Thousands march in Iran opposition protests

Nasser Karimi. Yahoo News/ Associated Press. 09/18/09. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090918/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_iran/print

TEHRAN, Iran – Hard-liners attacked senior pro-reform leaders in the streets as tens of thousands marched in competing mass demonstrations by the opposition and government supporters. Opposition protesters, chanting "death to the dictator," hurled stones and bricks in clashes with security forces firing tear gas.

The opposition held its first major street protests since mid-July, with marchers decked out in green — the reform movement's color — waving V-for-victory signs on major boulevards in the capital.

In some cases on several blocks away, larger crowds marched in government-sponsored rallies marking an annual anti-Israel commemoration, waving pictures of Iran's supreme leader and president and placards denouncing the Jewish state.

The commemoration, known as Quds Day, is a major political occasion for the government — a day for it to show its anti-Israeli credentials and its support for the Palestinians. Quds is the Arabic word for Jerusalem. During a speech for the rallies, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad railed against Israel and the West, questioning whether the Holocaust occurred and calling it a pretext for occupying Arab land.

But the opposition was determined to turn the day into a show of its survival and continued strength despite a fierce three-month-old crackdown against it since the disputed June 12 presidential election.

Top opposition leaders joined the protests, in direct defiance of commands by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who barred anti-government demonstrations on Quds Day. That could provoke an escalation in the crackdown: hard-line clerics have been demanding the past week that any leader backing the protests should be arrested.

Several tens of thousands joined the opposition marches, witnesses said — far smaller than the masses that turned out in the Quds Day rallies, which were helped by government organizing. Police and security forces, along with pro-government Basij militiamen, fanned out along main squares and avenues and in many cases tried to keep nearby opposition protesters away from the Quds Day rallies to prevent clashes, witnesses said.

Opposition supporters poured onto main boulevards and squares, wearing green T-shirts and wristbands and waving green banners and balloons. They waved pictures of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi and denounced Ahmadinejad, chanting "death to the dictator."

Others chanted, "Not Gaza, not Lebanon — our life is for Iran" — a slogan directly challenging the government's support for anti-Israeli Palestinian militants in Gaza and Lebanon's Hezbollah guerrilla. Some shouted for Ahmadinejad's government to resign. Some women marched with their children in tow.

But at one of the several opposition rallies around the city, a group of hard-liners pushed through the crowd and attacked former President Mohamad Khatami, a cleric who is one of the most prominent pro-reform figures, according to a reformist Web site. The report cited witnesses as saying the opposition activists rescued Khatami and quickly repelled the assailants.

Opposition Web sites reported that Khatami fell to the ground, but witnesses said he was only jostled and remained standing.

Hard-liners also tried to attack the main opposition leader, Mousavi, when he joined another march elsewhere in the city, a witness said. Supporters rushed Mousavi into his car when the hard-liners approached, and the vehicle sped away as his supporters pushed the hard-liners back, the witness said. He and other witnesses spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of government retaliation.

Another pro-reform leader, Mahdi Karroubi, who also ran in the presidential election, also joined protests elsewhere in the city.

In one of the main Tehran squares, Haft-e Tir, security forces weilding batons and firing tear gas tried to break up one of the opposition marched, and were met with protesters throwing stones and bricks, witnesses said. Several policemen were seen being taken away with light injuries. At least 10 protesters were seized by plainclothes security agents in marches around the city, witnesses said.

The pro-government Quds Day rallies were held in cities around the country, and the opposition staged competing rallies in the southern and central cities of Shiraz and Isfahan, witnesses said. In Shiraz, police rushed the protesters with batons, scuffling with them, witnesses said.

The opposition claims that Ahmadinejad won the June election by fraud and that Mousavi is the rightful victor. Hundreds of thousands marched in support of Mousavi in the weeks after the vote, until police, Basij and the elite Revolutionary Guard crushed the protests, arresting hundreds. The opposition says 72 people were killed in the crackdown, thought the government puts the number at 36. The last significant protest was on July 17.

In sheer numbers, the opposition turnout was far smaller than the mass pro-government Quds Day marches — not surprising given the state's freedom to organize the gathering.

