Does This Sound Familiar?

The New York Times reports today that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, that wonderful guy who denies the Holocaust and calls for Israel's destruction is now advocating the purging of liberal and secular professors from Iranian universities:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/06/world/middleeast/06iran.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

"Our educational system has been affected by 150 years of secular thought and has raised thousands of people who hold Ph.D's" the President said.

Hmm, where have we heard this kind of talk in recent months? Why, I believe we have heard something very similar from David Horowitz, the Marxist turned hard line conservative who has been sounding the alarm in his book "The Professors" about 101 liberal/left professors on American campuses whom he claims are indoctrinating unsuspecting students with liberal, secular ideas. Horowitz, who has been has been ardently supported by right-wing talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, urge taxpayers to find out what professors' political views are and demand that more conservatives get hired on campuses.

Sounds to me like Horowitz and Ahmadinejad have a common enemy; liberal, democratic and secular Western civilization with its emphasis on free-thinking and open scientific inquiry. For its part, the Bush Administration claims to be defending America from the threat of fundamentalist Islamo-fascism; but their own obiesance to fundamentalist Evangelical Christianity with its denial of evolution and global warming and intense hostility to abortion and women's freedom to control their own bodies, itself has a quasi-fascist feel that is very reminiscent of the mentality of the guys in the turbans. Both Bush and Ahmadinejad want a clash of civilizations--from Bush's side a crusade of militant Christianity against militant Islam. Hmm, as far as I can recall, the last time militant Christians threw a crusade against Muslims, an awful lot of Jews ended up getting it in the neck.
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Oh and another cheery item. In Russia, a number of provinces are now making the teaching of Russian Orthodox "culture" a required part of the public school curiculum. Rabbi Berel Lazar, the Chabadnik who was made chief rabbi by President Putin, and who has constantly praised Putin as a great friend of the Jews and refused to denounce Putin's successful efforts to destroy democracy in Russia, is now expressing concern in an Aug. 29 interview with a Moscow radio station that the course on Orthodox culture will “divide children into different classes” and ostracize minorities.
http://www.jta.org/page_view_story.asp?intarticleid=17023&intcategoryid=2

Well, when they throw democracy out the window, religious coercion by the majority against religious minorities tends to pop up. By the way, a few months back I took part in a debate at the American Jewish Committee on the subject of church and state during which I and my partner, Elie Rubenstein, were informed by our opponents Alex Goldin and Lenny Gussel that Russian Jews in the U.S. don't see the need for groups like the AJCommittee to be such ardents fighters in support of the principle of separation of church and state; that more religion in the public square is a good and beneficial idea. Well, guys, here you have Exhibition A straight from Moscow to show you why the mainstream American Jewish community has always fought efforts to blur the separation of church and state.