Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
What Pourzal does in his article is not to deny the police's power to
violate the freedom of assembly in Iran but to criticize exaggeration
of police action, based on bloggers' accounts, for exaggeration
diminishes credibility, and to ask whether friends of the West aren't
using worse repression than the Iranian state employs without getting
as much criticism. Valid points if you ask me.
The letter fails to address Pourzal's the main question: "What is the
Iranian public seeing in Ahmadinejad that it doesn't see in us?"
That's a question reformists in Iran, as well as most liberals and
leftists in the Iranian diaspora or the West in general, don't want to
ask, let alone attempt to answer.
That's it... That's what make me nervous.
Ahmadinejad himself is... 'Westernized'... philosophically and
culturally, to a greater degree than the mullah at his mosque of
worship, and I believe secular government is his goal. But it would defy
the laws of (meta?)physics for thousands of year of cultural
acclimatisation to come to a screeching halt, or change direction, to
continue the analogy.
The level of alarm sounded has the potential to amplify the pressure on
an incipient secular government in another way besides nuclear
proliferation issues, and foil the *long* term cultural adaptations
necessary to allow for Iranian women to
.
wear bikinis at the beach
.
<;'>
There is internal balance-of-power struggle in progress. It is
*generally* not violent, and we should be wary about wading too deep
into the middle of it over a single issue within that struggle, lest we
stir up more 'muck' than the western industrialized powers have already
churned up
[value/opinion=$0.02]
Leigh
http://leighm.net/
