The Saudi Arabian monarchy is no doubt one of the most repugnant regimes on the planet. Flagrant human rights abuses, political repression, and the relegation of women to chattel are arguments frequently deployed by the Kingdom's many critics. The barbarity of the regime is compounded further by its allegiance with the US and Western Europe, a point that particularly rankles leftists and liberals- and rightly so. We are locked in hideous embrace with a theocracy which purported the very fundamentalist ideology that we are meant to be fighting. A stance which undermines any ability to construct a moral foreign policy, free of the compromises of realpolitik.
When it comes to the Saudi's main enemy and rival in the Middle East, the Islamic Republic of Iran the left are, to put it mildly, slightly less vocal. According to Amnesty international the Iranian Mullahs execute their own citizens at a far higher rate than even the Saudi's do and are guilty of the most appalling human rights violations. just this weekend Iranian state television renewed the fatwa against author Salman Rushdie. $600,000 was offered for the killing of a foreign citizen for the crime of writing a novel. Of course Rushdie has experienced all this before following the publication of the Satanic Verses in 1989 where he was forced into hiding for years. The fatwa has actually never been rescinded.
The left's response to such a violent attack on culture and art is predictably weak. Indeed it is a predisposition of the left to soft peddle any criticism of the Iranian theocracy. The Iranian revolution, or counter-revolution, swept away the US backed Shah of Iran- a corrupt puppet more interested in narcissistic displays of pomp than the welfare of his own people. The Shah had been imposed on Iran after the United States overthrew the democratically elected Government of Mosaddegh who had the temerity to nationalise the Anglo-Persian oil company (the same fate would topple Arbenz in Guatemala a year later). There has unsurprisingly been strong current of anti-American feeling running through Iranian political discourse ever since.
The Rushdie affair is merely an extension of the official anti- enlightenment policy of the Iranian state. Culture, art, and secularism are the enemy and are used used to provoke religious fervour inside the country, thus solidifying the regimes core support. This type of othering is more a sign of weakness than strength as it is used to distract attention away from an ossifying, decadent regime which is gradually losing its grip on power.
The left must be more muscular in its opposition to such a state. This is a regime that butchered thousands of secularists and leftists on its assent to dictatorship and we should oppose it with the same fervour that is reserved for Saudi Arabia. It is becoming a sad truth that as long as you oppose American power the left will let you get away with murder.
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