This bizarre episode shows how little political correctness and sympathy for the jihad buys for a Leftist academic when he falls into the clutches of Iran’s Islamic regime. Imagine what they would do to Chomsky himself, despite his decades of faithful service to their cause. To them, he is just a Jew, no matter how Useful an Idiot he has been and still is.
“‘I am not a spy. I am a philosopher.’: 125 days in an Iranian prison,” by Ramin Jahanbegloo, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 3, 2014 (thanks to Anne Crockett):
…I was blindfolded, led by the hand through cold corridors, up and down stairs, past what I assumed were other cells and other barred doors. I was taken into a concrete room and ordered to sit on a hard chair. After what seemed like hours, I heard footsteps behind me. It sounded as if two men had entered. But they said nothing. I held my breath and waited. Eventually a third man came in and sat down behind me. He was the first to talk.
“Oh, very interesting. Mr. Jahanbegloo, the great intellectual, is here,” he said. “What are you doing here in prison?”
“There has been a mistake,” I said immediately.
“No, no, there is no mistake,” he said drily. “You have been brought here because you are accused of a conspiracy against the Iranian state. You are implicated in a barandazinarm.”
I had never heard that term before. The direct translation from Farsi would be a “soft overthrow.” Later I realized that he must have meant a velvet revolution. I asked him, in my confusion, to clarify.
“You know better than I what a soft overthrow is,” he said.
I realized that there would be no rational basis to our discussion. These men were not trained in political theory or in law. Their only skill was the ability to intimidate.
“You see, Mr. Jahanbegloo, we know for a fact for whom you are working. We’ve been through your emails. We have two rooms full of documents, with video clips and writings, newspaper cuttings, and voice recordings on you and all that you have done with your life. It all testifies to your guilt. So you’re better off telling us from the beginning what your role is in this soft overthrow and giving us the details of how your employers instructed you to carry it out.”
“What employers? What are you talking about?”
He exhaled his cigarette smoke slowly, patiently, and I felt it enveloping me from behind like a fog of uncertainty.
“The United States and Israel, of course. Do you think we’re stupid? We know you’ve been meeting with American and Israeli scholars, with politicians, with activists. You’ve done it all out in the open. There are video recordings of your meetings with them, countless articles and books that you’ve collaborated on with them. Shall I go on? You know best what role you’ve played in working with them, and that your intention has been to change the government of the Islamic Republic to better suit their interests.”
My writings talk only about nonviolent change and reform. My interrogators would say that nonviolent reform is the same thing as a velvet revolution, but for me there is a distinction. How could I convince these men that I was innocent; that what they had interpreted as wrongdoing was merely my wish to see my country do better, to treat its citizens with respect and dignity, to show that reform did not necessitate a complete change of government or a swing toward subservience and the foreign domination we had endured in the past? But there was nothing to say. In their eyes, I was already guilty….
I asked for something to read and was told that I was allowed only the Quran and a book of stories on early Islam….
“Why do you have so many Jewish friends, Mr. Jahanbegloo?” my interrogator asked.
“What do you mean? I’ve had many colleagues and acquaintances throughout my years in academe and outside it, and some of them happen to be Jewish.”
“Yes, but too many of them are Jewish,” he said.
“I have no idea what you mean. I don’t see what their religion or ethnicity has to do with it. As I’ve tried to tell you, we are all scholars. Our job is to educate.” I knew what he was going to say next.
“Merely to educate? No, I don’t believe that’s it at all. You claim that you want to educate, but educate whom and for what? Look at this list of your past associates—Isaiah Berlin, George Steiner, Noam Chomsky, and all these others. You think we don’t know who these people are and what they do? They are all dangerous thinkers, and they all have an agenda.”
“If you actually read the writings of those men, you’d know how wrong you are,” I said, immediately regretting it.
“Oh, so you think you have all the knowledge here? You have all the right interpretations and we know nothing? Watch how you speak to me. If you start to get aggressive with us, believe me, it won’t turn out well for you. We have many other methods to employ.”
