Eli Lake is right: Masoud Pezeshkian, the newly elected “reformist“ president of Iran, is NOT a good guy. Allow me to elaborate. The Iranian people are an anomaly in the Middle East. The vast majority of their population is not Arab nor do they speak Arabic. They share a common religion with their neighbors because of the Muslim conquest…
Eli Lake is right: Masoud Pezeshkian, the newly elected “reformist“ president of Iran, is NOT a good guy. Allow me to elaborate. The Iranian people are an anomaly in the Middle East. The vast majority of their population is not Arab nor do they speak Arabic. They share a common religion with their neighbors because of the Muslim conquest of Persia in the 7th century. Prior to the 1979 Revolution, $1 USD equaled 70 Iranian Rials. Today the conversion rate is $1 USD to around 42,000 RIs. Iran was considered to be a cultured, educated and wealthy (from an oil reserve perspective) nation. And to top it off, Iranian people are absolutely lovely. So what happened? Islamism.
Islamism advocates for the restoration of a pan-Islamic Caliphate which aims to religiously and politically unite the Muslim world. We are talking full on Sharia lockdown, condemning (and much worse) anything LGBTQ+ and preaching global jihad (not the spiritual kind). In other words, their current vision for the future is firmly rooted in a violent and medieval philosophy that should have drifted away like a very bad smell a long, long time ago. Why is it still so popular? Because it’s such a delicious recipe for authoritarian regimes controlled by thugs. (That’s EVERY Arab nation in the world today.) Thugocracy is not limited to the Arabs but the mechanics of the system are universal: a charming ruler with absolute power, no free press, suppression (by all means necessary) of any dissent and a sophisticated misinformation campaign to control the hapless citizens. “We’re not the problem,” say the clever tyrants, “It’s the ____,” fill in the blank. I’ll give you a hint: the first letter very often begins with a “J”.
What’s really going on? Currently, there’s an unbridgeable socioeconomic gap between the ironically “Western flavored” elites and the commoners in all Arab countries. It’s reminiscent of the disconnect that historically existed between the poor, working fellaheen and their wealthy, Arab landowner rulers—a pernicious caste like system that still exists. Iranian Islamists culturally appropriated not only the neighboring al-Islamiyyun conspiracy theories but the Thugocracy scaffold necessary to support them. Masoud Pezeshkian is merely another cog in the awful Iranian Islamist machinery with the power to change nothing.
Eli Lake is right: Masoud Pezeshkian, the newly elected “reformist“ president of Iran, is NOT a good guy. Allow me to elaborate. The Iranian people are an anomaly in the Middle East. The vast majority of their population is not Arab nor do they speak Arabic. They share a common religion with their neighbors because of the Muslim conquest of Persia in the 7th century. Prior to the 1979 Revolution, $1 USD equaled 70 Iranian Rials. Today the conversion rate is $1 USD to around 42,000 RIs. Iran was considered to be a cultured, educated and wealthy (from an oil reserve perspective) nation. And to top it off, Iranian people are absolutely lovely. So what happened? Islamism.
Islamism advocates for the restoration of a pan-Islamic Caliphate which aims to religiously and politically unite the Muslim world. We are talking full on Sharia lockdown, condemning (and much worse) anything LGBTQ+ and preaching global jihad (not the spiritual kind). In other words, their current vision for the future is firmly rooted in a violent and medieval philosophy that should have drifted away like a very bad smell a long, long time ago. Why is it still so popular? Because it’s such a delicious recipe for authoritarian regimes controlled by thugs. (That’s EVERY Arab nation in the world today.) Thugocracy is not limited to the Arabs but the mechanics of the system are universal: a charming ruler with absolute power, no free press, suppression (by all means necessary) of any dissent and a sophisticated misinformation campaign to control the hapless citizens. “We’re not the problem,” say the clever tyrants, “It’s the ____,” fill in the blank. I’ll give you a hint: the first letter very often begins with a “J”.
What’s really going on? Currently, there’s an unbridgeable socioeconomic gap between the ironically “Western flavored” elites and the commoners in all Arab countries. It’s reminiscent of the disconnect that historically existed between the poor, working fellaheen and their wealthy, Arab landowner rulers—a pernicious caste like system that still exists. Iranian Islamists culturally appropriated not only the neighboring al-Islamiyyun conspiracy theories but the Thugocracy scaffold necessary to support them. Masoud Pezeshkian is merely another cog in the awful Iranian Islamist machinery with the power to change nothing.