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[Real Reality]

Iran's hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called Tuesday for a purge of liberal and secular teachers from the country's universities, urging students to return to 1980s-style radicalism.

Ahmadinejad's aim appears to be installing a new generation of rulers who will revive the fundamentalist goals pursued in the 1980s under the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, father of the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran. Shortly after the revolution, Iran fired hundreds of liberal and leftist university teachers and expelled numerous students.
By NASSER KARIMI
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060905/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iran_university_purge

[ddeubel]

Time and time again, on this forum, I have to raise my voice and qualify all these small , "news " articles about Iran and especially saying that what Ahmadinejad says is the gospel and is LAW in Tehran, Iran.

The fact of the matter is, there seems to be tooo tooo many small newspaper articles, press service spin that takes what an Iranian official says and makes it into some "crisis" or "hardliner" crackdown. Truth is, this is really just adding to the miscommunication between the cultures and does nothing to really articulate the dynamics and complexity of both American and Iranian society.

YES, we should focus strongly on Iranian abuses of human rights. Especially in terms of journalistic freedom and the area of "thought" . But Iran is a much more complex place, changing place. Articles such as this which take a few sentences out of the president's usual "rhetoric" and create a menacing view of Iranian society, are out of line. They happen too often.

I read over the summer Deborah Campbell's very erudite and complete essay on Iran, Iranian society, the boogy man of the nuclear issue and much else....I really recommend it. Amazing and especially read the discussion about the article online ........ I have pasted the beginning of this lengthy article for those who might not click a link that asks for registration (to Walrus).

But anyone interested in good journalism , should read this artlcle and learn about Iran....I won't comment on all the great contradictions and thoughts she brings to light.......

http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/international-affairs-irans-quiet-revolution/

DD

Quote:

