Hey everybody, my name is Kevin Amirehsani, and I’m a new blogger here at Iranican. Now some of you may be asking: Does Iranican truly need a new blogger? How the hell did I receive this job? And do I have what it takes to blog on issues pertinent to the Iranian-American community? The answers to the previous questions are: Of course, the Temp Agency, and most definitely not. But that has never stopped me from impulsively and naively sharing my views, and I will attempt to do that periodically in the coming months. Feel free to comment on and criticize whatever I write, and fan mail will be accepted, especially from the ladies out there.
Many of you college students know that this past week was Islamo-Fascism Week, a week of “informational” events put on by College Republicans across the country to bring attention to the spread of hardline and radical interpretations of Islam, especially as it relates to terrorism, and to support more moderate forms of Islam. The influential conservative writer, David Horowitz, organized this week, and, call me crazy, but I kind of support it.
Now, before I receive rants labeling me with all sorts of fun adjectives, let me concede that the very name itself, “Islamo-Fascism Week,” was a horrible choice, and to many, implicitly links the entire religion of Islam to the rightly fascist Hitler and Mussolini regimes of the 1930s. And furthermore, let me also take a stance against many of Horowitz’s own words, which can at times be downright vitriolic (“I don’t think there has been another religion that has made saints out of murderers, had children of age two thinking they should blow up carloads of Jews.”). But the entire premise of this week, bringing to attention the danger of radical Islam, should be supported by all, particularly Iranian-Americans.
Many of us know firsthand how difficult and arbitrary some of the laws of the Iranian government are, a government supposedly based on the Quran. And there is little question as to whether the Iranian regime has supported terrorist groups in the past, and continues to do so today. I am not denying the endorsement of dictatorial regimes and even terrorist groups by some Western nations, and I would also support a week concerned with bringing these issues to the public view. But to oppose a week aimed at educating people about the dangers of radical Islam, as hordes of students all around the country are, is to turn a blind eye to how many Muslims around the world wrongly use this great religion as a basis for violent and despicable deeds. Do you really think there would be this much protest if there was a nationwide anti HardlineInterpretationsofChristianity week?
-Kevin
2 comments
The problem w David Horowitz and the entire project is that it reduces the world to a black and white paradigm. Yes, they talk about moderate Islam, but they never talk about the roots of radical Islam… the continued US sponsored aggression and dispossession in Palestine, US sponsorship and sustainment of dictatorships in the region, successive invasions of Iraq, the overthrow of democracies a la Iran, etc.
They paint a picture of how these radical Islamists hate the US and Israel bc the two are free and for such a farce, the event should be opposed.
There is definitely a correlation between certain polarizing and radicalizing US policies pertinnen to the region and the fact that the gov’ts in the region are sustained by the west and curtail political development. As such, when all forms of political participation are close, many opted for a more violent and radical alternative, all of which go unaddressed in these so called awareness forums.
Furthermore, they refused to talk about US sponsorship of groups that they themselves have placed on the State Department’s terrorist list, i.e. Jundallah in eastern Iran.
Thus, when viewing the event(s) from such a prism, it’s hard to ignore the inaccuracies, double-standards, hypocrisy, and lack of a wider approach. Concurrently, it’s easy to see that there must be a more sinister reason for why such events are put on. It seems like nothing more than promoting a viewpoint of perpetual warefare with a region that needs healthy policies, not further aggression from abroad.
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