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Feb. 11th, 2014
Protesting Israel
Feb. 11th, 2014 03:04 pmRoger Cohen has a nuanced view on the current state of international protest against Israel. There are some good motivations and goals behind it, but it goes too far. The so-called 'right of return' is a death blow to Israel.
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Iran continues to exercise its blood grudge against literature. We're still negotiating with Iran over such matters as its nuclear industry and over the civil war in Syria. How much optimism can anyone have in such negotiations?
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As Iranian poet Hashem Shaabani was dangling from a noose two weeks ago, desperately grasping for his last breath of air, one wonders what he would have thought about Western leaders who call President Hassan Rouhani a moderate. What exactly is moderate, Shaabani could have thought, about a regime which brands a poet an “enemy of God” and strangles him to death?
The crazy thing is that by the logic of the Iranian government, Shaabani had to be killed. He criticized God and the punishment for blasphemy is clear: death. Technically, Shaabani criticized the regime by speaking out against repression of ethnic Arabs in the Khuzestan province, but since the regime sees itself as the representative of God on Earth, his fate was sealed. It’s not called a theocracy for nothing.
-- David Keyes at The Daily Beast.com
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Well, for a lot of us, art and literature is a replacement for religion.
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As Iranian poet Hashem Shaabani was dangling from a noose two weeks ago, desperately grasping for his last breath of air, one wonders what he would have thought about Western leaders who call President Hassan Rouhani a moderate. What exactly is moderate, Shaabani could have thought, about a regime which brands a poet an “enemy of God” and strangles him to death?
The crazy thing is that by the logic of the Iranian government, Shaabani had to be killed. He criticized God and the punishment for blasphemy is clear: death. Technically, Shaabani criticized the regime by speaking out against repression of ethnic Arabs in the Khuzestan province, but since the regime sees itself as the representative of God on Earth, his fate was sealed. It’s not called a theocracy for nothing.
-- David Keyes at The Daily Beast.com
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Well, for a lot of us, art and literature is a replacement for religion.