Neo-conservatives Love Danny Postel

When Danny Postel, an editor at openDemocracy who commissions most of the articles on Iran there, published his personal attacks and unfair accusations about me on oD, I was wondering how that article would be used and by whom.

Mr. Postel, refusing to discuss my main points in a piece I wrote for oD on Ramin Jahanbegloo's release and its implications, accused of me working for the Intelligence Ministry of Iran, by drawing a comparison between me and a character in a Milan Kundra's novel and attacked openDemocracy over giving a voice to opinons different than his.

Interestingly enough, the article written by Mr. Postel, a self-proclaimed leftist liberal, has provided evidence for a serious neo-conservative researcher, Michael Rubin, who after serving as a political adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad and as an assistant on Iran and Iraq at Rumsfeld's office, and the author of articles such as "Don't 'Engage' Rogue Regimes. What we need is military might, not diplomatic talk," to dismiss me as a reformer who think Bush has helped Ahmadinejad's election by actively and bluntly promoting a boycott in Iran.

Unfortunately, this usually happens to journalists, such as Mr. Postel, who market themselves as experts on a country or culture without knowing a word of their language or even having spent a day there: Their well-intended work is more useful to people they have always opposed.

Most of the articles he has commissioned for oD have a strong neo-conservative angle towards Iran and this obviously requires another article which I'd have to write at some point.