Telos Press author Matthias Küntzel was recently interviewed by the Times of Israel regarding a planned trade mission by the German Near and Middle East Association, or NUMOV, to Iran in December. Küntzel’s forthcoming book, Germany and Iran: From the Aryan Axis to the Nuclear Threshold, will be published by Telos Press in November.
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Obama’s New Iran Policy and the Temptation of Appeasement Matthias Küntzel, author of Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism, and the Roots of 9/11 (Telos Press, 2008), will speak on “Obama’s New Iran Policy and the Temptation of Appeasement,” at Columbia University on Wednesday, March 12th, at 5:30pm. The event is being sponsored by LionPAC, the Columbia University Chapter of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, and the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy. The location of the event will be Uris Hall, Room 141. HAMBURG, November 24, 2013—During the night of November 24, 2013, it came to this: The five permanent members of the Security Council and Germany signed an interim agreement that accepts the plutonium facility at Arak and approves Iran’s continued uranium enrichment. “This deal appears to provide the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism with billions of dollars in exchange for cosmetic concessions,” criticized Senator Mark Kirk (R-Illinois). The following paper was presented at the Seventh Annual Telos Conference, held on February 15–17, 2013, in New York City. As the debate over the invitation to former Iranian President Mohammed Khatami to speak at Harvard’s Kennedy School continues, it is useful to contemplate specific aspects of his record. Because Mohammed Khatami was outflanked on his right by other extremists, he has sometimes appeared as a moderate. Because he has published books and taught at a university, he has been lauded as an intellectual. Yet his government led a brutal crackdown on university students in 1999, and his credentials as a reformer are dubious indeed. His visit to the US, seeking a “dialogue of cultures,” takes place in the context of an emerging campaign against “secular and liberal” faculty of the Iranian universities. Some pieces of the puzzle: In an account of the status on “Women in Iran—A Look at President Khatami’s First Year in Office,” by Donna M. Hughes in Z Magazine, of October 1998, one reads: Some analysts have said that the election of Mohammed Khatami to the position of President was due to the votes of women. Khatami’s strongest distinction seems to be that he was not the hard-line government’s favorite candidate. His election was no doubt a vote against the hard-liners. His upset election has garnered him the label of “moderate,” and raised expectations of people inside and outside of Iran. Khatami has been in office one year now. Is he a moderate? Has the status of women markedly improved in Iran since his election? There is a widely held view that Khatami supports the rights of women, but his statements and appointments don’t validate that view. Prior to his election Khatami said, “One of the West’s most serious mistakes was the emancipation of women, which led to the disintegration of families. Staying at home does not mean marginalization. Being a housewife does not prevent a woman from having a role in the destiny of her people. We should not think that social activity means working outside the home. Housekeeping is among one of the most important jobs.” (emphasis added) Former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami will be speaking at Harvard’s Kennedy School on Sunday, September 10. The timing of the talk is particularly embarrassing: Iran has recently accelerated its purge of liberal and secular elements from its universities, as recently discussed here. To make matters worse, the topic of Khatami’s address is the “Ethics of Tolerance in the Age of Violence.” The title reads like a parody of Iranian policy. The situation in Iran is dire: “Earlier this year, Iran retired dozens of liberal university professors and teachers. And last November, Ahmadinejad’s administration for the first time named a cleric to head the country’s oldest university in Tehran amid protests by students over the appointment.” It is sorry that Harvard would give a platform to a representative of a dictatorial regime currently crushing its own academic world. That this takes place the day before the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks testifies to a particular callousness. |
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A Presentation by Matthias Küntzel 
German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s magnum opus, Being and Time (1927), constitutes one of the most important contributions to philosophy of the last century. Beyond having a defining influence on numerous fields of study within philosophy that include but are not limited to existentialism, post-structuralism, and deconstruction, Heidegger has often been viewed as “the most creative religious writer of the twentieth century” (Ireton, 243). It should thus not be surprising that his ideas were widely received and regarded by Iranian intellectuals and students before (and after) the Iranian Revolution of 1979. One of the main seeds of Heideggerian thought that blossomed particularly well in the Iranian context was his notion of authenticity (Eigentlichkeit). Used by Heidegger to draw ontological distinctions, authenticity inspired a politicized discourse—among its Iranian readers—on a return to an “authentic” self. The authenticity of the Iranian return to the self firmly grounded on a separation from imposed Western ideals. A tendency among Iranians toward the study of existentialism[1] in addition to Heidegger’s poignant critique of a decadent West cloaked in religious terminology made him an excellent partner to a group of Iranian intellectuals unsatisfied with a despotic monarch perceived to be antagonistic to Islam. 
