Saturday, July 18, 2009

Hamid Dabashi vs. As'ad AbuKhalil!

Watching Hamid Dabashi and As'ad AbuKhalil fight is not unlike watching Bette Davis and Joan Crawford fight. Such divas. BTW, as you may have noticed, by now there's more infighting among leftists than any fighting against mollahs. As for the main event -- the battle of mollahs, between Khamenei and Rafsanjani! -- they don't do any fighting themselves. Instead they let their followers do their fighting. Clever mollahs. I bet that's how mollahs defeated Marxists during the Iranian revolution.

4 comments:

ishamid said...

"Clever mollahs. I bet that's how mollahs defeated Marxists during the Iranian revolution."

Actually, even their enemies, even such characters as Amir Taheri, admit that the mullahs lost more of their own during the Islamic Revolution and its aftermath than any other social group in Iran, in large part due to "leftists" such as the MKO.

In the current power struggle, the "clerics" are quite openly castigating each other. While Rafsanjani is hiding behind Musavi for sure, that is not true on the other side at all, and is not true of all of Musavi's clerical support either. Just today, in Kayhan, the clerics who support Ahmadinejad and the Rahbar came out with all guns blazing against Rafsanjani by name. And the Rahbar himself has openly supported Ahmadinejad, not "hidden" behind him.

Marxists were defeated for the simple reason that they did not have, and have never had, the support of the Iranian masses at large.

It's sad how "leftists" caricature the "mullahs" just as much as the right does. Neither Right nor Left seems to able to accept an ideology that does not conform to post-Enlightenment frames of thought. This deep prejudice and hatred colors nearly all Western critique of the Iranian Islamic system.

As a mote in the eye of both Right and Left, no stone has been left unturned in the West to put an end to this experiment, to stop its growth and evolution on its own terms. The Left in particular has exposed its own neocolonial/imperialist agenda in the aftermath of the elections in Iran, aligning itself with glee to a largely reactionary and minority movement, one with many fifth-column elements.

masoud said...

Well said Yoshie, and on the money too as always. As'ad has the better argument in this case, but he's also got some serious growing up to do. I hope you continue to post more frequently.

E said...

I can't read either unfortunately - both sites are filtered inside Iran.

Yoshie said...

Eskandar, you can check out Hamid vs As'ad at passagenwerk.blogspot.com/
2009/07/hamid-dabashi-vs-asad-abukhalil.html
.

The filtering of the Angry Arab and Al-Ahram, btw, illustrates the political immaturity of some government officials that Shahla Sherkat for instance pointed out.