If conservatives have been feeling a bit discouraged about politics lately, we should cheer up: There is good news from Tehran. For, according to the New York Times (May 31), the Iranian parliament has just affirmed its support for one of our own: “Iran Lawmakers Re-elect Their Conservative Speaker,” says the Times headline.
The “conservative” parliamentarian in question, Ali Larijani, has been speaker since 2008. But elections in February had not gone well for his faction, leading to speculation that Larijani might get the heave-ho this past week. Well, it was not to be: For reasons unknown, his “moderate” opponent Mohammad Reza Aref withdrew his candidacy a few days before balloting, and Larijani was reelected speaker by a near-unanimous vote.
For its part, the Times sought to reassure readers: Larijani, it reported, “is not considered a die-hard conservative” and, in any case, has supported “the government of President Hassan Rouhani, a moderate who was elected on promises of reaching a nuclear deal and loosening Iran’s severe restrictions on personal freedoms.” Any connection to a “moderate” is encouraging news, of course; and the only thing worse than a conservative speaker in Tehran would be a die-hard conservative speaker.
As readers have no doubt inferred, The Scrapbook is being sarcastic here, for while “conservative” is invariably a pejorative term in the pages of the New York Times, and “moderate” a compliment, even the Times must realize that these words, so familiar to American consumers of news, have no equivalent significance in the context of Iranian politics. In fact, it might well be argued that their meaning in the Islamic Republic is, at best, paradoxical: An American “conservative”—someone who believes in freedom of conscience, economic opportunity, and the values of the Enlightenment—would be the opposite of the hard-line Islamists who govern Iran and find common cause with the Obama White House and State Department.
It is possible that the Times does understand this, since the balance of its story employs a variety of descriptive adjectives, some of which are closer to the truth than others. Iran’s supreme leader, for example, is described as a “hard-liner”—which is accurate, of course, and may be applied to politicians of any persuasion. Except in the New York Times, where the only hard-liners and die-hards on earth—indeed, the only reliably all-purpose bad guys—are those “conservatives,” and we know who they are.
