Censorship in Iran

The Guardian (UK) published a story on Friday about a new wave of censorship in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Iran. Scores of Western classics, Western bestsellers, and liberal Iranian novels are censored and not being published there.

One small thing worth pointing out about this. Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code is among the banned books, and it is banned because it has deeply offended Iran’s Christian community. This is worth pointing out because it indicates that the censoriousness we’re seeing here isn’t something that we should associate with Islam so much as with a certain thread in Iranian culture and perhaps in the cultures of the Middle East. The threads are all entangled.

How different would the world be if the CIA had not overthrown the liberal Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953?