In Tehran in recent weeks, men have smashed cream pies into the faces of hapless bystanders on metro escalators. Actors posing as private taxi drivers have opened fire on passengers with red paint guns. Young people have tossed eggs at unwitting pedestrians.

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The stream of prank videos captured on Tehran's real-life streets and circulating on Iranian social media are not all fun and games to the Iranian authorities. Iranian police on Wednesday announced the arrest of 17 pranksters who posted the videos on a dozen Instagram pages, saying they'd incited public panic. The clips racked up thousands of views, attracting fans and imitators.

"Police strongly confronted such illegal acts," the country's state-run IRAN newspaper quoted Tehran police chief Gen. Hossein Rahimi as saying. "Publishing such clips plays with people's nerves, security and peace."

In the videos, the real victims of the pranks appear terrified and angry. One shaken man socked with a pie on the metro escalator grows incensed, chasing the laughing pranksters and lobbing a backpack and shoe at them before trying to beat one of the men up, cream still smeared over his face.

In one staged shooting, a prankster taxi driver films himself arguing with his supposed wife, an actress, in the front seat. When she starts screaming in a jealous rage about how he sent a heart emoji to her friend, he takes out a massive kitchen knife and pretends to decapitate her – leaving only a paint-stained wig. A horrified real passenger in the backseat frantically clambers out of the car.

"I just wanted to make people happy and also increase my Instagram followers," said the cake-throwing prankster, an information technology graduate identified by IRAN daily only by his first name, Shahab. He told the newspaper that after each prank he gives victims some $20, does their laundry and seeks their permission to publish the video on social media.

Iran's conservative authorities, many with religious sensibilities who view Western influence with suspicion, maintain tight control over the internet and block access to various websites like YouTube and Twitter. Young Iranians still manage workarounds, accessing social media through VPNs and proxies.

The government also has accelerated a long-running crackdown on what it describes as un-Islamic and immoral internet activity. Female models have landed in jail for posting photos of themselves or not wearing their mandatory headscarves outside. Pranksters and mischief-makers have been swept up on charges of spreading fear and panic with their online tomfoolery.

In 2014, police arrested a group of young Iranians who appeared in videos dancing to Pharrell Williams' hit song "Happy."

Typically detainees are released on bail and ordered to pay hefty fines.

Hard-liners, now in control of all levers of power in Iran, long have viewed social messaging and media services as part of a "soft war" by the West against the Islamic Republic. They say Westernization is attempting to tarnish the country's Islamic beliefs.

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He's recently published "The Conservative Sensibility" – no subtitle – a 538-page reflection on Western political philosophy and tradition, and the specifically American vision of the Founders.

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"A sensibility," he writes, "is more than an attitude but less than an agenda." The American conservative sensibility, he adds, includes "an unsentimental, almost bleak realism," while applying "general principles to untidy realities."

American conservatives in the current era, he argues, have no higher obligation than to defend the "classical liberal tradition" upon which the United States was founded. For more than a century, that tradition has been under attack by progressivism which "began as a forthright rejection of the Founders' philosophy." Today's progressives seek nothing less than "the overthrow of the Founders' classical liberalism."

Of the 10 chapters in this volume, all worth reading, only one grapples with foreign policy. But that single chapter is packed with ideas, a few of which I'll attempt to unpack here.

Dr. Will – he received a doctorate from Princeton decades before America's elite universities were debased by political correctness – begins by suggesting that in "foreign policy, as elsewhere, one of conservatism's functions is to say things that people do not want to hear, such as this: War, which has always been part of the human story, always will be." More than that: "History is, to a significant extent, a story of hostilities between groups – tribes, clans, cities, nations."

Woodrow Wilson, the most consequential progressive president (so far), rejected this reality, believing that peace conferences, transnational organizations and "the power of understanding" could end wars once and for all. This approach led to the League of Nations, a failed experiment as everyone knows, and the United Nations, a no less a failed experiment as everyone should know.

The fiction that there is a "community of nations" underlies these failures. "Nothing can be properly called a 'community' if it jumbles together entities as different as Saudi Arabia, and New Zealand, Japan, and Sudan, Italy and Iran, Norway and North Korea," Will points out. "The phrase 'community of nations' may seem harmless, if hackneyed, but it is a symptom of a blinding sentimentality."

He tells the story, perhaps apocryphal, of Wilson asking French Prime Minister Georges Clémenceau if all men are not brothers. The French statesman's reply: "Yes, all men are brothers – Cain and Abel! Cain and Abel!"

The most disastrous political calamities of the past one hundred years, Will notes, have been tied to the progressive belief that both nations and human nature "are much more malleable than they actually are." More than 100 million people have been killed due to "ambitious attempts at social engineering – attempts to create racial purity or a classless society or the New Soviet Man."

Most Americans, he writes, are "natural" isolationists, which is to say that they prefer "to think as little as possible about the rest of the world." But most also believe "that the nation does have some sort of mission."

In particular, there is the Founders' belief in natural rights, meaning rights that governments do not create but – if they are good governments – do secure for their citizens. This leads to his assertion that the Declaration of Independence's "declaration that rights, being natural, are universal must in some way inform this nation's foreign policy."

