[GreenYouth] Left is wrong on Iran- Hamid Dabashi
A must read. And wanting to read what Foucault has written on Iran. Never heard of that before. This one made me to remember Said's piece on Genet and Palestine. Aryan http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2009/956/op5.htm 16 - 22 July 2009 Left is wrong on Iran Who are and who promoted these leftist intellectuals who question the social uprising of the people in Iran, asks Hamid Dabashi* When a political groundswell like the Iranian presidential election of June 2009 and its aftermath happen, the excitement and drama of the moment expose not just our highest hopes but also our deepest fault lines, most troubling moral flaws, and the dangerous political precipice we face. Over the decades I have learned not to expect much from what passes for the left in North America and/or Western Europe when it comes to the politics of what their colonial ancestry has called the Middle East. But I do expect much more when it comes to our own progressive intellectuals -- Arabs, Muslims, South Asians, Africans and Latin Americans. This is not a racial bifurcation, but a regional typology along the colonial divide. By and large this expectation is apt and more often than not met. The best case in point is the comparison between what Azmi Bishara has offered about the recent uprising in Iran and what Slavoj Zizek felt obligated to write. Whereas Bishara's piece (with aspects of which I have had reason to disagree) is predicated on a detailed awareness of the Iranian scene, accumulated over the last 30 years of the Islamic Republic and even before, Zizek's (the conclusion of which I completely disagree with) is entirely spontaneous and impressionistic, predicated on as much knowledge about Iran as I have about the mineral composition of the planet Jupiter. The examples can be multiplied by many, when we add to what Azmi Bishara has written pieces by Mustafa El-Labbad and Galal Nassar, for example, and compare them to the confounded blindness of Paul Craig Roberts, Anthony DiMaggio, Michael Veiluva, James Petras, Jeremy Hammond, Eric Margolis, and many others. While people closest to the Iranian scene write from a position of critical intimacy, and with a healthy dose of disagreement, those farthest from it write with an almost unanimous exposure of their constitutional ignorance, not having the foggiest idea what has happened in that country over the last 30 years, let alone the last 200 years, and then having the barefaced chutzpah to pontificate one thing or another -- or worse, to take more than 70 million human beings as stooges of the CIA and puppets of the Saudis. Let me begin by stating categorically that in principle I share the fundamental political premise of the left, its weariness of US imperial machination, of major North American and Western European media (but by no means all of them) by and large missing the point on what is happening around the globe, or even worse seeing things from the vantage point of their governmental cues, which they scarcely question. It has been but a few months since we have come out of the nightmare of the Bush presidency, or the combined chicaneries of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and John Ashcroft, or of the continued calamities of the war on terror. Iran is still under the threat of a military strike by Israel, or at least more severe economic sanctions, similar to those that are responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis during the Clinton administration. Iraq and Afghanistan are burning, Gaza is in utter desolation, Northern Pakistan is in deep humanitarian crisis, and Israel is stealing more Palestinian lands every day. With all his promises and pomp and ceremonies, President Obama is yet to show in any significant and tangible way his change of course in the region from that of the previous administration. The US Congress, prompted by AIPAC (the American Israel Political Affairs Committee), pro-war vigilantes lurking in the halls of power in Washington DC, and Israeli warlords and their propaganda machinery in the US, are all excited about the events in Iran and are doing their damnedest to turn them to their advantage. The left, indeed, has reason to worry. But having principled positions on geopolitics is one thing, being blind and deaf to a massive social movement is something entirely different, as being impervious to the flagrant charlatanism of an upstart demagogue like Ahmadinejad. The sign and the task of a progressive and agile intelligence is to hold on to core principles and seek to incorporate mass social uprising into its modus operandi. My concern here is not with that retrograde strand in the North American or Western European left that is siding with Ahmadinejad and against the masses of millions of Iranians daring the draconian security apparatus of the Islamic Republic. They are a lost cause, and frankly no one could care less what they think of the world. What does concern me is when an Arab intellectual like Asad
