Via the essential
Crooked Timber I learn of a
Christian Science Monitor summary of the new Richard Perle/David Frum book, which if I believe is entitled
How to Ignore Reality, Or: The Case for Further Stretching the Capability of the American Military and Alienating Our Allies.
Saner fellow traveler Larry Kaplan values the book "less for its grace as a polemic than for its value as a primer on how those hawks view the world around them." Sounds about right to me.
One argument these two dangerously monomanical hard-liners advance is that, as per CSM, "Muslims living in the US must be given special scrutiny by US law enforcement and other Americans."
This personal account from an Iranian expatriate currently studying in the U.S. demonstrates that the Muslim situation has a human dimension:
Yesterday I was informed that I am not allowed to attend a workshop because it is held in Fermilab and I am an Iranian! I am the only one among all the speakers of the workshop who is excluded because of my citizenship. Less than a week ago my husband was informed that he is not allowed to apply for a scholarship from NASA not because he is a foreigner but because he is from an unfriendly country! I am practically not allowed to go to any conference outside the US because I am Iranian and I have chosen to study in the USA. I am not allowed to see my father while I am here because he is an Iranian!
My friend can hardly visit his wife, let alone live with her because they are Iranian students. Our friends who went back home this summer to see their families haven’t been able to come back to continue their studies yet, because they are Iranian. My friend’s mother hasn’t been able to see her only grandchild at all, and now the child is 5 years old and it is just because she is an Iranian woman and her daughter has chosen to study in the USA!
...
Of course it isn’t that if we go back to Iran this discrimination wouldn’t affect us anymore. Not only do they put sanctions on the sale of simple up-to-date technology to Iranian experimentalists and not let papers from Iran be published in American journals, they also interfere with Iran’s theoretical science affairs with others as well. For example, I was talking to an Argentinean scientist who had traveled to Iran once for a cosmology workshop and he was telling me that although he likes attending conferences in Iran, each time he enters the US, because of his trip to Iran, he has to go through a lot of harassment, so he is not sure if it is a good idea for him to visit Iran for a second time. Each time the US decides to attack one of Iran’s neighbors, international conferences or workshops in Iran get cancelled as everybody is scared to travel to the region!
What drives me so crazy is when Bush goes on saying how they are a friend of Iranian people and Iranian students and are trying to help them to get their freedom back. I know that most politicians lie to people, and he has proven to be one of the worst liars for his childish case for attacking Iraq, but still telling people lies straight in their face while you are doing the exact opposite in front of their eyes, that’s really absurd!
The comments are also quite interesting.