Even sympathetic experts framed Khomeini as a throwback and Iran as a circus

Evidence

There were slightly more subtle ways of incriminating “Islam” than the New Republic’s. One was to put an expert before the public and have him or her suggest that even though Khomeini was not really “representative of Islamic clergy” (this was L. Dean Brown, former United States ambassador to Jordan and special envoy to Lebanon, president of the Middle East Institute, speaking on the MacNeil/Lehrer Report November 16), the “ironclad” mullah was a throwback to an earlier (obviously more authentic) Islamic age; the mobs in Teheran reminded Brown of Nuremberg, just as the street demonstrations were signs of “the circus as principal entertainment” habitually provided by dictators. — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 234

Categorization

• XREF: Mirrors the false-binary move in the earlier chapter: the moderate expert still recruits his subject into a tyranny-versus-order framework.

Related

• The 1979 Iran hostage crisis made Khomeini the embodiment of Islamic evil to Americans. (similarity 0.79)
• Criticizing the Iranian regime can mask an attack on Islam in general (similarity 0.79)