Sohrab Ahmari
Sohrab Ahmari is an Iranian-American columnist, editor, and author of nonfiction books. He is currently the op-ed editor of the New York Post and a contributing editor of The Catholic Herald. Previously, he served as a columnist and editor with The Wall Street Journal opinion pages in New York and London, and as a senior writer at Commentary.
Ahmari has published a number of non-fiction books. In 2012, he co-edited the book Arab Spring Dreams, an anthology of essays by young Middle Eastern dissidents. Ahmari's book, The New Philistines, a polemic on how identity politics are corrupting the arts, was released on October 20, 2016 from Biteback Publishing. In January 2019, Ignatius Press published his spiritual memoir, From Fire, by Water, about his conversion to Roman Catholicism.
Early life and education
Ahmari was born in Tehran, Iran. In his 2012 book, Arab Spring Dreams, he writes that he was interrogated by security officials about his parents and faced disciplinary action as a child for accidentally bringing a videocassette of Star Wars into school at a time when Western films were officially banned in the country. In 1998, at the age of 13, Ahmari moved with his family to the United States.Ahmari earned a J.D. degree from Northeastern University School of Law in Boston. Between college and law school, Ahmari had completed a two-year commitment to Teach for America in the Rio Grande Valley region of South Texas.
While in law school, inspired in part by the protests following the disputed June 2009 Iranian presidential election, he began working as a freelance journalist, contributing pieces to publications such as The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Commentary among others.
Career
''The Wall Street Journal''
After serving as a Robert L. Bartley fellow at The Wall Street Journal in 2012, Ahmari joined the publication as assistant books editor. He then served as an editorial page writer based in London, where he wrote editorials and commissions and edited op-eds for the Journal's European edition.In this position, Ahmari reviewed Trita Parsi's A Single Roll of the Dice; Christopher de Bellaigue's biography of Mohammad Mosaddegh; a collection of short stories by Portuguese Nobelist José Saramago; Tariq Ramadan's Islam and the Arab Awakening; and Richard Haass's Foreign Policy Begins at Home, among other books.
Ahmari also conducted a number of interviews with prominent politicians, activists, and intellectuals for The Journal's "Weekend Interview" feature, including French Prime Minister Manuel Valls; NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen; General Frederick "Ben" Hodges, commander of U.S. Army Europe; Senator Jon Kyl; Mojtaba Vahedi, a former chief of staff to dissident Iranian cleric Mehdi Karroubi; bioethicist Leon Kass; physicist Kip Thorne; Catholic theologian and humanitarian Jean Vanier; Saudi women's rights activist Manal al-Sharif; conservative philosopher Harvey Mansfield; campus free-speech advocate Greg Lukianoff; and former New Republic publisher and editor-in-chief Martin Peretz.
During his tenure at The Journal, Ahmari also wrote numerous op-eds. Following the June 2013 election of Hassan Rouhani as president of Iran, Ahmari highlighted Rouhani's role in the violent crackdown on a 1999 pro-democracy student uprising as well as his anti-American rhetoric. For an op-ed on the November 2013 interim nuclear agreement between Iran and the P5+1, Ahmari secured an interview with Payam Fazlinejad, a senior writer and researcher at Kayhan, the state-run Iranian newspaper which is believed to reflect the views of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
Dispute with David French
A high-profile dispute between Ahmari and National Review writer David French broke out over the summer of 2019 as a result of the publication of Ahmari's polemic "Against David French-ism", sparking numerous essays and commentaries in politically conservative publications like the National Review and The American Conservative, as well as in several non-partisan outlets like The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic. The dispute first began on May 26, 2019, when Sohrab Ahmari expressed on Twitter his frustration with a Facebook advertisement for a children’s drag queen reading hour at a library in Sacramento, California, which he described as "transvestic fetishism", and argued that there is no "polite, David French-ian third way around the cultural civil war". This prompted a response from French in a May 28 essay published in the National Review entitled "Decency Is No Barrier to Justice or the Common Good". The dispute escalated significantly after Ahmari published the essay "Against David French-ism" in the conservative religious journal First Things on May 29, 2019. The direct targeting of French and the impromptu creation of the "David French-ism" political philosophy led the essay to gain a significant profile, prompting a response from French and the publication of numerous commentaries. On September 5, 2019, French and Ahmari engaged in an in-person political debate moderated by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat at the Catholic University of America in Washington D.C., again prompting a flurry of commentaries.The dispute centered around their differing opinions on how conservatives should approach cultural and political debate, with Ahmari deriding what he calls "David French-ism", a political persuasion he defines as believing "that the institutions of a technocratic market society are neutral zones that should, in theory, accommodate both traditional Christianity and the libertine ways and paganized ideology of the other side". He argues that this belief leads to an ineffective conservative movement, and contends that the best way for culturally conservative values to prevail in society is a strategy of "discrediting...opponents and weakening or destroying their institutions", which he maintains is a tactic already utilized by progressives, leaving conservatives who adhere to the David French-style of politics impotent in what he views as a waging culture war in the United States. He argues that the political realm should be viewed as one of "war and enmity", and that the power of the government should be directly utilized to impose culturally conservative values on society. French, by contrast, advocates a conservative libertarian approach in which decency, civility, and respect for individual rights are emphasized, and argues that Ahmari's beliefs "forsake" the philosophy of classical liberalism that the Founding Fathers of the United States espoused. He placed particular criticism on Ahmari's desire for direct government intervention in the lives of individuals, which he argues is not only antithetical to liberty but is a politically ruinous tactic for conservatives, who would end up on the receiving end of progressive policies if the government were given greater license to interfere in the private lives of individuals.