"Azar Nafisi writes about the current crackdown by the crackpot Iranian regime on what can be published in Iran", says The Literary Saloon, supplying a link to her article in the Guardian Review. Crackpot compared to what?, one might ask.
Unfortunately,
Ellis Sharp's pertinent question won't be heard by anything like as many as those who read
The Literary Saloon or the Guardian because his blog is inexplicably under-recognised. I notice it has only 15
Bloglines subscriptions to its RSS feed. Crazy! It's one of the few literary blogs (along with the Literary Saloon's) to whose every post I pay attention. Yet many others will not read of his necessary qualification of Nafisi's deceptively uncontroversial call for solidarity with Iranians against censorship.
With an American fleet and hospital ships in position near the Iranian coast, I can’t help thinking that perhaps the best way of supporting Iranians is to say that we don’t feel that they should be bombed.
Sharp then provides the equally necessary literary insight (i.e. for a literary blog) with a quotation from the unusually prescient analysis of Western policy in the Middle East by a great writer, an analysis published in an American newspaper.