Michel Foucault and Iran’s Ayatollahs
The Islamic Revolution in Iran, which brought Islamists to power for the first time in modern history, pitted the global left—perhaps best personified by Michel Foucault—against the global right. To this day, the global left’s advocacy for Islamism continues to guide the West’s general approach toward the Middle East.HonestReporting Takes Legal Action Against Twitter and Ayatollah Khamenei
The Islamist regime in Iran has now been firmly in power for over 40 years. The leaders of the regime and those they favor continue to benefit from their decades-long rule, but the people of Iran—as well as the countries in its neighborhood—suffer from the tyranny and terror unleashed on them by the regime and its ruthless Revolutionary Guards.
Analysts of different stripes usually tend to interpret the so-called “Islamic Revolution” of 1979 as the manifestation of the yearning of the Iranian people to free themselves from the tyranny of monarchy and Western interference. They tend not to mention that the revolution had a broad ideological scope that pitted the global left against the global right on the Iranian battleground.
Some of the most influential Western leftist intellectuals had a great personal stake in the Iranian revolution. They played a significant role in pushing Iran into the arms of Islamism in order to fulfil their ideological dream of “defeating capitalism” around the world.
The foremost of those intellectuals was French philosopher and journalist Michel Foucault.
Foucault’s interest in Islamism started in 1978, when the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera called on him to write a series of articles about Iran. To fulfill that assignment, Foucault spent time among members of the left-leaning Confederation of Iranian Students and other opponents of the Pahlavi regime in Europe. He then went to Tehran and met with many prominent revolutionaries. When he returned to France, he visited Ayatollah Khomeini in the village of Neauphle-le-Château near Paris where he was exiled at the time.
Ali Hosseini Khamenei, the current Supreme Leader of Iran, is spreading hate and calls for violence against Israel and Jews. That’s nothing new. Except now the Iranian dictator is becoming increasingly active on Twitter. These days “media” is not just print and television, but social media too; and that’s where HonestReporting comes in.Israel Advocacy Movement: Twitter enables antisemitism
Khamenei is abusing his Twitter account to broadly distribute antisemitic conspiracy theories, threats of violence and incitement for others to commit violence, including a link to his web site which contains calls for a Final Solution: a thinly veiled reference to Hitler’s notorious plan to murder all Jewish people in the world, which formed the centerpiece of the Holocaust.
Other specific examples include: calling the Jewish state a “cancerous tumor,” and calling for Palestinians to defeat the “Zionist enemy” through greater “access to weapons.” Like many modern antisemites, Khamenei declares he is not actually a Jew-hater, before going on to portray himself as a mere anti-Zionist whose aim is to “eliminate” the worlds only Jewish state, and the country with the world’s biggest concentration of Jews.
Incitement to violence is not only not free speech, it’s also illegal under U.S. law. So is aiding and abetting incitement to violence, which is exactly what Twitter is doing in this case.
Incitement to violence violates Twitter’s terms and conditions, terms which the company often enforces aggressively even against only marginal violations. So why does one of the world’s most brutal dictators receive different treatment?
If Twitter can censor Donald Trump, why don't they censor genocidal antisemites?
Bending the Jews
Deep-pocketed funders—including the Rockefellers and the Buffetts—are creating a constellation of activist groups like Stosh Cotler’s Bend the Arc that aim to rewire American Jewish life
From her 19th floor corner office in the Bend the Arc headquarters, Stosh Cotler took in the panoramic view of downtown Manhattan. It was a warm weekday last summer, and far below her the pedestrian foot traffic inched along like dollhouse miniatures on the sidewalks of Seventh Avenue. To the west under detailing light, white yachts traced long lines away from the piers of the Hudson River.
By that point, Cotler had been CEO of Bend the Arc for more than five years, but her role had changed since the 2016 election. She was in near-constant triage mode, she said, on guard to respond to whatever inflammatory statement or action was coming out of the White House. On television, radio, and in major print publications Cotler had assumed a regular profile, her strong, forceful presence fast becoming a recognizable voice speaking out on behalf of Jews in America. The day prior, President Donald Trump said, “If you vote for a Democrat, you’re being disloyal to Jewish people,” a reference to the ongoing support for the BDS movement by Democratic Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar.
Cotler’s assistant popped her head in to tell her she had an interview request with The Washington Post. No problem, she said.
Slim and athletic, Cotler’s motorized scooter and neon-green helmet leaned beside her tidy stand-up desk in the corner. At 50, Cotler wears her curly hair high, large earrings, and thick bracelets on her wrist. Though calm and on occasion friendly in conversation, a notable intensity emanates from her dark brown eyes, particularly when Cotler speaks on the burden on American Jewish organizations to chart the proper path forward for a country she sees veering into dangerous waters.
“At this point in time we’re really seeking to become the institution that redefines the center of gravity in the American Jewish community,” Cotler told me. “We have a vision and we have an agenda that we believe to now be the communal agenda of the Jewish community.”
Last summer, when I first encountered Bend the Arc in the news, I did not know what the group was or what they did. Then I saw them nearly everywhere—or at least they appeared to maintain a constant presence in the media on the issue of the southern American border and immigration detention facilities. Wearing organization T-shirts and carrying banners with the Bend the Arc logo, their protesters appeared in dozens of demonstrations and marches for immigration policy reforms covered by the mainstream press. At protests in the halls of Congress, their staffers were being arrested. On cable news and the radio, their leaders were brought on to condemn the policies of the Trump administration. In my social media feeds, I started to see photos and videos of smaller events in between those covered by major news outlets.
Though tracing its lineage back to predecessor organizations that were founded as far back as 1983, the Jewish social action organization is essentially a recent construction that has taken on a new and diffuse slate of political issues at both the state and national level—immigrant documentation, tax laws, voter rights, among other causes that may have little to do with what are generally defined as the specific needs of any particular Jewish community but are often championed by progressive Democratic politicians.