Amir Taheri describes the Ahmadinejad administration’s new cultural revolution to remove the corrupt influence of the infidel from education. That would, we suppose, eliminate most that is interesting about the world, including in science, economics, psychology, and most things associated with the idea of progress in human affairs. Not that any of that matters of course, when compared with the glories of jihad.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has promised to “cleanse” the Iranian educational system of what he calls “the corrupt influence of the infidel” and has mobilized a special militia to crush the expected student revolts.

The radical president refers to his “academic cleansing” plan as “The Second Great Islamic Cultural Revolution.” The late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini closed the universities and launched the first “Great Islamic Cultural Revolution” in 1980. A committee created to “cleanse” academia purged more than 6,000 professors and lecturers, virtually destroying Iranian academia. Dozens of academics were executed as hundreds fled into exile. The committee also expelled thousands of students on charges of monarchist or leftist tendencies. It also censored or totally rewrote dozens of textbooks to conform to the Khomeinist ideology.

When the universities were reopened two years later, the committee tried to fill them with students and teachers sympathetic to Khomeinism. The trick was to allocate special places for members of The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and children of families believed to be loyal to the regime.

Further, it established a blacklist of banned authors and writings – an index that has grown every year since, reminding one of the worst days of the Inquisition in medieval Europe. The madness of censorship, supervised by the so-called Ministry of Islamic Orientation and Culture, reached a new peak last week with the banning of a new volume of memoirs of former President Hashemi Rafsanjai – who was a member of the original “cleansing” committee!…

Ahmadinejad launched his second “Islamic Cultural Revolution” last year by appointing a semiliterate mullah as chancellor of Tehran University – the first time that a cleric took charge of the nation’s oldest and largest center of higher education. Ahmadinejad’s purge started last July with the replacement of 20-plus college deans. In almost every case, a bona fide academic was pushed out in favor of a Revolutionary Guard member…

Dozens of academics have been arrested, including some returning from conferences abroad. An unknown number of students have been arrested. In Tabriz, all seven members of the students union were picked up and taken to an unknown destination last month. The families of two of them claim that they may have died under torture. In Tehran, more than 150 student activists have been “disappeared” in recent weeks. As part of the purge, 30 privately owned colleges have been shut and their assets seized. Thirteen others are under investigation.

The willingness of Iran and other Islamic countries, as well as Gaza, the West Bank, etc., to absolutely destroy their children’s economic well being and futures in breathtaking. That the authorities do this without shame or guilt is eloquent testimony to the demented nature of the puritanical Islamic supremacist ideology that they preach. And yet the West takes no note of this massive inter-generational child abuse.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 at 4:56 am and is filed under General, Iran, Science, business, idiots!, radical chic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.