If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.

Leftists should learn that fundamentalists are not our friends.

image via Wiki Commons.

Seventy-year-old Sadegh Bana Motejaded has started something of a (dance dance) revolution in Iran, infuriating clerics, spawning many imitators, and conjuring up that apocryphal Emma Goldman quote by singing and dancing as crowds clap and chant along. He wants, he says, to make people happy. He’s also violating Iranian law.

The rule against dancing often goes unenforced, and dance has a long and rich history in Iran — something the country’s fundamentalist leadership has tried to quash in the name of religion. After an Iranian blogger posted a video of Motejaded dancing and the video was reposted to Instagram, the authorities cracked down, arresting 12 men and shutting down Instagram pages and websites. In place of the pages was a message: “this page has been shut down for creating criminal content” and the owner of the page “has been dealt with.” The men were reportedly beaten and made to pledge they would not dance again.

Yes, it’s kind of like the plot of Footloose, except even more fanatical.

If we weren’t talking about people being beaten and jailed, the story of puny little zealots incensed at a sweet old guy dancing would almost be funny. I mean, how miserable and villainous do you have to be to criminalize dancing, and to put grandpa in jail for a little jig? Get a life! But religious fundamentalism is exactly this: Wretched, miserable, villainous, joy-sucking, pushed and embraced by the most contemptible people on the planet. It is indelibly tied to abuse, misogyny, encroachments on civil rights and assaults on basic freedoms. To quote Emma Goldman for real this time, “I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy… If it meant that, I did not want it.”

So why do generations of American leftists keep aligning themselves with murderous and joyless fundamentalists?