NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana, 1 October 2004 — “In baseball, I’m a Marxist,” columnist George Will claims. But fundamentally, Will is a WASP, America’s exclusive “white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant” club. And WASPs understand exclusivity.
So in his recent Washington Post Op-Ed “Nuclear Iran,” Will explains why the US “cannot allow the Iranians” to join the nuclear club. Not only is Iran the wrong religion, but it’s crazy. “Iran’s regime is mad as a hatter,” Will claims.
Then, he gives a few reasons why. Very few. Iran bans lascivious books like “Lolita” — Vladimir Nabokov’s celebrated yet controversially-infamous 1955 novel. It has a low female age for marriage. And ten years ago, it had a “nearly blind” film censor.
Come on now.
Will relies on Azar Nafisi, a disgruntled Iranian feminist comparative literature professor now teaching, apparently, political science to the graduate student elite at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), to prove Iran’s “religious mania.”
Nafisi came to SAIS under then-Dean Paul Wolfowitz, whose romance with the Iraqi exile community dragged the US into Iraq with claims of weapons of mass destruction and Al-Qaeda connections that never materialized. Are we now going to be plunged into war with Iran?
Let’s look at the Will-Nafisi theory of why Iran is morally unentitled to possess nuclear weapons. It boils down to naughty books, naughty men, and naughty movies.
Look out, America. Do neocons want your children to die defending smut?
Iran’s rejection of “Lolita” as literature is Nafisi’s obsession. Her first SAIS lecture was so decidedly strange one almost sympathizes with Iran’s position. Nafisi presented photos of attractive young women wearing headscarves, who she claimed were students meeting “secretly” at her home to chat up “Lolita.” The next set showed the women without headscarves.
Okay.
“See? See?” Nafisi exclaimed, waiving her photos as proof of the Islamic Republic’s horribleness.
“See” what? See through Nafisi’s clothes, that’s what. Nafisi was not only headscarfless but also scantily attired, even by American standards, in thin white pants and sheer blouse through which her underwear was clearly visible.
“Gosh!” gasped SAIS’s assistant dean, by transfixing on images of scarfless women eating what looked like pretty tasty sweets and cakes. There were even Coke bottles, sure evidence of intellectual subversion in the Iranian student gulag. Nafisi then showed photos of women handing her flowers and wrapped gifts — offerings to her for reading “Lolita” and defying the government.
So Nafisi claims.
Forget that “Lolita” — controversial right here in America — is effectively “banned” in some US schools and libraries. It’s a sexually-explicit book about an older man’s lust for a young girl, exactly what Nafisi and Will cite as further proof of Iran’s “religious mania”.
As for female marriageable age, while the average marriageable age in many US states is 16, an even younger person can marry if a judge finds marriage to be “in their best interest.” Does that sound like an ayatollah talking, or what? In George Bush’s Texas, girls can marry at 14 — only one year away from Iran’s cutoff of 13.
Nafisi and Will need to get out more. Travel America, where sexualized 11 year-olds are regularly pregnant.
Is it “mania” to allow young people having sex to marry?
US law is often ambiguous. An older man in love with “Lolita” might face criminal charges for statutory rape, or he and her parents might persuade a judge to allow a marriage. In Louisiana, depending upon the minor’s age and the judge’s mood, he might face the death penalty. In Los Angeles, if he’s a pop star, he’ll just sell more records.
Now, which society is crazy?
As for Iran’s “nearly blind” theater censor, what’s “nearly blind?” It’s not automatically a fatal absurdity. If he were also “fully deaf,” Nafisi might have half an argument. But censorship is a national issue peculiar to each state. Singapore censors heavily, Canada censors some, and the US censors almost not at all. What’s it got to do with nuclear weapons? The “A” answer at Harvard would be “nothing.” But at SAIS, who knows?
What Nafisi and Will miss is that Iran is neither “crazy” nor seeking “to rivet the world’s attention.” Iran seeks nuclear weapons to deter Israeli and US military intervention. Iran sees the US invade Afghanistan and Iraq, which do not have the bomb, but not North Korea, which does.
Iran sees the US invade a bombless Iraq on gossamer pretexts, whereas Israel has received nary a slap on its wrist since 1967, when its possession of a bomb became an unacknowledged certainty.
If you were Iran and didn’t want your people slaughtered in an invasion, wouldn’t you actively seek nuclear weapons?
Will pines for a Kennedyesque time when nuclear club membership was more exclusive. Nafisi just rants about silliness. Together, they typify a neocon force working once again to push America into another senseless struggle against the Muslim world.
It’s time to talk to Iran. Even President Bush says so. So send America’s best diplomats to Tehran. Would that include SAISers? Not unless they leave their copies of “Lolita” at home, cover up their underwear, and get serious about politics.
— Sarah Whalen is an expert in Islamic law and taught law at Loyola University School of Law in New Orleans, Louisiana.
