OK, I understand the Taiwan News‘ opposition to a possible strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, but its editors must have been on crack to print this column from the Christian Science Monitor. Most hilarious line:
[If attacked,] nationalistic Iranians will then erase any memory of their Jewish-sympathetic history.
As evidence for this history, the writer, Kaveh L. Afrasiabi, refers to Cyrus the Great, who lived 1500 years ago. Conveniently unmentioned is the Iranian caliph who forced his Jewish subjects to wear yellow stars – a full 11 centuries before the Nazis. Or the Iranian pogroms of the late 19th and early 20th Century. (The last of which occurred in 1910.) Or the 1994 Iranian-backed suicide bombing of the Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires. Or that the current government of Iran forbids Jewish families from traveling abroad together, to prevent emigration. Or that it executes without trial people who assist Jewish emigration.
But I guess none of that matters, when you can cherry pick history and find ONE positive example in fifteen hundred years. I’m surprised a disingenuous asswipe like Mr. Afrasiabi didn’t try to tell his readers that Iran needs all that heavy water for medicinal purposes, like the international affairs deputy of the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization once did.
Elsewhere, the author complains about the ‘Islamofascist’ label:
Iranian television has been featuring programs sympathetic to the Holocaust… – [this fact weighs] against the Hitlerian image of Iran.
Ah, yes – but the writer neglects to point out that in one of these "sympathetic" programs, the Iranians place the blame for the Holocaust … on the evil Zionists! At any rate, leading Iranian "moderate" Ayatollah Rafsanjani is not quite so sympathetic – he’s on record as praising Adolf Hitler for doing such a good job at solving that pesky Jewish problem. (Speaking of Iranian TV, how could the author have overlooked educating his readers about classic Iranian sci-fi B-movies, such as this one about an evil futuristic queen wearing a Star of David?)
But, since the writer brings up the subject, lets discuss similarities between Iran and Nazi Germany. From the November 11th edition of the Weekly Standard:
On April 9, 2007, the province of Tehran’s headquarters for intelligence and security sent a letter from Revolutionary Guard Colonel Husayni to provincial police forces telling them to review any Baha’i-held business licenses and exclude Baha’is from "high earning" and "sensitive" areas. With paranoid scope, "sensitive" areas include not only "newspaper and periodical shops," "publishing and bookselling," and "Internet cafes," but also "jewelry and watch making, coffee shops, gravures, the tourist industry, car rentals, hotel management, and tailoring and training institutes."
Because Baha’is are held, as apostates, to be religiously unclean, they were also to be banned from "catering at reception halls," restaurants and cafes, grocery stores, pastry, coffee, and kebab shops, and ice cream parlors. Finally, for reasons unclear, they must be excluded from "stamp making," "childcare," and "real estate," as well as cultural areas.
Baha’is are under other pressures. They are vilified in the media. Banks are closing their accounts and refusing loans.
Sounds a bit like the Nazi race laws, no? Although I suspect that even the Nazis didn’t send death squads against people who let their Party membership cards expire:
In the 1990s, the Islamic Republic of Iran used death squads against converts, including major Protestant leaders, and the situation is worsening under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The regime is currently engaged in a systematic campaign to track down and reconvert or kill those who have changed their religion from Islam.
The Weekly Standard makes an extraordinary claim in the same article, which I was reluctant to believe:
Iran also regards Baha’is as heretics from Islam and denies them any legal rights, including the right to life: There is no penalty for killing a Baha’i.
Wrong I was. Elsewhere, I found this case:
| Sep 1993 |
An [Iranian] Islamic judge announces that he has found 2 brothers guilty of the abduction and burning to death of a Baha’i man. However, the judge will not be sending them to jail nor will he award the dead man’s family the traditional blood money as compensation because the murderers are Muslims and the victim was a member of the "heretical" Baha’i sect. |
So, kill a Bahai in Iran, and the judge WILL find you guilty – you just won’t receive a sentence. For those of you who think that hunting humans is the ultimate sport, Iran may just be your kinda place.
Finally, and not to belabor the point, during Ahmadinejad’s recent trip to America, he had a "Dialog of Civilizations"-type meeting with leftist religious leaders. It is said that his only condition for showing up was that no Bahais would be present. Untermenschen, doncha know. But then, isn’t that just the sort of thing you’d expect from the leader of a country whose name, when translated, means "Land of the Aryans"?
UPDATE (Nov 10/07): The column, "The cost of U.S. bellicosity towards Iran," is now registration only at Taiwan News, but is available at the Christian Science Monitor. One obvious question I neglected to ask in the post of Mr. Afrasiabi: Since you say Iran is so congenial a place for Jews, perhaps you could provide us with Iranian Jewish immigration figures to back that up. I mean, they must all be dyin’ to get in, right?
UPDATE #2: Apparently Mr. Afrasiabi isn’t exactly a disinterested third party: he was once an adviser to Iran’s nuclear negotiating team. A pity that little fact wasn’t disclosed at the end of the column.
UPDATE #3: Geez, am I really that dense? Afrasiabi’s statement that Iran will forget its "Jewish-sympathetic" history wasn’t meant as an insult to people’s intelligence, but as a THREAT. Attack Iran, and its population of Jewish hostages gets it. That’s the real message.
