Peter Kohanloo's blog

The Dictator or the Pundit?

Peter Kohanloo — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 18:00:49 +0000

Last week, Foreign Policy ran a curious item by the Iranian-American journalist and commentator Reza Aslan. Juxtaposing selected quotations from Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and Republican presidential aspirant Rick Santorum, Aslan challenged readers to determine “Who said what?” The purpose of this sophomoric exercise was to demonstrate how Khamenei and Santorum are supposedly theocratic mirror images of each other.

The Diaspora's Conscience

Peter Kohanloo — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 19:20:32 +0000

In the epic poem The Book of Kings, the 11th-century Iranian bard Ferdowsi warns of how "Unrighteous thought and the turn of days / Combine to seal one's fate." Ferdowsi's verse expresses the ethical injunction, deeply ingrained in Persian culture, to speak truthfully in times of personal and collective crisis. Today, as the clerical regime in Tehran grows ever more repressive at home and defiant abroad, Iranian-Americans have a special responsibility to speak out clearly on the moral stakes at the heart of the U.S.-Iran conflict.

An Attack On All Iranian Americans

Peter Kohanloo — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 17:52:11 +0000

On Monday, my friend and occasional co-author Sohrab Ahmari published an incisive review of A Single Roll of the Dice, a new book by the National Iranian American Council’s Trita Parsi, in The Wall Street Journal. Ahmari’s critique was entirely substantive in nature, taking Parsi to task for blaming everyone but the Iranian regime for the failure of President Obama’s “engagement” policy. Ahmari’s bottom line: “Mr.