Iran’s Reformist President Hassan Rouhani has been pushing international rapprochement heavily since his inauguration in August, but the government is just as active domestically.
Culture Minister Ali Jannati issued a high-profile condemnation of the censorship regime in place under the Ahmadinejad administration, saying that he was convinced that if the Quran was written today it would’ve never gotten by the censors. He ordered the government to review a number of previously rejected books.
Foreign Minister Javad Zarif also withdrew official backing for the New Horizon Conference, an annual Ahmadinejad-era conference that was nominally to focus on anti-Zionism but increasingly focused on Holocaust denial. The conference regularly sparked condemnation by Western nations. The conference was cancelled, sparking condemnation from Iranian hardline politicians who had planned to take part.
The hardliners are still entrenched in Iranian society on numerous fronts, with the groups condemning attempts at diplomatic rapprochement and hardline clerics continuing to push the narrative of Western nations, particularly the US, being completely evil and impossible to negotiate with. A similar split is ongoing in the US, with hawks angrily condemning attempts at negotiation with Iran as a “trick.”
There's now more than one cult that calls The-Unbelievers 'deniers.' One wants to 'tax carbon,' the other has succeeded in outlawing dissent on it's core faiths. On the latter: N. G. Finkelstein's The Holocaust Industry 2000, p. 55: "Articulating the key Holocaust dogmas, much of the literature on Hitler's Final Solution is worthless as scholarship…Holocaust studies is replete with nonsense, if not sheer fraud."
So it's especially interesting why talk about that is illegal in several European countries… It's also interesting how USrael's villains never really 'die.' E.g., even peacenikspeak starts schpiels about previous USraeli prey with 'now he really was a bad guy, but…' probably because the pop image of the man preserves the possibility of justifying more aggression by celebrating prior aggression –thus preserving our scam of b**ching about it the next time and our comfort in some limited conformity. And to me, that's the same thing as, say, ignoring that Assad really does and really needs to whack foreign backed terrorists; what is it we think we understand about the situations the witches find themselves in? Apparently we're so smart that we'll go along with labeling dissenters, and rarely contemplate the significance of outlawing speech. Especially speech that could remove the archetype uniformly evoked when 'they' sell mass murder to …well… morons.
: Guess there's a new one out, too.
US, being completely evil and
impossible to negotiate with
.
Enough said.