Yesterday, the Associated Press reported that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had issued a statement urging students in Iran to purge secular and moderate professors from the country’s universities. As news of the statement spread through the Web, American bloggers reacted with gusto.
“He’s encouraging students to purge the universities,” notes the Jawa Report. “It may seem infeasible, given the anti-regime stance of students, but the right mix of top-down pressure and looking the other way when ‘extremists’ ‘go too far’ has been known to get results in the past.”
“This is worrisome because Iran’s universities are the locus of opposition to Khomeinism, sharia, and religious conservatism,” adds the Jawa Report. “When we hear, as we do so often, that the Iranian street despises the ruling Mullahs, it is almost always university students giving those sentiments voice. If Ahmadinejad succeeds in purging the universities, then the last best hope for peaceful regime change in Iran will have been crushed.”
In the meantime, many liberal bloggers saw a comparison between Ahmadinejad’s statement about Iranian universities and American conservatives’ criticism of universities in the States.
“Yeah, that’s right,” moans realbistro, “Iran’s evil theocratic leaders are just like the American right wing in their hatred of liberal professors. [David] Horowitz and others of his ilk, like gambling man and ‘virtues’ expert former Secretary of Education William Bennett, and the wife of our evil VP, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities … Lynne Cheney, have made it their special project to intimidate and harass left-leaning professors in a post-9/11 wave of neo-McCarthyism.”
Fuzzy and Blue ponders, “Will someone please explain to me why it is that Repukes/ Religious Frighters claim to hate Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad/ Islamic fundamentalist when they are 2 very ugly faces of the exact same demented coin?”
Elsewhere, one conservative blogger wondered if the development in Iran would drive a wedge between the Iranian president and his (supposed) legions of liberal supporters in America.
“Yes, it’s true: The president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who CBS newsman Mike Wallace so famously referred to as an ‘interesting fellow,’ has decided that folks like Mike need to be purged from Iran’s universities. Liberals, be gone!” declares the Rogue Review. “I always thought it was strange how libs could respect and admire the very leaders who would have them imprisoned and/or shot if they were citizens of that land.”
Finally, one blogger countered the aforementioned comparisons with an alternate take on the American academy.
“The same people who are coked up in mock outrage over whether ‘this could happen here,'” argues spacetropic, “will be notably silent about the more obvious political purges that take place in American universities when academics fail to assume a Hard Left position.”
Andrew Bielak was a CJR intern.