Noteworthy Columns

Via Blog Iran comes a couple of items worth reading.

First, there's this column: Iran - Hope for a Cure in 2004?

If one wants to understand the frustration and negative opinions of the Iranian public with respect to the European Union - in particular Britain, Germany and France – it suffices merely to stroll through the streets of Tehran and listen to people’s complaints. We know that during the last 4 years the European Union has tried everything possible to support the reformist camp in Iran lead by Mohammad Khatami, trying to defuse the chaotic political situation in Iran as well as in the international arena. Nonetheless it has not produced any positive results. The public scepticism is palpable.[...]

At the same time the war in Iraq, led by the United States, has created hope amongst the Iranian public. A hope that sooner or later, once the Iraq issue has been resolved, the west will realise how deeply and strongly the Iranian people wish for radical change in Iran, and will therefore help those Iranians who are struggling to restore democracy, freedom, and a secular regime in this ancient land. Both the reformist and the conservative camps in Iran are fully aware of this feeling and have thus set in motion new tactics in order to distract public opinion at home and abroad. They are trying to destabilise Iraq as much as they can with the help of radical Shiites, by facilitating easy cross-border travel for international terrorists in the hope that the US will pull out its forces from Iraq and thus ease the pressure on Iran.

Then there's this column by Glenn "InstaPundit" Reynolds: Is the Empire Striking Back?

Though it hasn't been entirely silent, the human rights community has been less critical, so far, of efforts to censor the Internet than one might expect. Presumably, it has been kept too busy by criticism of the United States' activities in Guantanamo to address something as trivial as the empowerment of worldwide censorship.[...]

National and transnational bureaucrats don't, as a rule, like free speech -- or, as the choice of Libya indicates, human rights in general. And they don't like it that you can read Reporters Without Borders' criticism of them on the web, without needing permission from some government official. That's because free and open international communication is an enormous threat to bureaucracies, both national and transnational, that owe much of their power to their ability to keep people in the dark about what they're doing, and to pretend that voices criticizing their policies don't exist. The Internet, as I've written here before, has become a huge threat to the power of these folks, and it's expecting too much to think that they won't fight back. They are, and they will.