A dead silence. They hadn’t tortured me physically, but there was nothing to stop them.
“All I was trying to say is that there are different ways of understanding the writings of certain thinkers, and you have chosen to see them in one particular way. If you look at them another way, they may not seem as harmful as you think.”
“Who are you to decide what is harmful or not? Have you not written papers in support of the Zionists?”
“Of course not,” I replied. “What do you mean?”
“Look at this article here, for example, about your visit to Auschwitz. Do you not realize that in writing this article you have criticized the president’s views and given the Zionists credibility?”
Ahmadinejad was and is a Holocaust denier. The paper I had written spelled out the fact that millions of Jews had been killed by the Nazis, and that the death camp at Auschwitz was a center of inhumanity and cruelty.
“But I never refer in any place to the president and his views. I wrote about a place that I visited and saw with my own eyes, and I wrote about my reaction to it.”
“Yes, and in so doing you give ammunition to the Zionists to legitimize their claims and strengthen their grip over those they oppress. Have you ever been to Israel, Mr. Jahanbegloo?” he asked, his tone implying that he already knew the answer.
“I … when I was a child, yes. I couldn’t have been more than five or six years old. I remember only the huge grapefruits on the trees.”
“Well, you’re not a child anymore, so don’t play games with me. Even if you haven’t been back since, you’ve been in contact with Israelis. You’ve supported their regime all your life.”
“That’s not true at all. I also had many Palestinian friends when I was in France. I knew Edward Said. I even organized a conference at the University of Tehran in his honor after his death.”
“Not all Palestinians are true revolutionaries! The ones with whom you’ve been in contact are complicit in the Zionists’ wrongdoing because they don’t confront it with full force. They may as well be on their side.”“They are different kinds of revolutionaries—” I started to say.
“Enough! No more of these quick answers. You still have not explained why you’ve written these articles about the Holocaust, why you side with the Zionists in all matters, why you insist on seeing them as the victims.”
He was right. I hadn’t given him an adequate account, for I knew he would not understand. How could I explain that my main concern was with inhumanity, how pervasive it is and how preventable, when he was already caught in its vise?…
The driver parked in front of the Revolutionary Court. I was taken to the first floor, where I sat for an hour with my guard waiting for Saeed Mortazavi, prosecutor general of Tehran. When I was escorted into his office, he was talking to his secretary and did not even notice my entrance. He looked shorter than he did in his photos and had a three-day beard and mustache. His glasses made him look even more atrocious than suggested by his nickname, “Butcher of the Press.” Mortazavi gave me a harsh look and said, “Mr. Jahanbegloo, you are accused of spying against the interests of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
“But I have never been connected with any foreign intelligence,” I replied.
“Listen to me carefully,” he said with a snarl. “If you contradict me, you will go on trial and face charges of communicating with a hostile government, and I can easily ask for the death penalty.”
“But I am not a spy. I am a philosopher,” I said.
“That doesn’t interest us. What interests us is what foreign institution you are connected with.”
“None!”
“And who recognizes you as a philosopher? Americans, Canadians, the French?”
“I … I’ve taught everywhere. But I haven’t done anything except serve people.”
“Is that so? And why do you have Canadian citizenship? This is proof that you are a spy.”
“But many Iranians have dual nationalities,” I said.
“You are not an Iranian; you are an ugly Canadian.”
“But I have lived and worked in this country. I have written books in Persian.”
“Your writings are of no use to us. They do not serve Islam, and they do not serve Iran.”
Mortazavi turned to my interrogator and said, “Take him to the other room and read him all the accusations.”
I was shown a sheet of paper on which there was a long list: spying, working with foreign intelligence, plotting against the security of the Iranian state, preparing a velvet revolution, collaborating with Jewish institutions, writing lies about the Holocaust, and so on.
“Sign this,” he said.
“But I haven’t done any of these things,” I replied.