Customarily on Quds Day, Iranians gather for pro-Palestinian rallies in various parts of the city, marching through the streets and later converging for the prayer ceremony. The ceremony was established in 1979 by the leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Just hundreds of yards (meters) away from opposition protesters on the main Keshavarz Boulevard, thousands of Ahmadinejad supporters marched carrying huge photographs of the president and Supreme Leader Khamenei. Some in the government-sponsored rally chanted: "Death to those who oppose the supreme leader!"

At the climax of the occasion, Ahmadinejad addressed worshippers before Friday prayers at the Tehran University campus, reiterating his anti-Holocaust rhetoric that has drawn international condemnation since 2005. He questioned whether the "Holocaust was a real event" and saying Israel was created on "a lie and mythical claims."

Israel Radio Show Captivates Iranians

Yaroslav Trofimov. The Wall Street Journal. 6/23/2009 (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124571901245939581.html#printMode)

JERUSALEM—In his Friday sermon, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei reserved special wrath for "Zionist radio" that he said tried to drive a wedge between the Iranian people and the Islamic Republic. Such attention from Iran's supreme leader was music to the ears of Menashe Amir, a bespectacled Iranian-born Israeli who has been broadcasting in Persian from Jerusalem for the past five decades.

"We're listened to in Iran and considered very credible and effective," Mr. Amir says with pride. "We're close to the Iranian people, we know what they want, and we have our sources that give us detailed news about everything that's going on in Iran."

The spread of the Internet and satellite television in Iran over the past decade seemed to eclipse the prominence of Mr. Amir's old-fashioned shortwave broadcasts on Kol Israel, Israel's public radio. But now, as the Web in Iran is either blocked or dramatically slowed and satellite-TV channels are jammed by the government amid spreading unrest, Mr. Amir has suddenly become relevant again.

"Today we have many more listeners inside the country because Iranians are thirsty for any information" about the unrest, the 69-year-old Mr. Amir says. He estimates the Iranian audience for Kol Israel's 85-minute daily show in Persian is between two million and six million people. Independent audience numbers, for obvious reasons, are impossible to come by.

Though semiretired, Mr. Amir has been hosting the show every day since Iran's controversial June 12 elections, narrating news summaries and taking live telephone calls from listeners within Iran. The call-in part of the broadcast, normally a weekly feature, is now on air daily due to the current unrest. Because Iran bans phone and postal links with Israel, Iranian callers dial a special number in Germany; as a precaution, Mr. Amir asks them not to mention their names or hometowns.

On a recent day, as Mr. Amir sat in his tiny studio in Kol Israel's Jerusalem offices, one caller from Iran, his voice trembling with emotion, recounted how "there's blood on the streets and people are being killed like butterflies." Another urged the world to help the protesters—reminding that Persian emperor Cyrus the Great protected and aided the Jews two and a half millennia ago, and asking the Jewish state to repay the favor by supporting Iranian demonstrators today.

Mr. Amir hasn't made any calls to sources inside Iran for decades, he says, fearing his voice would be recognizable to anyone who may be monitoring his contacts' phones. But he and other journalists at the service keep in touch via email and other means of electronic communications with local sources.

He boasts of being able to beat the competition on anything from the latest price of cheese in Tehran to confidential discussions within the Islamic Republic's establishment.

Neatly dressed in a dark suit, white shirt and a tie despite Jerusalem's sweltering heat, Mr. Amir embodies the golden age in Israel's relationship with Iran, the Jewish state's closest regional ally until the shah was overthrown in 1979's Islamic revolution.

"I am 100% Iranian, and I wish the best to Iran. Israel and Iran are natural friends," he says, his studio decorated with posters of Iranian movie stars, a printout of an Iranian flag and a family photograph of Prince Reza Pahlavi, the late shah's exiled son and heir.

"There are still many who remember the period of fruitful cooperation between Israel and Iran, and they want it back," Mr. Amir adds.

Still, Israeli analysts caution, Mr. Amir's vision of renewed Israeli-Iranian friendship is unlikely to materialize in the foreseeable future, even if the protesters, led by former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi, somehow gain the upper hand in Tehran.

"The entire population has been raised for the past 30 years with the cultic mantra of "death to Israel," " says Prof. Ze'ev Maghen, a Persian speaker who heads the Middle East Studies department at Israel's Bar Ilan University. "It's almost impossible to conceive of a positive outlook on peace between Israel and Iran."

Born into a Jewish family in Tehran, Mr. Amir worked for Iran's Kayhan newspaper—now the mouthpiece of the Islamic regime—before he moved to Israel in 1960. He is one of some 60,000 such immigrants—a community that still maintains close contact with the estimated 15,000 Jews who remain inside Iran.

