‘parsifiles’ and their aspirations to return Iran to the age of the Pahlavis.

When the government of Iran executes rape victims, which group’s wishes is it responding to?

(I suppose that’s a right-wing nut kind of question.)

I lived in Iran briefly before the revolution, and have been an amateur student of the country, and something of a parsiphile, ever since - although I won’t be translating any great historical texts anytime soon. I would characterize Iran’s government as being somewhat similar to that of South Korea up until ten years or so ago; an authoritarian regime with some electoral institutions in place. Hardly a democracy, but not a fascist state, either. As with South Korea, I have high hopes that Iran may liberalize and let all its people seek their highest aspirations. An Iranian constitutional monarchy could be a great force for good in the region.