Pages: 1 2
“I flashed back to my own childhood, to propagandistic images of Khomeini as an evil dictator, the terrible jokes about Muslims that circulated through my Catholic grade school, and the absolute support of the tyrannical Shah, who privatized much of Iran’s resources, turned it into a comprador regime, and committed unspeakable acts against his own people,” Gautney writes.
She faults her own countrymen for daring to cast Iranians “as fundamentalist monsters in American bedtime stories” when Islamic revolutionaries stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days from November 1979 to January 1981.
Oh, where to begin?
Of course the depiction in American culture of Khomeini about which Gautney complains was completely accurate. And although the Shah’s regime was repressive to an extent, it was comparatively benign when contrasted with today’s Islamic Republic. Unlike the Shah’s pro-Western regime, the current government terrorizes women with sartorial codes. It routinely persecutes and executes its own citizens for political dissent, religious nonconformity, and behavior considered deviant such as homosexuality. It is a brutal theocratic hellhole.
Like Gautney, Professor Vitale is also no fan of his own country.
Vitale, who is associated with the neo-communist National Lawyers Guild, criticized the New York Police Department last October as officers were trying to contain the violent mob occupying Zuccotti Park in Manhattan. “By penning people in, dividing people up, making it very difficult to get march permits, policing, making arrests for minor legal violations, they are denying peoples’ right to protest,” he whined.
Big Apple cops “are obsessed with order maintenance, this kind of zero-tolerance mentality about disorder,” Vitale told the Village Voice in 2007. “So they micromanage every aspect of a demonstration.”
It isn’t all that surprising that Vitale served on a panel called “Law and Obedience After Capitalism” with Lynne Stewart at a conference held at the CUNY Graduate Center in 2004. Vitale must have seemed comparatively moderate alongside Stewart, a Maoist firebrand serving a 10-year prison term after being convicted of aiding an Islamic terrorist group. The now-disbarred attorney once said, “I don’t believe in anarchist violence but in directed violence” against “the institutions which perpetuate capitalism, racism, sexism, and at the people who are the appointed guardians of those institutions and accompanied by popular support.”
It needs to be said that Gautney, Vitale, and Hammond are hardly outliers. Academia is utterly saturated with socialist misanthropes who want to find common cause with America’s enemies. As Jamie Glazov argues in his book United in Hate, the Left’s contemporary romance with militant Islam is entirely logical.
Both leftists and Islamists abhor Western culture and American-style market capitalism. Both embrace international chaos and upheaval aimed at creating a new world order built upon the ruins of the status quo. Both rail against Zionism and Jews’ alleged control of the world through the financial system.
While fanatical, belligerent Iranians foment war against Israel both groups perpetuate hoary anti-Semitic tropes like a Jewish cabal engineering unjust wars for the benefit of Israel.
Leftists and Islamists probably won’t abandon their twisted fantasies anytime soon.
Meanwhile, back here in America management at a downtown housing complex in Chicago is warning residents to flee to safety before Occupy demonstrators show up to protest the NATO summit next month. The Library Tower Condominium Association sent a letter indicating that management “is STRONGLY recommending that all residents find places to stay during the conference from May 18 through May 21.”
Maybe Professor Gautney should advise them to seek asylum in Iran.
Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.
Pages: 1 2




















