“Don’t go near those who have had the COVID vaccine. They have become homosexuals.”
You could easily think that another far-right fringer, maybe a pastor like Paula White, has been heard from.
And you’d be wrong.
From the Jerusalem Post, this is Iranian Ayatollah Abbas Tabrizian. I don’t know more about him than what’s in the article, but this sort of statement is congruent with protecting his power structure, Islam, against encroachments. So’s this:
Tabrizian has a history of derogatory opinions about Western medicine. Last year, a video showed him burning Harrison’s Manual of Medicine and saying that “Islamic medicine” had made such books “irrelevant,” according to an article on the website of Radio Farda, the Iranian branch of the US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty broadcast service.
And while this can be interpreted as an anti-Western, Islamic-centric screed, I think it’s more likely to be an attack on a far more dangerous, for Tabrizian, advance: that of rational, evidence-based medicine. The Islamic Republic of Iran, at least in the eyes of the eponymous power structure, should center its existence on Islam, not on anything else.
Because, in that way, power can be retained.
The real question is whether Tabrizian honestly believes a book that was written centuries ago can have any relevant medical knowledge. Can medicine based on “Islamic principles” compete with evidence-based medicine? I doubt it. The history of Christian, Islamic, even Traditional Chinese Medicine is that of grifting, not success.
And if Tabrizian goes looking for all of these new homosexuals, he won’t find them.
But this is a lesson for the United States. The nuttiness of the Christian far-right has been contained to the obscure corners of the country, so far. For four short years we were somewhat exposed to what happens if a President lets Christian grifters manipulate him, principally through the hydroxychloroquine debacle.
Tabrizian’s spew is a lesson to the United States why putting religious grifters or zealots in charge is a fundamentally bad idea.
