When my breakfast arrives, I try to discern which dish is the omelet by process of elimination. It isn’t the flat bread, and it isn’t the plate full of alfalfa-like salad on the next plate, so it must be the pile of reddish substance in the middle. I begin to eat. The reddish substance is warm, so I conclude that I will not contract dysentery from it. For the same reason, I refrain from eating the pile of greens, remembering what happened to the Westerners who ate salad in Cairo in 1994.
Hamed wonders why I am not eating the salad.
“A chacun sa gout,” I say.
“What?” he asks.
I repeat the phrase about five times and then finally translate it into English.
“Oh,” he says when the light bulb finally goes on, “A chacun sa gout.”
“That’s what I said.”
“Your French is terrible.”
He is, of course, right. My French is terrible, but even if it weren’t I have no desire to argue with him. The red “omelet” has formed a knot in my stomach, and as we drive to the university I say a prayer that it doesn’t get worse.
The political situation has changed dramatically since my first trip to Iran. President Ahmadinejad was voted out of office and replaced by Rouhani, who is determined to come to an agreement with the Americans which will end the economic sanctions which have been imposed on Iran. The Obama Administration seems determined to reciprocate, even if its program seems to be two steps forward and one step back. The Obama Administration did not take the bait that the false flag gas attack in Syria offered in August of 2013. Instead Obama agreed to work with Vladimir Putin. The Israel Lobby was furious, but AIPAC’s attempt to impose new sanctions failed in January 2014 largely because a new pro-Obama Jewish lobby, J Street, opposed them and gave wary congressmen a way out. It was AIPAC’s first major defeat and signaled a decline in its power.
Not to be deterred, the Jews countered with Victoria Nuland’s coup d’etat in the Ukraine, which made it impossible for Obama to work with Putin and blocked what was promising to be a convergence on gender issues between Poles and Russians. Nuland, wife of Neoconservative luminary Robert Kagan, failed in the act of succeeding, giving us a stunning recent example of what Hegel called “the cunning of reason.” The democratically elected Yanukovych government was overthrown by a coalition of American supported Neo-Nazi thugs, but the Neocon holdovers from the Bush Administration overreached, causing a reaction, and the Crimea returned to Russia, putting an end to NATO’s expansion eastward and signaling the beginning of the end of the American Empire and its century-long efforts to control the Eurasian landmass. In spite of everything, the Obama Administration continued its overtures to Iran, lifting the sanctions prohibiting sale of oil for six months around the time I was traveling through Iran with Hamed.
Over the course of our travels, Hamed told me he was willing to die for the Supreme Leader. The real issue now, however, is whether he and his generation are willing to live for the Supreme Leader. The situation has changed since the 1981 war with Iraq. The revolutionary fervor of 1979, followed closely by the war which took 300,000 lives, pictures of whom adorn virtually every building in Iran, has been replaced by a period of uncertainty. We know the Iranians know how to die; the current question is whether they know how to live, and what principles will guide their lives through this current period of uncertainty. Hamed is a supporter of former President Ahmadinejad and is worried about whether the Rouhani government is going to bargain away all of the gains of the revolution in order to broker a sanction-ending deal on the nuclear issue. He also talked about finding a wife. Willingness to die in battle and a desire to get married are two of the deepest aspirations a human being can have, but they require different intellectual infrastructures to find completion, and now the conditions necessary to marry, have children and become one of the indispensable social cells which will carry Iran into the future have become opaque to large numbers of Iranians. The main issue is birth control.