“Look. If you don’t sign, we have to start the interrogation from scratch. That means that you will stay in prison for a year or two with no contact with the outside world.”…
Steffen Larsen says
It’s the usual Gulag: senseless accusations, senseless questions. The purpose less a search for some truth than an attempt to break the prisoner who is guilty by default. Anything to please your superiors and your career, add an inclination for sadism and you couldn’t find a better job.
Max Publius says
Feels like the left may be making a shift soon, as they did toward America after Hitler after he attacked Stalin.
But don’t hold your breathe about getting any thanks from the denizens of the left whose arrogant elite (pace their low-information voters) said who was critical of the Soviet Union before them was “prematurely anti-communist.”
To the denizens of the left, anyone who is critical of Islam before they gets a clue is just being prematurely counterjihad.
jr says
chomsky a zionist? i can only wish
Jerry says
What a joke.
Noam Chomski is a Judenratnik (collaborator with the Nazis), rather than a Zionist.
Online Commenting Guy says
The Judenrat were wrong, but it’s easy for us to judge, not being in their terrible circumstances. They were faced with a “Sophie’s choice” and chose wrong, but at the end of the day they were desperate victims of the National Socialist regime as well.
It is an offense to compare the Judenrat to Chomski, who is himself a free, and joyously willing supporter of evil (his road paved with arguably good intentions just the same).
Jay Boo says
Ben Affleck could star in the movie role as this Leftist academic because Ben does such a fine job of giving off the appearance of a being a contemplative Leftist academic.
If only Ben Affleck were able to recite the dialog without offering up his self-serving (look at caring me) opinions he could pull it off.
Beagle says
2014 is the most significant year in watching leftist ideals crash and burn since the so-called fall of Communism in 1989-90. Not that those on the Left will learn, as they never do, but those who are not impervious to evidence and facts can see it.
From Islamophiles being beheaded by jihadis, through scores of governmental failures and abuses, to Obama’s foreign policy leading to what has become de facto a world war. Nothing about leftist ideals is as presented or works, and it’s evident.
Here we have a leftist academic who favors one of the most anti-Jew capo Jews being lumped in with Mossad by their so loved Iranian Islamic revolutionaries. The Iranian revolution was embraced by leftists from Michel Foucault* to Jimmy Carter. How’s that working out? You’d think the Iranians putting the Communists against the wall soon after the revolution would have clued in the Left, but no.
The true believers in leftist catechism, as they always do, will assert that if only Obama had stayed pure and true to Marxism, socialism, progressivism, whatever the nom du jour, things would be perfect.
*Foucault, required reading by every liberal arts undergrad, wrote the stupidest thing on the Iranian revolution ever conceived by man or monkeys on keyboards.
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/007863.html
Quote:
“One thing must be clear. By “Islamic government,” nobody in Iran means a political regime in which the clerics would have a role of supervision or control…”
— —
“clear” “nobody”
That’s some powerful certitude.
When you send your impressionable son or daughter to school, know that this idiot will be presented as a towering genius of philosophy.
pumbar says
I wasn’t required to read any Foucault when I read Philosophy back in the early nineties. I did, however, pick up a book about him but failed to get past the first couple of chapters because it was obvious the guy was an odious, narcissistic idiot.
nacazo says
Ramin Jahanbegloo is an associate professor of political science and holds the York-Noor Visiting Chair in Islamic Studies at York University, in Toronto…
I bet even after his experiences in iran, he will say that it’s just that the iranians don’t know how to implement the true teachings of the beautiful religion of pieces.