The community plans a demonstration of support for Tehran protesters on Tel Aviv's seafront promenade Tuesday. Iranian-born Israelis include Shaul Mofaz, until earlier this year Israel's minister of defense, who is often heard in Mr. Amir's broadcasts.

An institution in Israel, Mr. Amir, who also edits the Israeli foreign ministry's Persian-language Web site, bristles at suggestions that he must be coordinating his programming with Israeli government officials because Kol Israel is a public broadcaster that targets a strategic foe.

"Nobody gives us advice—we're the ones who give advice" to the government, he says indignantly. "We know the Iranian psychology, and can tell exactly what's happened there and what the news means."

Mr. Amir minces no word in expressing his outrage over a statement by Meir Dagan, the chief of Israel's Mossad intelligence agency, who told a parliamentary committee last week that the extent of fraud in Iran's contested presidential elections was no worse than what happens in liberal democracies.

"If that's what Mossad really thinks, they don't have any idea of what's going on in Iran," Mr. Amir said.

Kol Israel, of course, isn't the only foreign radio station broadcasting in Persian. The British Broadcasting Corporation, the Voice of America and U.S.-funded Radio Farda also beam into the Islamic Republic. Ayatollah Khamenei, however, on Friday singled out Kol Israel, naming it first in his tirade against alleged foreign interference in Iranian affairs.

"The enemies are trying through their media, which is controlled by dirty Zionists. The Zionist, U.S. and U.K. radio are all trying to say that there was a competition between those who supported and those who didn't support the state," the ayatollah said, insisting that all presidential candidates fully accepted the Islamic Republic and its government system. "Accusing the government of corruption because of Zionist reports is not the right thing."

Ayatollah Khamenei's diatribes are likely to lure new listeners to Mr. Amir's program, Israeli analysts say. "The enemy of my enemy may not be my friend," explains Shmuel Bar, director of studies at the Institute for Policy and Strategy in Herzliya. "But, if the regime is so much against it, you have to listen to it."

Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A6
Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Iranian: Israel Is a Racist State

Edward Cody. Washington Post Foreign Service. 04/21/09
( http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/20/AR2009042000145_pf.html)


PARIS, April 20 -- Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad argued before a U.N. anti-racism conference Monday that Israel is a "paragon of racism" founded on "the pretext of Jewish sufferings" during World War II.

The comments, a hard-edged version of Ahmadinejad's often-repeated anti-Zionist views, prompted several dozen European diplomats to walk out of the opening session of the week-long Geneva meeting, which the Obama administration and eight other Western nations already were boycotting. In addition, a handful of pro-Israel demonstrators shouting "shame, shame" and "racist, racist" threw red clown noses at the podium and prevented Ahmadinejad from entering a room where he was to hold a news conference.

In Washington, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Ahmadinejad's "hateful rhetoric" was "one of the reasons why you saw the administration and the president determine that its participation in this conference was not a wise thing to do."

The uproar seemed to douse any hopes that the gathering would prove more successful than the first U.N. anti-racism conference, in Durban, South Africa, in 2001. That meeting also became a forum for vitriolic condemnation of Israel.

Ahmadinejad, who just a week ago had suggested that Iran was ready for a new relationship with the United States, blamed America and its allies for a long list of ills, including the world economic crisis. He suggested that the Western model of economic liberalism was exhausted and that Western leaders, in their efforts to contain the crisis, "are simply thinking about maintaining power and wealth."

Turning to Israel, he started by asking why the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council have so much power over other nations. Although such powerful countries condemn racism in words, he said, by their deeds they "ridicule and violate all laws and humanitarian values."

"Following World War II," he continued, according to an official English-language text of his remarks, "they resorted to military aggression to make an entire nation homeless, on the pretext of Jewish sufferings and the ambiguous and dubious question" of the Holocaust.

"They sent migrants from Europe, the United States and other parts of the world, in order to establish a totally racist government in occupied Palestine," he said, "and in fact, in compensation for the dire consequences of racism in Europe, they helped bring to power the most cruel and repressive racists, in Palestine."

Ahmadinejad said Zionist supporters enjoy undue influence over Western governments, imposing "their domination to the extent that nothing can be done against their will," and he suggested that the only solution is to defeat them.

