I never thought I'd be rooting for Iran

Last update - 21:41 18/06/2009

I never thought I'd be rooting for Iran

By Bradley Burston

Now, though, the people in Tehran's streets have made it possible to begin to see past Ahmadinejad. I have to get used to Iran not as a cartoon bully, but as my neighbor. Not because they will go nuclear; though nuclear they may well go. But because it is a nation of people, as we are, not pawns in an increasingly obsolete revolution.

It often seems that fundamentalism is the curse of the Middle East. In Israel, in Palestine, in Lebanon, in Iraq and Iran, it appears at first glance that it is fundamentalism that keeps peace at bay, that it has cursed Israel with settlements and faith-based racism, that it has cursed the Palestinians with anti-Jewish incitement and dated ideology which has kept statehood a practical impossibility, that it makes Hezbollah worship weaponry over all else, and has spurred brother Muslims, Shi'ites and Sunnis in Iraq, to suicide bomb each other's mosques, and each other.

But this view is too simple. It fails to take into account the fact that it is not religion per se, but its unholy marriage with politics, that yields the excesses that rob people of their freedom, dignity, and a future of peace. When fundamentalism becomes revolution, the truth that is in religion, becomes the first casualty.

And make no mistake. We are all revolutionaries here. And when everyone is a member of one revolution or another, the struggles are bound to collide. In Israel alone, the founding rival revolutions (socialist Zionism versus right-wing Revisionism) which have succumbed to age and irrelevance, have been replaced by the deadlock between the settler/no compromise revolution on the one hand, and the software/global-outlook two-state revolutionaries of the new center. The Palestinians have a similar dichotomy, with the aging onetime-Marxists of Fatah battling the middle-aging Armani Islamists of Hamas.

In the wider Middle Eastern theater, the fundamentalist revolution of neo-conservatism clashed with - and thus fueled - the various rival revolutions of Islamism.

The saving grace, for this reason, may be the circumstance that for all their talk of permanency and messianic solutions, revolutions, like the people who run them, age. At some point, when they no longer serve their stated goals, or their people, they begin to die.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1093996.html

and entirely agree about the baleful effects when fundamentalist religion gets mixed with politics.

I always did think that one day I'd be rooting for Iran - just perhaps not so soon. I do hope this ends well, and not as another 'Tiananmen Square'.