Thursday, September 7, 2006
There will, of course, be a protest:
President Khatami called the Hezbollah terrorist group, a “shining sun that illuminates and warms the hearts of all Muslims and supporters of freedom in the world.”
A coalition of student groups will gather to counter the Iranian support for terror and drive for nuclear weapons.
Sunday, September 10 at 3 pm
Kennedy School of Government at the Institute of Politics JFK Dr.
Our messages will be:
Stop Supporting Terror
No Iranian Nukes
Please bring American flags, and signs (do not attach them to sticks). Feel free to make your own but please no signs or graphics offensive to any racial or ethnic group including but not limited to Iranians or Islam. We will ask that such signs be taken down. Ours is not a message of intolerance, but of peace.
Of course, we are a pro-Israel organization, but this will not be a rally for Israel or by Jews, but rather against a state sponsor of terror by a coalition of concerned groups and citizens. It is critical that we maintain a coherent peaceful message as a contrast to the extremist positions of Iran.
For more information click here and here
And don't miss Jeff Jacoby: Bowing to Iran, which concludes: "Khatami's visa is a win for the mullahs, but a slap in the face to the people of Iran. What a blunder by the Bush administration. What a disgrace."
For balance, see TigerHawk: Khatami vs. Ahmadinejad, "Unlike virtually every other conservative blogger, I tentatively supported the granting of a visa to former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami..." He makes some points worth considering.
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Leave a comment to: Protest Khatami at Harvard
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I read (or tried to) the speech Khatami delivered to National Cathedral audience. The only speech less comprehensible was John Kerry's acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention.
Khatami sounds as though he has overdosed on Harvard's philosophy textbooks:
http://www.cathedral.org/cathedral/programs/lecture060907.shtml
Muslim sages consider man as a microcosm; a universe in and by itself. The principality of man, in their view, is neither in his individualism nor in collectivity. Rather, it lies in the sole fact that man is the only creature that God addressed. It is because of this call that the human soul is exalted, and through the exaltation of his soul, the entire universe finds a meaningful, beautiful, just, and divine character. If one contemplates on the development of philosophy from its origin to the present, one clearly notices that most thinkers in history have in fact moved between two extremes. Modernism (and modernity) is the last cycle in this process. Modernism contains within itself many philosophical, artistic, scientific, historical and ethical components. The common denominator among all these aspects, however, is the catastrophic transformation that toward the end of the Middle Ages penetrated into the depths of the minds of the intellectuals. The new era that we call the Age of Renaissance not only sought to revive the intellectual and cultural heritage of Greece and Rome, but its main objective was to adopt new approaches and ways of expression in relation to religion and its place in human society. The Renaissance-era intellectuals and thinkers defined human beings in a different light. Instead of turning his back to the world and despising material life as the primordial human being had done, the newly defined man was an individual who turned to the world and material life. Thus, the human being became the subject of a new religion.
[came here via UniversalHub.]
When it comes to a dialogue with the Islamic world, there's two fronts: one over ideas, one over passion. It appears that people like Marci above are witless to join the campaign over ideas, and thus consign themselves to the second camp. But like so many of her fellow travelers on the right, it's just as important for her to make a jab at Senator Kerry. Oh, please grow up.
The theme of Khatami's speech doesn't require a PhD to decode: he's talking about the conflict between modernity and traditionalism. We've lived with that for about 500 years.
But Khatami would like us to believe that this conflict stymies us in the West, and in particular the United States. But it fails to the simple equation: why are there so many Iranians fleeing to the West, and not visa versa?
The Khatami argument is impressively constructed, but it's a house of cards. Anybody who grew up with the minimum of a public education in the United States should be able to blow it down.