The Baha'i Faith & Religious Freedom of Conscience

From: jricole@my-dejanews.com <jricole@my-dejanews.com>
Subject: destroying intellectuals
Date: Wednesday, January 20, 1999 12:49 PM
In a recent message, Susan Maneck quoted me as saying that "this thing is a
totalitarian cult" and that "it destroys any intellectual who gets involved
with it."
This message, I would like to point out, was a purely private one sent in the
summer of 1996 when the Baha'i administration was investigating and
threatening large numbers of my old friends.  Obviously, I was over-wrought,
and Susan at that point was an old friend who represented herself as
sympathetic.  Even then, the referent in my own mind of "this thing" was not
the Baha'i faith as a whole, but rather its elite power structure.
Unfortunately, Susan Maneck has now turned herself into the Linda Tripp of
the Baha'i faith, and is quite unconscionably employing my old private
conversations with her as a means of attempting to undermine my credibility. 
Posting a private message without my permission is a violation of my
copyright, and so she is breaking the law as well as being unethical.  What
she does not realize is that she is simply proving my point.  The people
giving her her instructions did destroy me as a Baha'i intellectual, and now
they have also succeeded in suborning her.  Of course, in employing private
communications to discredit people, she is just doing what Baha'i
administrators like Firuz Kazemzadeh did to the Dialogue editors.  It is not
a new thing among those people.
I continue to deny that in the period 1972-1996 I ever contravened the Baha'i
covenant in any way.  I continue demand that any credible evidence be
presented that I ever did so.  I continue to affirm that the UHJ had me
accused of doing so in April of 1996. In so doing, all they did was reveal
what kind of organization they are running.
cheers    Juan Cole
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