Shortly after I returned from Iran, Thomas Erdbrink’s article on Iran’s troubled attitude toward children appeared in the New York Times (June 8, 2014). In a form that we have come to expect on issues and populations which the global elites have targeted for social engineering, Erdbrink tells the story of “Bita and Shirag,” a young couple who “are really serious about not having kids.” So serious, in fact, that Bita has procured two abortions, even though abortion is illegal in Iran. Erdbrink does his best to portray Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as a religious fanatic intent on imposing his views on Iran’s helpless women via:
a 14-point program, announced late last month, that health officials hope will lead to a doubling of Iran’s population, to 150 million, by 2050. Hospital delivery stays are now free, and women are allowed longer maternity leave. Reversing past policies to control population growth, the government has canceled subsidies for condoms and birth control pills and eliminated free vasectomies... Billboards in the capital show a laughing father with five children riding a single tandem bicycle up a hill, leaving far behind an unhappy looking father with only one child. Those parents who actually produce five children are now eligible for a $1,500 bonus, not that many here are likely to be tempted.
As we have come to expect from aspirational articles of this sort, Erdbrink puts the last word into the mouth of an Iranian, a 25-year-old unemployed soccer player, who of course represents the position of the New York Times, when he opines: “Anybody with a lot of children is either very rich or very irresponsible,” Mr. Najafi said. “There is no other way.”
Like Hamed, Shaheen is also willing to die for the Supreme Leader. He is also interested in finding a wife. Shaheen asks me if I have any children. When I mention that I have three sons and two daughters, he asks if he can marry one of my daughters.
“How old are you?” I ask.
“Twenty-two,” he says.
When I mention that he is closer in age to my oldest granddaughter, an internet search for her Facebook page ensues, but it is not successful because there are simply too many Joneses in this world.
Religious fervor and the sexual issue go hand in hand, there as over here. The differences involve the religions and the form of fervor. At this point, the global elites who control American policy have committed America to a publicity campaign in favor of gay marriage that makes the Children’s Crusade look wishy-washy by comparison. The cumulative effect of all past campaigns in favor of sexual liberation is having its effect in Iran. The revolutionary fervor of 1979 has diminished, as all revolutionary fervor must over time, and has been replaced by a sense of uncertainty. Was the West right after all? The unspoken question haunts Iran.
Since the end of the Iran-Iraq war, the Basij, or the Organization for the Mobilization of the Oppressed, a paramilitary volunteer militia which was established in 1979 by the Ayatollah Khomeini to fight in the Iran-Iraq war, has become a law enforcement auxiliary involved in “the providing of social service, organizing of public religious ceremonies, and policing of morals and the suppression of dissident gatherings” (Wikipedia on the Basij). The Basij still apprehends couples for holding hands in public, but the police release them with a lecture now, rather than putting them on trial. The same is true of dancing. Just before I arrived in Iran, a group of Iranian teenagers were arrested for posting a video to the tune “Happy,” which showed Iranian girls dancing without wearing the hijab. The young people were taken to the police station but later let off after they claimed that the video had been done with the assurance that it would remain private. The young people were probably victims of a cultural agent provocateur, but the sense of uncertainty in the air remains.
The focal point of much of the cultural protest is the hijab or traditional headcovering which is mandatory for all women, including foreigners, in Iran. The women who attended my talk at Basij headquarters in Tehran all wore the chador, which is to say the black garment worn in public which covers body, head, and neck. The same was true of every other talk, including those in
Shiraz and Fasa. But in the airports, the westernizers seemed to be in the majority. These women bleached their hair and wore the hijab as far back on the head as possible, exposing as much hair as possible. The effect is not particularly attractive because Iranian skin is not particularly compatible with blonde hair, certainly not bleached blonde hair. But the political statement is clear. In a world where the engineering of consent can now be projected globally via the internet, the hijab has become a symbol of the oppression of women. Women are urged to have themselves photographed in public sans hijab and to then post the photos on the internet. Doubtless some US-funded NGO is behind the campaign. But the message is always the same. America frames no hypotheses. It simply promotes freedom, which is part of nature. Man is born free, but in Iran he (or, more importantly she) is in chains because some cleric wants to impose his morality on the population. Those with an ear for propaganda will remember that these same memes and tropes got used in the attack on the Catholic Church’s position on birth control and later abortion during the 1960s and 1970s. The similarities between what happened to the Catholics then and what is now being foisted on the Iranians was the theme of my talks.
