A Quote by Azar Nafisi

For more than 30 years the Islamic regime and its apologists have tried to dismiss women's struggle in Iran as part of a western ploy. — © Azar Nafisi
For more than 30 years the Islamic regime and its apologists have tried to dismiss women's struggle in Iran as part of a western ploy.
In the past 30 years, officials of the Iranian regime and its apologists have labeled criticism, especially with regard to women's rights, as anti-Islamic and pro-Western, justifying its brutalities by ascribing them to Islam and Iran's culture.
This is a good time to ask apologists for the Islamic regime, who degrades Islam? Who imposes stoning, forced marriage of underage girls and flogging for not wearing the veil? Do such practices represent Iran's ancient history and culture, its ethnic and religious diversity? Its centuries of sensual and subversive poetry?
Under the current U.S. policy, because of this power struggle, American oil companies can't do business with Iran. So I think the ultimate goal of the U.S. administration in Iran is regime change, to put into power a pro-Western government that will eliminate the strategic challenge to U.S. interests and, at the same time, allow the lifting of sanctions and allowing American oil companies to do business with Iran.
Part of me has always resisted the Western clichéd image of Muslim women, depicting them as nothing more than silent victims. My art, without denying 'repression,' is a testimony to unspoken female power and the continuing protest in Islamic culture.
I lived for 30 years in the U.S., but always kept my Islamic and Iranian culture and customs... even now, western lifestyle feels strange to me.
From a geo-strategic point of view, I consider Iran a bigger problem than the Islamic State. ISIS is a group of adventurers with a very aggressive ideology. But they have to conquer more and more territory before they can became a geo-strategic, permanent reality. I think a conflict with ISIS - important as it is - is more manageable than a confrontation with Iran.
We can not imagine that an Arab population forming more than 80 percent of the Iraqi society will allow the article reading that Iraq is part of the Islamic world instead of mentioning that we are part of the Arab nation, as if they want us to be linked to Iran and not to the Arab nation.
Turkey is viewed as a very modern country and a great place to go and visit and yet Islamic as well. Iran is in some ways like that... with the difference that Iran is probably more influential than Turkey in affairs that are of interest to us.
Launching a ground war against Iran would require hundreds of thousands of troops for a 'regime change followed by nation-building' operation, as we attempted in Iraq. Iran has a much more modern military, more than double Iraq's population, and almost four times the landmass.
The great powers have dominated the destiny of the Islamic countries for years and installed the Zionist cancerous tumor in the heart of the Islamic world. Many of the problems facing the Muslim world are due to the existence of the Zionist regime.
Structurally, as is evident, the role of the 'Islamic Terror' is to fill the gap left by the disintegration of Stalinism. That is why Saddam's quasi-Stalinist Baathist regime was the perfect transitional object for the U.S. in the immediate years after the Cold War ended. Saddam was no more a Muslim than Stalin was a Christian.
It didn't take long for the world to realize that the Shah was an enlightened liberal next to the bloody reactionary regime that followed, and which executed more people in three months than the Shah had done in 30 years.
If you want peace and well-being to be in place in the Middle East and you want terrorism to be uprooted, then there's no path other than the presence of the Islamic Republic of Iran, you saw that in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen that the power that was able to help the people of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen in the face of terrorist groups was the Islamic Republic of Iran.
In any event, the problem in Iran is much bigger than weapons. The problem is the terrorist regime that seeks the weapons. The regime must go.
Those in the west who dismiss the repressiveness of laws against women in countries like Iran, no matter how benign their intentions, present a condescending view not just of the religion but also of women living in Muslim majority countries, as if the desire for choice and happiness is the monopoly of women in the west.
We've made some heroic efforts, but the Earth as a whole is in worse shape today than 30 years ago, ... There's been 30 more years of greenhouses gases, species extinctions and population growth.
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