Iran�s Quiet Revolution � page 1 of 7 � As the standoff with the United States heats up, Iranians are united on nuclear policy, but little else by Deborah Campbell Photography by Alfred Yaghobzadeh -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The bus rumbled along a highway in southwest Iran, passing a series of anti-aircraft batteries and rickety guard towers before pulling in through a checkpoint to the Bushehr nuclear plant compound. Having anticipated significant difficulties finding, much less nearing, the reactor, I stared in stunned silence at its dome. So much for state secrets. It glistened like a mosque. I sat in the women�s section at the back, mentally drafting the travel brochure: �Welcome to Bushehr! Take our budget bus tour of the facility that has everyone talking!� One could imagine the collective synaptic energy emanating from Washington, London, Paris, and Bonn, striking the gleaming white dome like flint sparks. Yet to my fellow travellers�locals being taken to their homes surrounding the plant, weary labourers half asleep in the men�s section, women in the brightly coloured layers traditional in the Persian Gulf�it was just an average day in a quiet Iranian fishing village where nothing much happens. They didn�t even look out the window. We passed a sign that welcomed �Dear Guests� to the reactor�s information centre, but the bus tour was just as good: no security shakedown and all for less than a dime, round trip. Plus it ran past the ocean, providing a stellar view of the Persian Gulf and a lung full of sea air. What more could one ask of a nuclear power plant tour So much has changed since the Bushehr reactor was launched in the early 1970s with the enthusiastic endorsement of the United States. Whether it will ever produce weapons-grade fissile material is open to question, but thirty years ago the Ford administration (at the urging of Westinghouse and other US companies, which stood to make billions as suppliers) agreed to sell the Shah of Iran a full nuclear fuel cycle, thereby providing all the ingredients necessary to make nuclear weapons. Then as now, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld held key national security portfolios and Paul Wolfowitz was in charge of stemming nuclear proliferation. According to Henry Kissinger, who was privy to the agreement, that subject never came up. The deal dissolved after the 1979 Islamic revolution, when the uprising�s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, deemed nuclear weapons �un-Islamic� and halted the program. For twenty-five years, the issue of Iran�s nuclear capabilities and ambitions was of no great concern. Today, they are deemed a threat to the West, while within Iran the pursuit of nuclear energy has become a powerful symbol of national identity. On the other side of Bushehr, among the salt-encrusted fishing vessels, I chatted with a woman in her thirties, a pleasant-faced housewife in a flower-patterned chador. �Come to my home, �she said, leading me through a labyrinth of mud brick alleyways. The walls of her home were painted turquoise, the colour of the sea. Inside was her husband, an invalid, thin and drawn, unable to walk. He talked of the wounds he had sustained in the war with Iraq�a war that spanned the 1980s and claimed a million lives. Taking my hand, he pressed it into the missing flesh of his thigh. He had endured countless surgeries, but he and his wife were able to have a child�a delicate eight-year-old son, their greatest joy. We sat on carpets drinking hot tea and eating oranges as a ceiling fan lazily nudged the sultry air. To be in an Iranian home is to enter a private garden where the problems of the outside world recede. So much of what the world knows about Iran is distorted, enslaved by the past or, in the present, by war-on-terrorism rhetoric. I wondered how this family would fare in the event of a military strike on their neighbourhood reactor. Would they so readily invite a foreigner home Iran is a complex, even contradictory nation, and in the context of rising tensions and a growing threat of war, the lens through which the West and the Islamic republic view one another has become dangerously blurred. For the West, Iran is a nation of wild-eyed zealots shouting the familiar refrain of marg bar Amrika�death to America. It�s an image Iranian authorities have not hesitated to promote in their efforts to quell internal dissent and present the outside world with the image of a fearsome, loyal populace. Yet Iran has changed remarkably in the quarter century since the Islamic revolution, and such reductionist images are deceiving. The war with Iraq was unsettling for many reasons, not least of which were American support for Iraq and weapons sales from the West that served to arm both sides. After a period of uneasy transition, the election of reformist president Mohammad Khatami in 1997 ushered in an era of social liberalization that proved to be transformative. Expats were lured back, satellite television and the Internet seized the popular imagination, and in Iran�s cities, at least, a repressive, closed society opened its doors. If current military threats have had little impact on the population, the juggernaut of Western cultural hegemony is an altogether different matter. Having adopted (or adapted) many of �our�ways, Iranians today know far more about the West than the West knows about them. The mutual mistrust between the administrations of Iran and the US is illustrated by their reciprocal epithets: the Axis of Evil versus the Great Satan (or the �Global Arrogance,� as Iran�s leaders now refer to America). Among certain American politicians, there are mounting fears that the �mad mullahs� are on the verge of obtaining the bomb, potentially annihilating Israel (though of course this could annihilate the Palestinians in the process), and strengthening Iran�s role as a regional power. Meanwhile, Shia leaders with strong ties to Iran have risen to power in Iraq, a result that should have been anticipated but wasn�t. The Iranian government nonetheless sees itself surrounded by hostile forces: an American-occupied Afghanistan; a nuclear-armed Pakistan; and Iraq, a fractious nightmare where Americans forces are constructing permanent military bases and the world�s largest US embassy�reportedly the size of Vatican City. Iran�s leaders fear an aggressive Israel and its undeclared nuclear arsenal as well as America�s desire to see not only change, but regime change.

[Kuros]

[ddeubel]

Very true. And this should be dealt with on a nation to nation basis -- not with a flood of articles preporting that the Iranian leadership is doing hardline X,Y and Z -- because Ahmadinejad said such and such a statement. His statements are rhetorical and also translated..........they do not reflect law but rather what might happen. All these press association tidbits do, is create the illusion of a big menace, the exact same thing the official press in Iran does with their evil Satan imagery....we should not go tit for tat in this way and the west should engage Iran constructively, noting the underswell of youth and support and understanding in Iran of the U.S. (but not their military stance or interventionist foreign policy, rather their culture, ideals)

But I agree about the NPA and as stated and well known, the Iranian human rights abuses....... Lets also point out continued U.S. violation of the agreement also - which it also time and time again has failed to address or even remedy.

DD

[Kuros]

[mindmetoo]

[NAVFC]

[mindmetoo]

[Octavius Hite]

Bush has never said that he wants to purge universities but his unofficial mouth piece, Fox News, rails on and on about activist professors and teachers everyday. Papa Bear O'Reilly and wingnutter Sean Hannity love to bitch and moan about it all the time.