The left being taken to task?
 

This is kinda' long but worth reading! Right Dude?


Salon.com | June 19, 2003

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles...le.asp?ID=8471

Something truly extraordinary has been going on in Iran these past few months and especially in the past couple of weeks. A grass-roots, student-run, anti-theocracy movement has reached some sort of critical mass. The enemy is the religious right of Iran, the group of murderous mullahs who have run their country into the ground and now have to answer for their godly tyranny to a new and populous generation of under-30s. Suddenly, we have the possibility of regime change in a critical country without war and without the intervention of the United States.

You'd think that this would be the central story on the left in this country. As blogger Don Watkins explained: "Here are a bunch of brave souls fighting a tyrannical regime through the old liberal favorite of massive protests. Here's the chance for them to get behind the cause of freedom without having to support war."

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."

Where did this piece appear? The National Review, of course. In fact, the most comprehensive coverage of the nascent Iranian revolution has been on the right. Much of the antiwar left has sadly long since stopped caring about the actual freedom of people under oppressive regimes, except, of course, if their plight is a way to blame or excoriate the United States. The antiwar left's blindness toward the evil of Saddam is now compounded by its refusal to grapple with the next great part of the struggle against Islamo-fascism.

Check out some of the more mainstream publications of the left: The Nation's home page has nothing -- nothing -- about Iran on it. Search for Iran on its Web site and you get more results still gloating over the Iran-Contra scandal than anything that's going on in Iran today. "What Liberal Media?" blogger Eric Alterman has said nothing as the story has unfolded. This magazine has been a little better -- but not by much. The Boston Globe editorialized -- but mainly against what it sees as counterproductive American support for the dissidents. The New York Times has covered the news but has yet to put its full weight behind the story. The BBC, to its credit, has provided several excellent reports.

The question is: Why? 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.

Salon columnist Andrew Sullivan's commentary appears daily on his own andrewsullivan.com Web site.

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arent you guys quick to jump on anything that goes right?

if i'm not mistaken, i've read for a long time about how student led demostrations have been taking place in iran. i even remember reading about the uprising in my history text book (public school text book, that should tell u somethin about the age)

i do give bush a little credit here.
the war in iraq did add a LITTLE bit more juice into the struggle.

but what the right claims is way exaggerated.

ok, after that point - the ayatollah or whoever that is in control (religious mofo) still control's the security forces. unless they do what the soviet troops did, i dont see this uprising getting anywhere.


i wish the same would happen here, the students rise up against"the religious right". u know what i mean by that ;-)

I believe very much the reason stated in the article:

Many elements of the left hate the right so much that any cause they support is immediately anathema.

http://www.drudgereport.com/coulter.jpg

Is that supposed to be ironic, Lebell? I hate elements of the right so much that any cause they support is called into question. Examples include Rush, O'Reilly, and that Coulter bitch.

Dude - what the guys said is where are all of you who have bashed everything done over the past few months - why are all of you not raising hell to support them - Remember when all of you could do nothing but bash the US Government and say we should have waited - helped cause an uprising or something! That's what the writer is asking - why are you guys choosing to ignore this when you were breathing fire over Iraq ?

No, but your post is certainly Ironic.

ignore this??

you mean not give too much attention.


anyway, that's because it's been going on for years now. search for this online and you'll find the history of this uprising. trust me, it's been goin on forever.

the story is old and that could be a reason why they dont want to cover it.

Sad that hypocritical conservatives, mindful of their own hypocrisy, try to label liberal organizations with their own shameful label.

What I'd like to see is a conservative care about something that isn't on the talk radio or Fox News list of talking points for the day.

i just did a search for this online and here's a link

http://www.iran-e-azad.org/english/noi/noi-34.html

dates an event on 04/24/95

here's another story

so, does clinton get credit for it thru his foreign policy?

i cant post a link cuz i'm accesing thru subscriber archives and link wont work if i post it.

Dude, what's the date on that story, out of curiosity?

bah, how could i miss that, i guess i thought i copied it

anyway, it was posted on SUN 07/26/98

To directly answer the original point:

Indy media sources aren't ignoring the subject. The author went to one source and cited it as the focal point of liberal thought. Well, alternet.org has been running stories regarding Iran for at least as long as corporate media.

btw, this seems contrary to the usual assertion--that the media is dominated by liberals. The author didn't cite any mainstream sources as liberal sources refusing to lead the story.

The New York Times is cited, which is the model for all wannabe-liberal-newspapers in the country.

You appear to have a nodding acquaintence with the concept of irony.

By the way, the Star Tribune, one of the most liberal "big city" papers in the nation, has nothing that I could find about the Iranian students protesting for political change.

In other news, here is a quote from an article from the Portland Phoenix. It is indirectly related to this thread, and so I hope not too off-topic.

LINK!

i still dont get it. they expect newspapers to give a story about iran front page coverage just cuz bush said this would happen?

btw, this has already been happeing for years now and bush just said what happened, not what will happen

um, could we have a show of hands as to how many people regard www.salon.com as an exclusively "right wing" website.

salon.com is about as right-wing as Hillary Clinton.

Seretogis,

I distinguish between conservative, liberal, and corporate media sources.

In direct response to your point, however, the section you quoted specifically stated that the Times actually did lead stories regarding Iran.

None of the other sources in that same paragraph refused to run the stories, either.

Is your complaint that such sources aren't covering the topic at all or that they aren't covering it as much as you'd like? I didn't realize (assuming they are catering to liberal interests) that your opinion on their coverage even matters.

So you could say that this Salon article that criticises the left wing media for ignoring the plight of the Iranians is an example of a left wing media source highlighing the plight of the Iranians.

Ironic huh.

nice one macheath. i didnt even see that coming

Interesting article. While it might be gratifying to point this out to the left, and it might be horrible for the anti-war protestors image, meanwhile these Iranians are getting screwed. Sad. Does anybody care about Iran? The Left wants to rant about the Right pointing it out and the Right wants rant about the Left not pointing it out. Who is going to help Iranians?

The left did try to help Iranian students, once, right down to the point of helping to organize demonstrations on U.S. campuses in which Iranian students marched in circles holding signs with paper bags over their heads, so they would not be recognized by the hated Shah's secret police. The Shah was finally deposed and a new Iranian regime, more bloodthirsty than the Shah's rose to take it's place. Many liberals spent much political capital opposing the Shah as an example of the U.S. propping up dictators around the world. When the student demonstrators stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran, some even went so far as to say "See- this is what you get for supporting dictators." After it became apparent that the Ayathollah was no better than the Shah, liberals just sort of lost interest in Iran. After all, here was a brutal totalitarian government that they could no longer blame on the U.S. and could even be somewhat culpable for themselves. The conservatives being somewhat timid about challenging the Left, perhaps afraid of being labeled as "opportunists" (liberals used "name calling" tactics very successfully during the Vietnam-Civil Rights era) , missed a golden opportunity with the Lefts glaring miscalculation of Iranian politics. Since the release of the hostages, Iran has been left to simmer seemingly unnoticed by the agendas of either right or left.

Excellent Conclamo! Most of these posters seem more interested in counting coup against the other side of the aisle than in a serious discussion of issues. Finger pointing and chest pounding, day after day, post after post!

>>Who is going to help Iranians?

Maybe the Iranians should help themselves?

So far, Ace, it would seem that the Iranian/American population isn't as motivated as the Iraqi/Americans are. until there is a real face on the situation, US public outcry will be insignificant. The Iranians and their supporters need to play the US press for coverage.... then things will begin to happen.

You don't like us? That's too bad, I like you, it says so on a balloon I bought for you, it's in the mail.