Apology and Brief Iran Update

I apologize to readers for the form of my last blog post. Something
happend and it initially wouldn't go through. By fiddling around, a
got it to go, and then discovered that it went in one long paragraph,
and the spell check didn't work.

My Iran update is a point that I remembered after I wrote my last blog
post about Iran The present government has made the fact that the
previous president, a cleric regarded as a "liberal"(an advocate of
loosening clerical restrictions on the populations and improving
international relations, although liberals here make the good point
that he received no positive encouragement from the Bush
administation) "shook hands" with a woman abroad a major example of
"Un-islamic activities." This reminds me as an historian of an
incident in the 1920s, when British agents acted to discredit the King
of Afghanistan, who also was regarded as a liberal and an opponent of
British imperial interests in his country, by showing a photograph of
him dancing with a women abroad. I doubt the the clerical regime was
aware of this, but who knows.
At least they have yet to accuse him of holding a banner proclaiming
"Bong Hits 4 Jesus" but in the world of propaganda anything is always
possible.
Norman Markowitz