/sarc off
Steffen Larsen says
“If only comrade Muhammad knew what is REALLY going on …”
John C. Barile says
Yes! It’s all that scheming Abu Bakr’s doing! We must wrest the Message of the True Path from his clutches; we must restore the Beautiful Way of Allah, and purify it from opportunist distortions.
sinantara says
you’re on something mate… You have to see it like this, the author is dead, long live the author. If it has to happend through subversion, subverison will have to do. like some christians say, that was paulus! so they can have female clergy
Salah says
The only way for Islam to survive is through intimidation and thuggery. That’s how Muhammad “spread” his fake religion. That’s how his followers are keeping it “alive” today.
http://crossmuslims.blogspot.com/2012/03/assassin-english.html
Transmaster says
This makes me think of what my German ancestors had to endure in Stalinist Russia. Except for the members of the family who emigrated to the USA before WW1 all but a handful died of starvation during Stalin’s rule. But people who endured this always thought that if only Comrade Stalin knew what was going on he would stop it. There where all of the western Socialists who traveled to The Soviet Union to work to enable the world wide Communist revolution. It took years for these prototypical moonbat libtards to realize what was actually going on. Even than is was not the Communist movement but the high jacking of it by Stalin that was the trouble. We are presently in the “it isn’t Islam that is causing the trouble”, times. Hopefully it will not take a Jihadist atomic mushroom cloud rising up from one or more major of our western cities to take them the rest of the way to realizing what Islam truly is.
What we need here is a social Darwinism. Selection of the fittest by western standards, Carry an RPG, you die, kill, or brutalize members of another religion, you die, cover your face to conceal who you are on jihad, you die, marrying children, you die, brutal treatment of women, you die, Honor killing; the entire family doing it dies, part of any of the Jihadist groups, you die, Islamic mullahs exhorting people to violence, they die. Schools teaching it destroyed.
They had a real problem in India with Tigers eating people. During The British Raj man eating Tiger where systematically killed. Now outside of nature reserves Man eating Tigers are rare. That is because all Tigers with this behavior in wide areas of the country where killed off. This is what is needed with Islam.
KrazyKafir says
The trifecta of useful idiots.
-Capo
-dhimmi stooge
-Quisling
KrazyKafir says
-Kapo
Beagle says
Kapo or capo is acceptable. Kapo is allegedly derived from Kameradschaftpolizei or capo from Italian for boss. I’ve seen both.
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0011_0_10732.html
KrazyKafir says
Thanks, Beagle.
jewdog says
This poor guy needs to learn that there’s no befriending Islamic supremacists. Daniel Pipes has a section on “Palestinians” who have attacked their “friends”. It’s similar to Jews who thought they could make friends with Nazis. It’s just a wasted effort and betrayal of the brave people trying to defeat evil.
John Alexander says
Wow, good news from the Muslim world for a change.
Another good news story is that thousands of our most devout followers of the religion of peace are in Saudi for the Hajj. All in all a bit of a holiday from atrocity for the rest of us.
There’s apretty good angle on the “religion of peace” lie that in a post: “Why The Obvious Lie” at:
http://john-moloney.blogspot.com/2014/10/why-lie.html
mariam rove says
This guy Mortazavi is one of the vile and hated figures in Iran. He has send hundreds of people to be executed. M
Alarmed Pig Farmer says
I don’t wanna sound illiberal or anything, but somehow the idea of jailing leftist academics doesn’t sound that bad. Better, fire them for incompetence and let these geniuses go get real jobs (the ones in American, real jobs are few and far between in Dar al-Hellhole.
pumbar says
I’ve decided to coin a new phrase for PC academics and their followers who whitewash islam and its teachings. In my opinion they are, “Affleckted by an incurable malady”.
Ruslan Tokhchukov, EnragedSince1999 says
This is very telling. Chomsky is one of those anti-Jewish Jews. And he is anti-Zionst. And yet, Iran demonizes him as a “Zionist” just because he was born a Jew. Shows the evil nature of the Islamic Republic of Iran. This story should be sent to Chomsky, Finkelstein, Avraham Burg and other anti-Jewish Jews. Something for them to think about. Will show them they will never win good graces of the Islamio-Nazis, just as no Jew could expect any mercy from the Nazi Germans.
Inka Hutz says
Okay so I’m skeptical, is there any truth to this article?
pumbar says
Contact him and find out;
info@jahanbegloo.com