Thursday, June 19, 2003

So take a look at Indymedia, one of the activist left's prime Internet Web sites. Blogger Meryl Yourish did. What did she find on the armed struggle against theocracy? Nada. Zilch. The top stories on San Francisco's Indymedia site were as follows: "Rally & March Against War in Iraq, Philippines & the INS; Anti-war Movement Audio Retrospective -- The Struggle Against Empire; Thousands at punk rock heroine Patti Smith anti-war benefit; Beat Generation Bookstore's 50th Anniversary Draws Huge Crowd."

Meanwhile, there's a story to be told:

"It has become almost routine for us to go out at night, chant slogans, get beaten, lose some of our friends, see our sisters beaten, and then return home. Each night we set to the streets only to be swept away the next dawn by agents of the regime. Two nights ago, on Amirabad Street, we wrote 'Down with Khomeini' on the ground. Before long, the mullah's vigilantes attacked us on their motorcycles. They struck a female student before my eyes so harshly that she was no longer able to walk. As she fell to the ground, four members of Ansaar-e-Hezbollah surrounded her, kicking her. When I and two other students threw stones at them so that they would leave her alone, they threatened us. We escaped into a lane and hid in a house whose owner, an old lady, had left the door open for us. A few minutes later, we saw the young lady being carried away by riot police, her feet dragging on the ground, her shattered teeth hanging out of her still-bleeding mouth. At least three of my best friends have been detained; nobody knows anything about their fate."


and:

Could anyone on the left actually sympathize with the sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic theocrats in Tehran? Of course not. But it seems that many of them hate the American right more than they hate foreign tyranny. A revolution in Iran might serve to cast a better light on President Bush's Middle East policy -- and that's so terrible a possibility that some leftists simply prefer to look the other way. Lefty blogger Matthew Yglesias let it slip that "these stories about the Iranian student movement have been so relentless hyped on rightwing sites that I think we on the left have been shying away from the story." That's an excuse? Mercifully for Yglesias, it isn't.

If you want to understand better why the American left has been losing every debate it has joined recently, you could do worse than observe its indifference to the fight for freedom in Iran. The position reeks of myopia, self-regard and opportunism. Those qualities are not political winners, and they don't deserve to be. Until the left attends to its principles as meticulously as it attends to its resentments, it will lose the battle for ideas for good. There's still time to reverse this -- and help the cause of human freedom as well. Let's hope the left comes to its senses before the revolution is over.


Andrew Sullivan beating the hell out of the neo-Nazi Leftwing hypocrites, who would rather throw every last one of their precious "principles" - besides anti-Americanism of course - out the window than admit they were wrong about Bush and his Middle East policy, and on the whole question of who hold the moral high ground in the war against radical Islam. Bastards.

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