The instructor held up an unfurled green condom as she lectured a dozen Iranian brides-to-be on details of family planning. But birth control was only one aspect of the class, provided by the government and mandatory for all couples before marriage. The other was about sex, and the message from the state was that women should enjoy themselves as much as men and that men needed to be patient, because women need more time to become aroused. This is not the picture of Iran that filters out across the worldSophistication-mania! If you're intelligent and liberal enough, you too can tell all your cocktail party friends about how wrong, misguided, and just plain unfair the Likudnik AIPAC neo-con characterization of Iran is. Sure, they have a legal system where prepubescent girls are sold and raped under Iran's temporary marriage laws, but they also tell men to take their time. So at least we know that the enslaved prepubescent girls are are enjoying themselves. Except they're not because, you know, they're prepubescent girls who are getting sold and raped. But if it wasn't for that!
And then there's that whole inconvenient "they kill gay people for being gay" thing. You have to wonder why - of all the things that a journalist could choose to write about - someone would make it their business to make the Iranian regime look good to the outside world. "They're just telling the truth" is not a defense - there are literally an infinite number of true things that anyone can write about anything world, and at least a couple dozen of those are interesting. Michael Slackman and the IHT choose to propagandize for the Iranian regime - to present a different "picture of Iran" than the more accurate one of enslaved women and murdered gay teenagers.
[Read an extended version of this post at Mere Rhetoric]
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