Death to which dictator?

Year One debuted yesterday, a Judeo-Christian lore redux type-of-comedy. In one scene Jack Black eats the forbidden fruit and says "it's got sort of a knowledgey taste." In another Cain corrects his brother for saying “I’m called Able”: “You’re called ‘suck.’”

It’s not the first of its irreverent kind. The best is Monty Python's Life of Brian, with its garbled-message-from-on-high scene:

Man 1 (straining to hear Jesus): I think it was ‘blessed are the cheese-makers.’
Woman: What’s so special about the cheese-makers?
Man 2: Well obviously it’s not meant to be taken literally. It refers to any manufacturers of dairy products.

With so funny a genre, what to make of its Islamic sister-niche's market failure? Year 622, The Life of Muhammad, Yousef Almighty, Samira and the Amazing Technicolor Hijab? Not so much.

Salman Rushdie didn’t get many laughs for his 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses. It explored the perhaps too-probable-to-be-funny suspicion, held by many Islam historians, that Muhammad garbled up his own divine messages, deeming passages “satanic” when they accidentally contradicted others. Mr. Khomeini - a pasty old man that far surpassed “Garrison” Keillor’s presumptuousness with his demand to be called Iran's "supreme" leader - put a “fatwa” on it. (Personally, I didn’t think the novel was that bad). The current leader of the sexually-repressed world, Mr. Khamene’i, renewed the fatwa (which had already put Rusdie into hiding for over a decade and incentivized the murder of one of his publicists) in 2005.

I preface Iran’s week of protests and Basij-led beatings this way to put it in perspective: for all the inspirational rallying, few are objecting to the dour theocratic premises that the regime built itself on. And for all the slick appearances in Iran – shiny cars, tight jeans, text messages, ballot boxes – it’s still incredibly backward. The comedic irony of stonings as family passtimes in Life of Brian might not translate into Farsi. And a Year One Iranian equivalent would never fly, probably not even with “the people” (i.e., Moussavi’s voters).

Vice President Biden said of the election, “we don’t have enough facts to make a firm judgment.” Here are some facts: Of the thousands of candidates for the presidency of a terrorist country that actively leads the world in killing Americans, 476 passed preliminary vetting (must be Muslim, can’t be a woman, must support the theocratic revolution). Of these, the Ayatollah granted only three the privilege of running against the incumbent Ahmadinejad, who had run a campaign of potato bribes and media censorship for much longer than his opponents, who only had three weeks to prove their bona fides on hanging minors in public, stoning women, and jailing teens for “printing lies” and “spreading propaganda against the system.” But reserve your judgment, because, as an op-ed in The Washington Post this week suggested, “the election results in Iran may reflect the will of the Iranian people.”

Free or fixed, the Ayatollah deemed their results “divine.” But contradicted by protests, he now reckons the “divine” results require an inquiry. Was his initial assessment a Satanic garbling? As Muhammad’s child-wife quipped when she observed him changing the divine rules to fit his polygamist inclinations, “I feel that your Lord hastens in fulfilling your wishes and desires.”

There are geo-political nuances to be balanced, and the President is handling them wisely. But this doesn’t excuse the American citizenry for falling for the rhetoric of “vigorous debate” (the White House) and “thrilling elections” (The Economist). We should condemn the fascist scheming in Iran for what it is.

This means tough love for the Moussavi supporters in Islamic green, too. I saw hundreds of them in person protesting outside the “Iranian interests section” at Pakistan’s embassy in DC last Wednesday, all chanting “death to the dictator.” "Which dictator?" I asked. Ahmadinejad. Khamene’i’s ownership of Iranians was too axiomatic to condemn. A band of ten blandly dressed men, women, and children on the other side of the street holding “Death to the Islamic Republic” signs impressed me more. They said they wanted secular democracy. Who are we to deny it by euphemizing the greens? These people had no use for “divine” signs (ayatollah is literally “sign of god”) or fatwas (except anti-Khamene’i fatwas, which are frustratingly missing from the discourse). As children of the oldest, most successful revolution still rolling, Americans should stand with these brave secular democrats.

Iranians know Khamene’i is an autocrat, but they also take pride in their modernity and farcical elections. Khamene’i outdid himself with the vote margin, and the Iranians are sorting out the humiliating truth. As a man privy to Muhammad’s trickery in The Satanic Verses says, “It’s one thing to be a smart bastard and have half-suspicions about funny business, but it’s quite another thing to find out that you’re right.” He realizes “there is no bitterness like that of a man who finds out he has been believing in a ghost.” Iranians would still rather believe in the “ghost” than swallow the bitter truth, but it’s becoming harder for them to deceive themselves. As they protest the straw-dictator - Ahmadinejad - our government is wise not to be seen “meddling” (as the Iranians did with our 1980 election by taking hostages, and as they do today in our Iraq efforts). But Americans themselves– the veteran revolutionaries – should meddle unapologetically for the faction of secular democracy: down with the real dictator.