I ended my talk to the Basij by saying that birth control was the biggest issue facing Iran at that moment. The main internal threat to the ongoing existence of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and, indeed, the existence of the Iranian people, is birth control. But to state the issue that way is to misstate it. No nation can maintain revolutionary fervor for any extended period of time. Even fervor for the sexual revolution of the 1960s began to wane by the mid-’70s, and in 1979 it was replaced by Alien and a whole new generation of horror movies that provided catharsis by articulating the psychic pain which the sexually liberated had been experiencing for over a decade. As a symbolic coda to what I was saying, H.R. Giger, the Swiss creator of the Alien monster, died when I was in Iran.
More often than not, the sexual counterrevolution often had nothing to do with the intentions of the counterrevolutionaries. The best example of this was the rise of Hollywood horror films. Alien, which opened in 1979 and won that year’s Oscar for best visual effects, was in many ways the sequel to the 1973 porn classic Deep Throat, only by 1979 oral sex wasn’t fun anymore. In the minds of the sexual revolutionaries, who had aborted their offspring, had their hearts broken, or contracted a venereal disease over the course of the decade following the other annus mirabilis, 1964, Year of the Pill, sex, in fact, had become an oftentimes disgusting, terrifying, and life-threatening experience. America’s collective guilty conscience over abortion found psychic release by viewing H.R. Giger’s face hugging monster, which inserted its penis into the mouth of John Hurt, causing his stomach to explode in a parody of human sexuality and gestation that was deeply cathartic for the walking wounded who were the survivors of sexual liberation (E. Michael Jones, Monsters from the Id (2013)). Horror films like Alien and Halloween (which came out one year earlier) gave the sexually liberated a cathartic release because they allowed them to affirm simultaneously the contradictory assertions that sexual liberation is a good thing (thereby preserving their credentials as progressives) and it ruined my life.
The sexual revolution had created a world-wide wave of revulsion that would propel a number of world leaders into positions of political power. Ronald Reagan was one of these leaders; the Ayatollah Khomeini was another. In Iran, the sexual revolution of the ’60s was replaced by another revolution. The Revolution of 1979 created the Islamic Republic which is still in existence today. After initially encouraging a high birth rate as the demographic basis for political and economic national power under the Ayatollah Khomeini, the revolutionary government after Khomeini’s death in 1989 inexplicably reversed his position and instituted what would turn out to be one of the most effective birth control campaigns in modern history. In the 10-year period following the creation of the Islamic Republic in Iran in 1979, Iran’s birth rate was 3.5. By the time his successor Khamenei gave his speech in the fall of 2012 lamenting the population decline, the Iranian birthrate had plummeted to a European level of less than two children, which is to say below replacement rate (Wikipedia on family planning in Iran). The New York Times was not slow in exposing the irony of the situation:
Under the grip of militant Islamic clerisy, Iran has seen its population of children implode. Accordingly, Iran’s population is now aging at a rate nearly three times that of Western Europe. Maybe the middle aging of the Middle East will bring a mellower tone to the region, but middle age will pass swiftly to old age.
Accounts differ on why and how the change came about. Some claim that the changes were instituted by the Rafsanjani government after the death of the Ayatollah Khomeini; other reports claim that Khomeini himself was responsible for the change. One source claims that: “In the late 1980s, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran’s supreme leader, issued fatwas making birth control widely available and acceptable to conservative Muslims” (LA Times, July 29, 2012). Either way, the birth rate plunged, but more importantly, as the LA Times put it, the promotion of contraception began “to usher in social changes, particularly in the role of women.” Crippled by a sola scriptura approach to morality, the religious leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran inadvertently created a feminist fifth column which would rise up against the revolutionary government during the Green Demonstrations of 2009. Or as the LA Times put it:
Without intending to, Iran’s clerical leadership helped to foster “the empowerment of Iranian women,” said Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, an Iran expert at Virginia Tech. “The mullahs may be winning the battle on the streets, but women are winning the battle inside the family.”