"So long as Zionist domination continues, many countries, governments and nations will never be able to enjoy freedom, independence and security," he said. "As long as they are at the helm of power, justice will never prevail in the world and human dignity will continue to be offended and trampled upon. It is time the ideal of Zionism, which is the paragon of racism, be broken."

British and French diplomats, whose governments had threatened a walkout if they heard anti-Semitic or anti-Israel remarks, left the room. Peter Gooderham, the British ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, called Ahmadinejad's remarks "outrageous" and "anti-Semitic," according to news reports.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told reporters that he deplored "the use of this platform by the Iranian president to accuse, divide and even incite," which was "the opposite of what this conference seeks to achieve."

Israel, preparing to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day starting at sundown Monday, derided the U.N. gathering for giving Ahmadinejad a forum. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu called him "a racist and a Holocaust denier who doesn't conceal his intention to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth."


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What Iran’s Jews Say

Roger Cohen.The NY Times. 02/23/09. (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/23/opinion/23cohen.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print)

At Palestine Square, opposite a mosque called Al-Aqsa, is a synagogue where Jews of this ancient city gather at dawn. Over the entrance is a banner saying: “Congratulations on the 30th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution from the Jewish community of Esfahan.”

The Jews of Iran remove their shoes, wind leather straps around their arms to attach phylacteries and take their places. Soon the sinuous murmur of Hebrew prayer courses through the cluttered synagogue with its lovely rugs and unhappy plants. Soleiman Sedighpoor, an antiques dealer with a store full of treasures, leads the service from a podium under a chandelier.

I’d visited the bright-eyed Sedighpoor, 61, the previous day at his dusty little shop. He’d sold me, with some reluctance, a bracelet of mother-of-pearl adorned with Persian miniatures. “The father buys, the son sells,” he muttered, before inviting me to the service.

Accepting, I inquired how he felt about the chants of “Death to Israel” — “Marg bar Esraeel” — that punctuate life in Iran.

“Let them say ‘Death to Israel,’ ” he said. “I’ve been in this store 43 years and never had a problem. I’ve visited my relatives in Israel, but when I see something like the attack on Gaza, I demonstrate, too, as an Iranian.”

The Middle East is an uncomfortable neighborhood for minorities, people whose very existence rebukes warring labels of religious and national identity. Yet perhaps 25,000 Jews live on in Iran, the largest such community, along with Turkey’s, in the Muslim Middle East. There are more than a dozen synagogues in Tehran; here in Esfahan a handful caters to about 1,200 Jews, descendants of an almost 3,000-year-old community.

Over the decades since Israel’s creation in 1948, and the Islamic Revolution of 1979, the number of Iranian Jews has dwindled from about 100,000. But the exodus has been far less complete than from Arab countries, where some 800,000 Jews resided when modern Israel came into being.

In Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Iraq — countries where more than 485,000 Jews lived before 1948 — fewer than 2,000 remain. The Arab Jew has perished. The Persian Jew has fared better.

Of course, Israel’s unfinished cycle of wars has been with Arabs, not Persians, a fact that explains some of the discrepancy.

Still a mystery hovers over Iran’s Jews. It’s important to decide what’s more significant: the annihilationist anti-Israel ranting, the Holocaust denial and other Iranian provocations — or the fact of a Jewish community living, working and worshipping in relative tranquillity.

Perhaps I have a bias toward facts over words, but I say the reality of Iranian civility toward Jews tells us more about Iran — its sophistication and culture — than all the inflammatory rhetoric.

That may be because I’m a Jew and have seldom been treated with such consistent warmth as in Iran. Or perhaps I was impressed that the fury over Gaza, trumpeted on posters and Iranian TV, never spilled over into insults or violence toward Jews. Or perhaps it’s because I’m convinced the “Mad Mullah” caricature of Iran and likening of any compromise with it to Munich 1938 — a position popular in some American Jewish circles — is misleading and dangerous.

I know, if many Jews left Iran, it was for a reason. Hostility exists. The trumped-up charges of spying for Israel against a group of Shiraz Jews in 1999 showed the regime at its worst. Jews elect one representative to Parliament, but can vote for a Muslim if they prefer. A Muslim, however, cannot vote for a Jew.

Among minorities, the Bahai — seven of whom were arrested recently on charges of spying for Israel — have suffered brutally harsh treatment.

