(Jerusalem Center for Public Affair) Tirza Shorr - Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and Hizbullah's "Number Two" Sheikh Naim Qassem recently made statements supporting the student protests around the world and noting their importance for backing Hamas's war against Israel. Islamism's appeal to the West in modern times can be traced to Osama Bin Laden's "Letter to America" of 2002, which harshly criticized Western imperialism and hegemony. It also includes appeals to Westerners to familiarize themselves with Islam. Twentieth-century Western intellectuals from Foucault to Said and their twenty-first-century students have justified Islamists and excused their repression, extremism, and murder of innocents. The Iranian Revolution itself contains a lesson for modern progressives: once Islamist leaders gained power, they brutally repressed and killed thousands of their Iranian Marxist co-revolutionaries in their quest for authoritarian theocracy. "There's a common misconception that Khomeini was lying and got people to believe him," said Chahla Chafiq, an Iranian leftist writer and sociologist in exile. "But we must take responsibility....We lied to ourselves....I started to ask, 'How could we not have known that it would be like this?'" The writer is a senior researcher and program coordinator at the Jerusalem Center.
2024-06-16 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive