A miscellany of e-mails on Iran and other subjects

(Comments have also been posted here, here, here, and here.)

Our old friend, an Indian living in the West, writes:

I have no information on how widespread the anti-government feeling is. Like India, I am certain that Iran has a massive divide between the urban middle class and the rural poor. Ahmedinejad represents the latter, who tend to be pious Muslims and want strict religious law enforced. The former are very Westernised and look upon the whole regime as an embarrassment. The Iranians I met when I was in London were a very Westernised bunch and not religious at all—unlike other Muslim immigrants like the Pakistanis.

The real question is who will win this tug of war. I don’t think a revolution is inevitable. If the rural poor massively outnumber the urban middle class and support the regime (which I think is the case), Ahmedinejad and his grotesque regime will survive. (See Iran can no longer suppress its youth.)

LA replies:

Well, I remember Iranian youth in the U.S. in the late 1970s, very full of themselves, they brought down the Shah, and ended up with Khomeini. I’m not exactly high on Iranian political maturity.

Sex jokes as tool of leftist intimidation

Sam Karnick writes:

Here my recent article outlining how the media use sex jokes and other offensive speech to demoralize the opposition by creating a perpetual threat of character assassination and career destruction. I hope that you will visit The American Culture regularly for an informed right-of-center view on the culture.

LA replies:

The use of gross insults as a weapon is not only seen on the left.

A thought on Obama’s Cairo speech

Cindy W. writes:

The sentence in Obama’s speech about how Muslims built our tallest building struck me as one of the most insensitive things toward Americans that he could have said. Why would he say something like that, given the fact the Muslims were responsible for destroying our tallest buildings? Does he, or at least his advisors, not see the bitter irony of a statement like that? And besides … what did the religion of the lead engineer of the Sears Tower—one individual—have to do with the building’s design or creation? It wasn’t a Muslim-inspired creation. I’m sure many Jews, Christians, and atheists also were involved. As Scalia was quoted as saying, “There’s no Catholic way to cook a hamburger.”

Another thing that struck me as odd is when he mentioned “soaring spires.” To my knowledge, Muslims do not believe in tall buildings, steeples, and the like, because they believe it shows lack of humility toward Allah. For the same reason, they don’t believe in fine art in the way that we in the West think of it. That’s why, as one Muslim told me, their art consists of symmetrical geometrical patterns that don’t spell anything or replicate anything. To create an image of something—even something earthly—is seen as trying to do what Allah alone can do.

Irv P. writes:

Subject: your lecture [“Multiculturalism and the War against Whtie America”] 15 years ago

Great! Simply great!

Two questions:

Is it too late?

Are we worth saving?

LA replies:

1. No.

2. Yes. But to save ourselves, one of the things we have to do is become worthy of being saved.:-)

John D. writes:

Re your article, “America is in danger of losing its soul,” 1991

This writing is excellent! Thank you for posting it.

I often wonder why these truths were (and are) so lacking in their ability to penetrate enough people’s conciousness in order to affect stopping this madness. I suppose that being labeled a “racist” must be considered a fate worse than death in the minds of the majority.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 21, 2009 04:17 PM | Send