[GreenYouth] Left Is Wrong on Iran
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2009/956/op5.htm Left is wrong on IranWho are and who promoted these leftist intellectuals who question the social uprising of the people in Iran, asks *Hamid Dabashi* * http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/print/2009/956/op5.htm#1 -- When a political groundswell like the Iranian presidential election of June 2009 and its aftermath happen, the excitement and drama of the moment expose not just our highest hopes but also our deepest fault lines, most troubling moral flaws, and the dangerous political precipice we face. Over the decades I have learned not to expect much from what passes for the left in North America and/or Western Europe when it comes to the politics of what their colonial ancestry has called the Middle East. But I do expect much more when it comes to our own progressive intellectuals -- Arabs, Muslims, South Asians, Africans and Latin Americans. This is not a racial bifurcation, but a regional typology along the colonial divide. By and large this expectation is apt and more often than not met. The best case in point is the comparison between what Azmi Bishara has offered about the recent uprising in Iran and what Slavoj Zizek felt obligated to write. Whereas Bishara's piece (with aspects of which I have had reason to disagree) is predicated on a detailed awareness of the Iranian scene, accumulated over the last 30 years of the Islamic Republic and even before, Zizek's (the conclusion of which I completely disagree with) is entirely spontaneous and impressionistic, predicated on as much knowledge about Iran as I have about the mineral composition of the planet Jupiter. The examples can be multiplied by many, when we add to what Azmi Bishara has written pieces by Mustafa El-Labbad and Galal Nassar, for example, and compare them to the confounded blindness of Paul Craig Roberts, Anthony DiMaggio, Michael Veiluva, James Petras, Jeremy Hammond, Eric Margolis, and many others. While people closest to the Iranian scene write from a position of critical intimacy, and with a healthy dose of disagreement, those farthest from it write with an almost unanimous exposure of their constitutional ignorance, not having the foggiest idea what has happened in that country over the last 30 years, let alone the last 200 years, and then having the barefaced chutzpah to pontificate one thing or another -- or worse, to take more than 70 million human beings as stooges of the CIA and puppets of the Saudis. Let me begin by stating categorically that in principle I share the fundamental political premise of the left, its weariness of US imperial machination, of major North American and Western European media (but by no means all of them) by and large missing the point on what is happening around the globe, or even worse seeing things from the vantage point of their governmental cues, which they scarcely question. It has been but a few months since we have come out of the nightmare of the Bush presidency, or the combined chicaneries of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and John Ashcroft, or of the continued calamities of the war on terror. Iran is still under the threat of a military strike by Israel, or at least more severe economic sanctions, similar to those that are responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis during the Clinton administration. Iraq and Afghanistan are burning, Gaza is in utter desolation, Northern Pakistan is in deep humanitarian crisis, and Israel is stealing more Palestinian lands every day. With all his promises and pomp and ceremonies, President Obama is yet to show in any significant and tangible way his change of course in the region from that of the previous administration. The US Congress, prompted by AIPAC (the American Israel Political Affairs Committee), pro-war vigilantes lurking in the halls of power in Washington DC, and Israeli warlords and their propaganda machinery in the US, are all excited about the events in Iran and are doing their damnedest to turn them to their advantage. The left, indeed, has reason to worry. But having principled positions on geopolitics is one thing, being blind and deaf to a massive social movement is something entirely different, as being impervious to the flagrant charlatanism of an upstart demagogue like Ahmadinejad. The sign and the task of a progressive and agile intelligence is to hold on to core principles and seek to incorporate mass social uprising into its *modus operandi*. My concern here is not with that retrograde strand in the North American or Western European left that is siding with Ahmadinejad and against the masses of millions of Iranians daring the draconian security apparatus of the Islamic Republic. They are a lost cause, and frankly no one could care less what they think of the world. What does concern me is when an Arab intellectual like Asad AbuKhalil opts to go public with his assessment of this movement -- and what he says so vertiginously smacks
