Care to know a little more about respected author Steven Vincent who lived in and wrote about Basra? Steven who had a blogsite called RedzoneBlog and was suddenly whisked away by police in a white Toyota, then found later by the roadside dead?
The two paragraphs that led to his demise, [I think], and the Iran connection named Moqtada al-Sadr, a name now becoming more familiar TG
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Everyone, it seems, except the religious parties themselves, which always seem to know what to think, do, and say, especially compared to the city's frightened intellectual class. Consider, for example, Professor M. and his run-in with renegade Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. An expert in radical Shiite movements, Professor M. wrote a well-researched, politically neutral history of the Sadrist phenomenon, which ran on the front page of a daily newspaper. Unfortunately, the periodical accompanied the piece with a photograph of a Basran crowd that included women who were not wearing hejab!
Reaction was swift. Sadrists claimed that M. and the newspaper had conspired to defame them — a charge, of course, both parties vehemently denied. No matter. M. began receiving increasingly disturbing death threats, which climaxed when someone fired a bullet through his front window. Despite his innocence, he published an open-letter apology to the Sadrists in the newspaper, which, to mollify the populist thugs, reprinted the article with a more acceptable photo of women bundled in their Islamic-sanctioned fabric prisons.
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More of Steven's eye - opening copy can be read at:
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/vincent200506210821.asp
NationalReview.com TG