While Will favorably quotes John Quincy Adams' admonition that America "goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy," he recognizes that in the present era – an era in which the Atlantic and Pacific no longer function as moats safeguarding the castle – it is necessary "to make prudent departures from Adams' ideal."

Of course, prudence is in the eye of the beholder. As Will sees it, liberating Iraq from Saddam Hussein's clutches was not prudent. Making clear that the US will not abandon Taiwan to China's tender mercies would be.

"US practices should respond to Beijing's pressure on Taiwan with a reciprocal defiance worthy of a great nation friendly to a small nation that has few friends," he wrote in a column last month.

Supporting democrats abroad should not be confused with exporting democracy abroad, also known as nation-building, a task requiring skills Americans haven't mastered, and based on this faulty premise: "If everyone yearns for freedom, and freedom is understood identically everywhere, how hard can building a democratic nation be?"

The truth, Will writes – political incorrectness alert! – is that "some cultures lack the requisite aptitudes for democracy." A democratic society "requires talents and aptitudes that do not appear spontaneously, and are not distributed democratically, meaning evenly, across the globe."

Does that imply that Americans should turn a blind eye and a cold shoulder to such cultures?

No. His argument instead is that US foreign policy should "create incentives for the slow, incremental modification of certain national characters to bring them more into conformity with the universalism of the American creed. Pressure can come from the United States by the constant support – rhetorical, financial, diplomatic – of people in those countries who are asserting natural rights that have been denied recognition."

Do you disagree? If so, I suspect you'll need to rack your brains to figure out why and to frame a cogent dissent. I'll be eager to hear what you come up with.

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Church leaders and conservative politicians set off a storm of indignation on social media this week when they demanded that a concert by Mashrou' Leila, scheduled to take place in the coastal city of Byblos on Aug. 9, be canceled, saying the group's songs are an insult to Christianity.

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The indie rock band, whose lead singer and song writer Hamed Sinno is openly gay, has been a champion of LGBTQ rights in the Arab world and regularly sings against controversial subjects such as sectarianism, corruption and other social problems.

The band has previously been banned from performing in Jordan and Egypt, but censorship demands threatening its concert in the more liberal Lebanon – where it has performed on numerous occasions – are new.

"After looking at the goals of Mashrou' Leila and the content of the songs it performs which infringe on religious and humanitarian values ... we call on authorities to suspend their performance on the land of holiness, civilization and history," a statement issued by the Christian Maronite Archdiocese of Byblos said.

On Facebook, a group calling itself the "Soldiers of God" started a campaign against the concert, posting warnings suggesting it would take to the streets to prevent the event from taking place. Others weighed in, starting a hashtag that called for stopping the performance.

Taken aback, the group hit back on Monday, saying it has been surprised by the "defamatory campaign."

"It's very sad that some of the lyrics from our songs have been cherry picked, taken out of context and twisted into a meaning very far from what the songs are actually about," a statement issued by the band said.

The rhetoric by religious and conservative figures spurred a response from activists, rights groups and outraged Lebanese, angry over what they see as their country's mounting suppression of freedom of expression.

"This is so ridiculous. The whole world seems to be regressing into illiberalism," wrote renowned Lebanese-American writer and novelist Rabih Alameddine, who performed with the band at The Met Breuer in New York earlier this month.

"Mashrou' Leila is one of the greatest things to happen to the Middle East."

The band, whose name translates as "Night Project," was founded 10 years ago by a group of architecture students at the American University of Beirut whose songs challenged stereotypes through their music and lyrics.

Riding on the wave Arab Spring uprisings that swept the Middle East, the band was embraced by Arab youth who see its music as part of a cultural and social revolution. The band members have gone on to gain worldwide acclaim, performing in front of sold-out crowds in the United States, Berlin, London and Paris.

Their August concert in Byblos would be their third show at the Mediterranean venue north of Beirut, the Lebanese capital. It was not clear what the organizers plan to do in the face of the controversy; they were not taking any calls on Wednesday.

Amnesty International issued a statement Tuesday calling on the Lebanese government to ensure the band is protected and the concert goes ahead.

"It is unconscionable that there continue to be such calls emanating from institutions that are meant to serve as role models to their constituencies, and can and should be upholding the right to freedom of expression," said Lynn Maalouf, Amnesty's head of research for the Middle East.

It was not clear what specifically triggered the current outburst. Some critics cited a photo shared online by Sinno that depicts a painting of the Virgin Mary with her head replaced by the pop star Madonna.

The debate has been trending on Twitter for days.

In a country beset by political, economic and financial troubles, many lamented the focus on the arts and censorship.

"What's wrong? Why do you insist on taking us back to the middle ages? Is it not enough that we are collectively sliding backward without any breaks? Is it not enough the despair we live in, on all levels?" Joelle Boutros, an activist, posted on Facebook.

Columnist Diana Skaini, writing in the daily An-Nahar, said the debate goes beyond Mashrou' Leila, to the heart of Lebanon and its message as a country.

"Either we consecrate bans and populism and say goodbye to what remains of this moderate spot, or we confront this tyrannical wave that goes against our pluralistic and diverse country," she said.

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