David Horowitz, the overwrought Israel lobbyist who made a career out of being a former leftist, 3 years ago wrote a book called One Hundred and OneThe Professors that attacked prominent campus opponents of the American special relationship with the Jewish state. Hamid Dabashi is a professor of Iranian studies at Columbia who made the list. The nutgraf: "The defining characteristic of Professor Dabashi’s scholarship is his aversion to the United States and Israel… " Horowitz went on for several pages. Dabashi "denounced supporters of Israel’s right to exist… Israeli Jews have a congenital predisposition toward brutality… anti-Israel fervor… fanatical hatred of … Israel.. " Etc. Horowitz all but accuses Dabashi of anti-Semitism.
Horowitz’s tunnel vision is exposed by Dabashi’s piece this week in Al-Ahram Weekly, published in Egypt, attacking the Iranian government in brutal and literary terms. It reminds us that the Israel lobby uses vicious caricature to try and marginalize opponents.
The forced transmutation of Iranian political culture into a singular Islamic state was an act of epistemic violence that could only be sustained by a militarised security apparatus that forced its intellectual and political opposition into exile or else brutally eliminated it. But the Islamic Republic could not uproot and transform Iranian society at large, and from the older roots of the selfsame political culture new branches have sprouted — wiser, sharper, stronger, and more intelligent than ever. Iranian civil society in political culture is not just ahead of Iran’s backward and retrograde leaders but also ahead of their stilted intellectuals…
To retrieve the cosmopolitan culture of Iran, with the rightful and democratic place of Islam in it, we have absolutely no choice but to think of ways to reduce the magnitude of violence unleashed upon us first and foremost by not falling into its trap and reciprocating it. Violence is violence and violence must be condemned — genocidal, homicidal or suicidal. The Israeli genocidal violence against Palestinians does not justify Palestinian suicidal violence against Israelis; it just exacerbates it. American homicidal violence in Afghanistan and Iraq does not justify Afghan or Iraqi suicidal violence either; it just extends its madness. Muslims, Jews, Christians and Hindus are today at each other’s throats. We have inherited a politics of despair that has reduced us to desperate measures. In revenge for what the world has done to Afghanistan, it is as if the whole world is being reduced to Afghanistan — a disparate people desperately in search of an illusive peace, robbed of their dignity, sustained civility, moral whereabouts, and at the mercy of drug traffickers, highway bandits and supersonic bombers alike. Iran is today ruled by a criminal band of militant Taliban lookalikes, savagely beating, raping, torturing, and point blank murdering the people. They are, as Mehdi Karrubi once famously put it, worse than Zionists, for the Zionists do what they do to Palestinians, not to Israelis. The answer to that kind of indiscriminate violence cannot be violence, for it will plunge us into even deeper layers of hell.
A Nakba of no less catastrophic consequence than that of the Palestinians, though perpetrated against now more than 72 million people, is casting its deadly and languorous shadow over an entire nation. A worldly cosmopolitan culture has been reduced to a narrowly exacting Shia juridical tongue-twisting fraternity club that insists on speaking clerically inflected Persian with Latinate obscurantism.
[Thanks to Steven F.]
