Iran's Khatami Wrong

repost of my recent blog

Iran's Khatami Wrong

Posted 2 Days Ago

Khatami pteh pteh pteh.  This interjection disempowers Khatami's wrong wrong wrongness.  May the impact of his words be as a flyspeck in the universe. 

 

He was in the news yesterday, for the wrongest of utterances about Israel and the Palestinians. Iran's Supreme Ayatollah,  Khatami  advocated continued  armed struggle to eliminate Israel, he said this explicitly and he said it was the only path.  I want to assert co-existence as a one word opposition and alternative to what he is advocating.

 

The current calamity in Gaza is a setback for co-existence, as well as being a tragedy with regard to the casualties, on both sides, and the devastation to Gaza. 

 

Part of this problem already  is the pursuit of armed struggle,  which Iran has also previously supported.  The idea of eliminating Israel is a fanatical idea.  The answer is co-existence, not more violence.

 

Khatami is also the architect of the religious pronouncements  that were used in Ahmadinejad's program to eliminate gay people from Iran.  Specifically, if you don't know, gay people were threatened with the state sponsored death penalty for homosexuality, while being offered  state subsidized transgender surgery and a birth certificate with a gender reassignment.  Obviously this is really different from rights for gay people.  Khatami worked out the Sharia to give this program a religious aura, when it is in fact, intolerant victimization.

 

Moreover, the various intolerances displayed by Iran are related to each other.  Authoritarians in Iran cannot tolerate the existence of a Jewish state in the middle of their vision of an entirely Islamic region.  Authoritarians in Iran cannot tolerate the visibility of gay people because they disrupt the uniformity authoritarians needs.  The persecution of Bahai'is in Iran is also about intolerance of a religious difference.  Note too, the control of women, including dress and escort codes, and again the death penalty, to enforce fidelity in marriage --  and used sometimes to enforce obedience. All these maltreatments are part of the context for understanding Iran's opposition to Israel's existence.

 

Then when Israel's own military operation in Gaza entails high civilian casualties for Gaza, the enemies of Israel have a peg onto which to hang their violent and rejectionist positions.  The cycle of violence is wrong, and the use of violence is fraught with endless pitfalls and predictable calamities. I hope as I am writing that the people working on a truce succeed and that truce can be built upon. The goal, direction, path, and challenge is co-existence.    

 

 

July 25, 2014