As part of my determined and ongoing campaign to dilute the Mere Rhetoric brand - strongly linked as it is now to an ethos of online anonymity and amatuer ranting - I'm co-sponsoring a real-life expert event with Dore Gold on Monday Nov. 2nd at the Skirball. The official co-sponsor list: Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, One Jerusalem, the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and Mere Rhetoric Media, which is a fake entity I just made up to cover MR's "dyanmic and growing stable of political and academic blogs, social media assets, and multimedia offerings" (see? branding!).

More importantly: Dore Gold on Iran. Skirball. November 2nd. I've pasted the full flier, which is nicely laid out and includes some more logistical information, after the jump. Click on it to download a full-sized copy.

You can also click through to the CJHS writeup or just RSVP preemtively because it's Dore Gold and he'll be talking about Iran on the week where the IAEA will be declaring "so we looked into that Qom site that we gave Iran weeks to clean out, and it turns out it was empty - nothing to worry about!" CJHS put on a Skirball event with Norman Podhoretz about a month ago that sold out and had an overflow line stretching almost out the door. So if you're going to attend - and you should, given how what Gold said in August is happening now and what he'll be saying next week will be happening in December - it behooves you to RSVP sooner rather than later.

Partial blurb:

One of Israel's greatest living foreign policy experts, Ambassador Gold will be speaking about his new book The Rise of Nuclear Iran: How Tehran Defies the West and about the threats posed by a resurgent Iran arming itself with weapons of mass destruction... The Rise of Nuclear Iran systematically lays out the elements of Iran's weaponization program: highly enriched nuclear material, long-range ballistic missiles, and nuclear-capable warheads. The revelation of the Qom enrichment facility and Iran's subsequent missile tests have confirmed all of Gold's warnings, making his book required reading for anyone who seeks to understand Tehran's current and future plans. Now Ambassador Gold will lay out a bleak case against the West's "sticks and carrots" engagement policy and highlight the consequences of its likely failure: a "nuclear umbrella" for global terrorists, a Middle East dominated by Shiite hegemony, a Western hemisphere subject to Iranian threats, and a ever-present genocidal shadow over the Jewish State.

RSVP: Click.