Now the Supreme Leader is faced with the unenviable task of putting the contraceptive genie back into the moral lamp from which he conjured it over twenty years ago. No wonder he is asking Allah the All-merciful for forgiveness. President Ahmadinejad joined in the anti-contraception campaign by claiming that:
Doubling the country’s population of 75 million would enable Iran to threaten the West, he said. He has denounced the contraceptive program as “a prescription for extinction,” called on Iranian girls to marry no later than 16 or 17 and offered bonuses of more than $950 for each child.
Unfortunately for the pro-natalist faction, President Ahmadinejad is no longer in power. The question lurking behind every sexual/cultural issue at the moment is whether President Rouhani is going to throw the contraceptive baby out with the nuclear bathwater. On July 25, 2012, Supreme Leader Khamenei stated that Iran’s contraceptive policy made sense twenty years ago, “but its continuation in later years was wrong. Scientific and experts’ studies show that we will face population aging and reduction (in population) if the birth-control policy continues.” Similarly:
Deputy health minister Ali Reza Mesdaghinia was quoted in the semiofficial Fars news agency on 29 July saying that population control programs “belonged to the past” and that “there is no plan to keep the number of children at one or two. Families should decide about it by themselves. In our culture, having a large number of children has been a tradition. In the past families had five or six children... The culture still exists in the rural areas. We should go back to our genuine culture” (Wikipedia on family planning in Iran).
My impromptu speech to the Basij on birth control was barely out of my mouth when fellow speaker Yvonne Ridley objected to what I had to say. Ridley is an English journalist who burst upon the scene on September 28, 2001 when she was captured by the Taliban in Afghanistan after she had crossed the border illegally wearing a burqa. Ridley was released on October 8, and as a result of her experience she converted to Islam. Now this 56-year-old chador clad Englishwoman was telling the Basij that Muslim women should have the right to choose. On our way back to the hotel in the car I asked Yvonne how she could claim to oppose American imperialism while at the same time supporting one of its main instruments, namely, population control, and in particular a program put in place in Iran at the behest of the R
ockefellers in collaboration with the hated Shah. She replied by saying that I wanted to keep women “barefoot and pregnant.” Needless to say, recourse to the feminist clichés of the 1970s was not conducive to intelligent discourse. The interpreter seemed intrigued by what I was saying about the Logos of sexual activity. “Sexual intercourse is like intercourse in general,” I said. “It’s not immoral to remain silent, but it is immoral to lie. Fertility is an integral part of human sexuality. Contradicting the Logos of sexuality is the sexual equivalent of a lie.” Ridley has been married five times. This would presumably make her an expert on marriage or, if not, then at least sadder but wiser, but Ridley’s mind, in spite of her conversion, seemed frozen in the feminist clichés of yesteryear and the conversation soon lapsed into silence.
In this she differed from the Iranian women, who seemed more pensive than truculent on the matter of birth control. You could tell by the expression on the faces of the women that birth control was a problem. You could tell that they were troubled, but also that they were grateful that someone was finally addressing the issue openly. This is not to say that there wasn’t some hostility. In Shiraz, a woman reacted in a hostile manner outside the hall where I had given my talk after the official Q&A had ended. When I mentioned the Polish bishops’ pastoral on gender ideology, she attacked the pope for not doing more to stop sexual decadence, sounding a lot like a conservative Catholic attending a meeting of her local CUF chapter in the 1980s.
“The pope should support the Polish bishops,” she said.
“I agree.”
“Why aren’t you a Muslim?” she asked.
“Why aren’t you a Catholic?” I answered in response to her question.
I then mentioned my encounter with a mullah in Qom, who told me that they weren’t interested in converting believers like me, but rather wanted to work together for justice until the twelfth imam returned from the state of occultation with Jesus at his side.
Islam and Logos Page 10