An increasingly shrill President Ahmadinejad of Iran channelled the spirit of 1960’s era Mao Tse Tung yesterday.
First, he demonstrated mobilising the student masses by going over the heads of the middle ranking cadres:
“Students should shout at the president and ask why liberal and secular university lecturers are present in the universities”
Second, he spread the message that the overly educated are traitors to the revolution:
The supreme leader has raised fears that the country might suffer a “velvet revolution”, with western powers using academics and other opponents to overthrow Iran’s Islamic system.
Third, he and his cohorts defined progress as going back to the future:
They have demanded a return to the revolutionary purity of the early 1980s when unIslamic students and professors were expelled.
No word from the University and College Union yet. I wonder if certain of those members from its predecessor bodies will be as loud in their condemnation of Iran as they were of another country beginning with ‘I’ last year and more recently.
