Your Move, FIDE

The WaPo, coming late to the party, reports on the boycott, led by the unfortunately named Nazi Paikidze, of the Women's World Chess Championship because it is to be held in apartheid Iran.  Since the WaPo article is all I know about her, I cannot tell if Nazi is a political moron or a political genius.  She may well be a political genius.

Of course, I approve her move wholeheartedly.  But, listen to her explanation,

A message to the people of Iran: I am not anti-Islam or any other religion. I stand for freedom of religion and choice. I'm protesting FIDE's decision not because of Iran's religion or people, but for the government's laws that are restricting my rights as a woman.

She is distinguishing between the government of Iran and the religion of Islam.  But, Iran is a theocracy and nobody there is confused on this point.  Any attack on the government is, per force, an attack on Islam and that is how Iranians see it.  Some, probably many, Iranians may even welcome such an attack, but an attack it surely is, in their eyes.

On the other hand, Westerners are deaf, dumb, and blind to any religious motivation.  The writer Sam Harris makes much of this point.  For example, Westerners have no trouble understanding that Europeans enslaved Africans out of economic self-interest, but they are wholly incapable of believing that Muslims were murdering Yazidis in anticipation of the eternal pleasures of a heavenly whorehouse.

Nazi Paikidze is not, strictly speaking, a Westerner.  An ethnic Georgian, she may be far more alert to Islam than most of us.  Having spent some years in the U.S., studying at the university of Maryland, she may also be fully aware of Western deafness to religion.  Therefore, on the one hand, her explanation may be just another sad manifestation of the suicidal Western ignorance of Islam.

On the other hand, Nazi's statement, gibberish on its face, may be a brilliant exercise in political double-entendre, worthy of a chess grand master.  Her attack on the government of Iran can be understood by shallow, naive Westerners as a political statement while, at the same time, the Iranians will hear it as the attack on Islam that it should be.  If this is, in fact, what she intends, then

Well played, Nazi Paikidze.