Over the past year or so a number of official and unofficial public statements have been made in Iran denying the genocide of Jews during the Second World War. The culmination of this trend was the widely publicized, so called “International Holocaust Conference”, held in Tehran in December 2006. Given the serious moral and practical implications of this trend, we, a group of Iranian academics, intellectuals, writers and artists, find it imperative to take a public stance on this issue.
Kudos to those brave and enlightened soles
We should see more (and regular) letters like this from Muslims denouncing the radicals within their faith.
Agreed.
This is an exemplary example of rational people held captive by the nutjobs in Iran.
It is great to see this sort of thing. I always feel sad for Iran. It is a vibrant cradle of civilisation that has been misruled for far too long. Not just by the Mullahs, but certainly by them for the last while. I honestly think in some ways it is a natural liberal democracy waiting to happen. But alas, that is probably wishful thinking. Still, I hope they get to shake off the yoke of theocracy soon enough.
Just sayin’
They still managed to smear Israel.
I read something like this, and realize that I am not as tough and brave as I thought I was. I would be scared witless to sign this document. The odds of retaliation are excellent, and not just from the government of Iran.
Last Wednesday Cox & Forkum had an entry on Secular Islam – http://www.coxandforkum.com/archives/001045.html – that references this year’s Secular Islam Summit – tinyurl.com/2klq2y – with speakers including notable experts Ibn Warraq, Walid Phares, Amir Taheri, Nonie Darwish, and Irshad Manji, among many others.
The radical Islamist extremists want us to all believe that all Muslisms are like them. Many aren’t, as we see here in Persia.
An excellent document and indeed, they are brave people confronting the theistic political dogma of current Iran – an Iran, as pointed out, that was not always like this, and hopefully, will move out of this entrapped enslavement at some time.
If only the Educated middle class of Iran could rid themselves of the thugs and mad mullahs.
BTW – I’m no angel when it comes to typos myself but I’m sure you would like to refer to these people as SOULs not the bottom of shoes!
Like Aaron said, they still managed to get in a few licks on Isreal
Ronrob,
Who are they?
The majority? The minority? The mad mullahs?
Do you think leaderships sometimes tear at each other for power while the people just lay low and hope for a calm to return? = TG
There are serious things and there are ventures among those so batty one has to throw up one’s hands. The most serious things I have seen are a glimpse of several dead men near Belfast, torn apart by 50 cal slugs from a Brit chopper, and my first reading, as a teenager, of Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. These were profoundly unsettling experiences and not one day passes that I do not thank God for life in Canada, a place so much better than these locations of utter dispair that it is hard to even compare them. But some have taken their vicarious experiences much too lightly. Here, for instance, we have a production of Stormin Normin Geras,who in his life has voyaged from adulation of a Marxist in the the Leninist mold, the tough as nails Rosa Luxembourg (about whom he wrote a book) who went down murdered in Germany of the 20s, I think, all the way to praise of the current President of the USA, and approval of the war in Iraq, while living a life of tra la to this and tra la to that, in English academe. Currently he postures as a darling of the right. Not as loathsome as Hitchens, but pretty rank.
That is one hell of a trip, but who in their right mind will take it as warrant for the good sense of the author? Geras here presents this odd group of “intellectuals” who are Iranian,it says here,and what are they concerned about? There is passing mention that some Jewish people were killed in Iran during War 11. Does it say “during”, well when were some Jewish persons not killed in Iran, at every food riot probably and right up to now, and what nation is not covered with shame at the attitude it showed in the pre war and war period when Jews were hunted with a ferocity that is hard to understand, including our own.
But is is just that, a passing mention, for the real subject of these intellectuals (really?) concern was the fact that at the recent absurd “conference” set up by the Iranian government, probably for no better purpose than to goad the Americans, a number of Jews came to protest that the State of Israel should not exist for “religious” reasons. And whose fault is that? Is there some way the religious intoxication of this improbable group is the fault of the political left in North America? Getting donations from Daily Kos, are they? Said rude things about Stephen Harper, did they? The “so there” of Kate is almost papable, but the rational basis for it is missing.
On the other hand I suppose it is a lesson in morality of what happens when you support the productions of those who have been dragooned into support of the Israeli lobby: a stamped entry visa to the land of looney tunes.
We might also note, with a sigh, that recent history shows the Iranians making monkeys out of the USA, and the whole west learning a bitter lesson from that and Iraq and Afganistan that these populations have been there a very long time and they will go to the wall if you screw with them. Now can we go back to watching Stephen Harper, the
Incredible Shrinking Man. He is so low now he can barely reach up to deliver a foul blow.
garhaneg, you posted something so convoluted, that after reading three times, it still does not make any sense. Yes, there are ultra-orthodox Jews, who decry the state of Israel, on the basis that the Jews should not have taken their fate into their own hands, and instead should have taken the books for granted and waited for a messiah to take them back to the Holy Land and rebuild the Temple. They are entitled to their opinion! But those Jews never demanded annihilation of Israel, so putting them in the same boat as the nuke-toting holocaust deniers from Iran is appalling.
Thanks to Aron for reading the post and for the comment. I will try to make my next post more easy to understand. Convoluted is a good word, and I will adopt it to describe how the blog author scored an own goal in this case, but it can be difficult to explain how and why.
Some people couch a variety of opinion in the hope that one could conclude that they may be correct.
Other people express a starkly clear opinion and leave it to the well informed to find fault or to validate the overview.
One such blunt opinion is that Ahamadinejad and his mullahs promise to nuke Israel and deny the holocaust in order to shock and startle and de-stabelize the whole Middle East.
Saudi oil exporters [the largest supplier], moves oil through the straits were Iran is holding war games and popping off practice rockets.
Instability and allarm raises the price of oil. When oil prices go up, Iranian income goes up.
Iran need every cent it can raise to cover many expensive projects going in a very poorly run economy. Vast unemployment is only part of the problem.
There are armies to pay, submarines, jet fighters and nuclear plants to finance. The bills are coming in fast. = TG