Idealistic Solidarity: It’s so yesterday

Thomas Ricks’ recent book, The Gamble, on the US military’s “all in” crushing of al-Qaeda in Iraq captures the poetic absurdities of life there: A triumphant yet starving Iraqi Army in Basra last spring resorts to fishing with grenades due to logistic incompetence. A sheep smuggler, asked by an American officer why he smuggles sheep across the Syrian border, answers “Why did you put the Syrian border in the middle of my sheep?” And a Sunni calls Iraq’s 9-1-1 to report a Mahdi Army attack, only to catch a scolding: “The Mahdi Army are not terrorists like you,” said the dispatcher. “And how could you know that they are the Mahdi Army? Is it written on their foreheads?”

We have our own absurdities in Minnesota. Zacarias Moussaoui took flight lessons in Eagan, requesting to learn everything except how to land. A Minneapolis man left America to blow himself up in Somalia, where people supposedly blow themselves up because they don’t have what we have in America. And when passengers at the Minneapolis airport saw men of Muhammad Atta’s complexion making bizarre preflight demands and insisting on praying out loud, they called for help. The government eventually dispatched a response: the worried passengers would face humiliating charges for their Islamophobia. And how do you know they are terrorists? Is it written on their foreheads? Yes, we too have our dispatchers.

There’s a haunting wind blowing in this war against Islamists. You can hear it in what Norman Mailer called “the delicate filtered laughter of a pessimist who is reassured that things have turned out badly.” This wind heaves everything upside-down, so that it’s support for Israel and the Iraq war that comes to require the explaining. You can hear it in the howling applause that greeted candidate Biden in July 2007, just before the “surge” proved itself, when he pledged “not within the lifetime of anyone in this room will there be a unity government in Baghdad.”

And so it was that when the widows of Iraq needed cows last January, it was not the National Organization for Women (NOW) but the United States Marine Corps that provided them. NOW has no stake in this.

Fouad Ajami, enemy of Arab apartheid and supporter of the invasion and surge, describes America’s new Iraq policy: “we are not to embrace the Iraqis, and claim the victory we won there and the decent democratic example we implanted on so unpromising a soil.” Ideology, says Secretary of State Clinton, is “so yesterday.” So here is yet another absurdity of Iraq: only when the satanized Mr. Cheney departs does the US actually return to its “no friends, only interests” permafrost.

If only ideology were “so yesterday,” we could forgive Amnesty International and the Ron Paul libertarians for demanding that the US suspend military aid to Israel. But Islamism is yesterday-today-and-tomorrow, and it kills. To each its own: Five thousand dead and five hundred concubined in a two-day Afghan massacre; shooting of legs and follow-up beheadings of tourists in Egypt’s massacre; genocide for Islamist Sudan; a hundred thousand dead in Algeria’s Islamist civil war; daily stonings/honor killings/suicide bombings in Somalia/Saudi Arabia/Iraq; a hundred plus Jews blown up in Buenos Aires; hundreds of thousands of Iranians doing The Rahbar’s will shot down armed with Korans and keys (to paradise); tongues cut out from those who would call such a strategy absurd; and two soldiers shot-up in Arkansas while smoking cigarettes last Monday.

The winds of this war blew in India and Israel long before we claimed 9/11 as our own, and Islamic terrorists are the whole world’s nightmare. Yet some would have Israel fight its own war: we have our own interests, they have theirs. That attitude, as a weary Republican senator once said of Bush’s Iraq strategy, “is absurd. It may even be criminal.”

The Islamists forget that Americans can fight for an ideology too, and that they are recruiting more Americans for the cause of liberty than they are killing. They can be forgiven, for they hear we’ve “reset” foreign policy: if Pakistan, Somalia, and Indonesia fall into the horrors of Islamic law, America, with its humbled defense budget, will have to be okay with it, as if to say, "we have no stake in this." If terrorists win back Iraq, it will be vindication for those that called Bush’s war “criminal.” But until the military completely withdraws from Mr. Bush’s bidding, it would be a mistake to confuse our cows-for-widows idealism with France’s oil-for-food imperialism. There are still some in America that don’t need writings on the forehead to tell friend from foe.