Iran's leader wants liberal teachers out

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Iran's hard-line president Tuesday urged students to push for a purge of liberal and secular university teachers, another sign of his determination to strengthen Islamic fundamentalism in the country.

With his call echoing the rhetoric of the nation's 1979 Islamic revolution, Ahmadinejad appears determined to remake Iran by reviving the fundamentalist goals pursued under the republic's late founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

And

Dozens of liberal university professors and teachers were sent into retirement this year after Ahmadinejad's administration, sparking strong protests from students, named the first cleric to head Tehran University. The country's oldest institution of higher education remains home to dozens more educators who outspokenly oppose policies restricting freedom of expression.

"Today, students should shout at the president and ask why liberal and secular university lecturers are present in the universities," the official Islamic Republic News Agency quoted Ahmadinejad as saying.

Click here for the rest.

This is no surprise at all for Iran, which we ought not to invade, but is clearly in the control of a repressive, backward-ass, theocratic, totalitarian regime. Makes me glad I live in the United States. But there's something bugging me about this story, something I just can't put my finger on about it...

...oh, yes, it reminds me of this:

More recently, he has turned his attention to rooting out liberal bias in the academy. Students for Academic Freedom, a group he founded, promotes the cause of ''intellectual diversity" in teaching, faculty appointments, and even research. Horowitz is also the author of an ''Academic Bill of Rights" asserting that students are entitled to an education free of ''political, ideological or religious orthodoxy" imposed upon them by professors. This right, he says, is routinely infringed by liberal academics who voice their politics in the classroom. Legislatures in 17 states are considering making the ''Academic Bill of Rights" law.

In Horowitz's recently published book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, he profiles left-leaning scholars who ''appear to believe that an institution of higher learning is an extension of the political arena." His targets range from the obvious, such as MIT linguist and public intellectual Noam Chomsky, to more obscure figures like Oneida Meranto, an associate professor of political science at Metropolitan State College in Denver. Horowitz insists that the professors profiled in the book are ''representative" of the American university as a whole, that liberal bias is ''increasingly widespread throughout the academic profession," and that it's time conservatives did something about it.

Click here for more, including David Horowitz's dumbass response.

Yeah, that's right, Iran's evil theocratic leaders are just like the American right wing in their hatred of liberal professors. Horowitz and others of his ilk, like gambling man and "virtues" expert former Secretary of Education William Bennett, and the wife of our evil VP, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities and professional bitch Lynn Cheney, have made it their special project to intimidate and harass left-leaning professors in a post 9/11 wave of neo-McCarthyism.

So what does it mean that our right wing is very much like their right wing? Well, I just report. You decide. Anything less wouldn't be fair or balanced.

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