I asked Morris Motamed, once the Jewish member of the Majlis, if he felt he was used, an Iranian quisling. “I don’t,” he replied. “In fact I feel deep tolerance here toward Jews.” He said “Death to Israel” chants bother him, but went on to criticize the “double standards” that allow Israel, Pakistan and India to have a nuclear bomb, but not Iran.

Double standards don’t work anymore; the Middle East has become too sophisticated. One way to look at Iran’s scurrilous anti-Israel tirades is as a provocation to focus people on Israel’s bomb, its 41-year occupation of the West Bank, its Hamas denial, its repetitive use of overwhelming force. Iranian language can be vile, but any Middle East peace — and engagement with Tehran — will have to take account of these points.

Green Zoneism — the basing of Middle Eastern policy on the construction of imaginary worlds — has led nowhere.

Realism about Iran should take account of Esfehan’s ecumenical Palestine Square. At the synagogue, Benhur Shemian, 22, told me Gaza showed Israel’s government was “criminal,” but still he hoped for peace. At the Al-Aqsa mosque, Monteza Foroughi, 72, pointed to the synagogue and said: “They have their prophet; we have ours. And that’s fine.”

Iran to try 3 it says were spying for Israel

Nazila Fathi,Isabel Kershner, New York Times. 11/26/2008.
(http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/11/26/MNT114C8QT.DTL)


(11-26) 04:00 PST Tehran -- Iran has broken a spy ring working for Israeli's intelligence service, Mossad, and will seek the death penalty for three suspects in custody, Iran's prosecutor general announced Tuesday.

The prosecutor general, Saeed Mortazavi, said the suspects, members of Baseej, Iran's volunteer militia, were expected to get close to senior members of the Revolutionary Guard so they could "assassinate military scientists and blow up strategic military and missile facilities."

At a news conference covered by the semiofficial Fars news agency, he said they would be tried within a month, and, if convicted of moharebeh - crimes against Islam and the state - they would be sentenced to death. Conviction on lesser charges could mean 10 years in prison, he said.

Mortazavi said the suspects had been trained in 21 sessions to carry out assassinations, plant bombs, drive cars and motorcycles professionally and use special cameras, computers and satellite equipment. Three additional suspects are under surveillance, he said.

The leader of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, Mohammad Ali Jafari, said Monday that its intelligence bureau had detected the spy ring.

Mortazavi said Tuesday that the inquiry started six months ago. He said evidence was found on the suspects' laptops and satellite phones. "They also had advanced and sophisticated digital cameras for taking still shots and videos," Fars quoted him as saying.

Assessing the strength of the government's case is difficult. The Israeli government has declined to comment on it, but Prime Minister Ehud Olmert recently hinted at intelligence achievements, without elaborating. Mossad is widely considered one of the world's most effective intelligence organizations, but as such, its activities are secret.

Iran's announcement was made amid severe tension between Israel and Iran, which does not recognize Israel. Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is hostile to Israel.

Israel, which has a nuclear arsenal, has said it is convinced that Iran will soon be able to make nuclear weapons.

Israel bombed an Iraqi nuclear site in 1981 and what it suspected was a Syrian nuclear site in 2007. In June, Israel conducted a major military exercise that U.S. officials said appeared to have been a rehearsal for a potential bombing attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.

Last week, Iran executed Ali Ashtari, who had been convicted of spying for Israel, and warned that its war with Israel had become "more serious."



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Iran hangs man convicted of spying for Israel

Nazila Fathi, New York Times. 11/23/2008. San Francisco Chronicle
(http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/11/23/MNJB14A9SD.DTL&type=printable)


Iran has executed a man convicted of spying for Israel, the semiofficial Fars news agency reported Saturday.

The agency reported that Ali Ashtari was executed by hanging Monday. It said he was arrested in 2006 and confessed during his trial in June to spying for Israel through security and telecommunication equipment.

Iranian news media reported in June that Ashtari, 45, had received a death sentence for spying. At the time, newspapers said he had been the manager of a company selling communication and security equipment to the Iranian government.

An Israeli official said in June that Israel had no knowledge of his case.

Tension between Iran and Israel has escalated in recent months over Iran's nuclear program. Israel has not ruled out launching a military strike against Iran's nuclear facilities. Iran does not recognize Israel as a state, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has spoken of Israel with hostility since his election in 2005.

A Web site affiliated with the Iranian Intelligence Ministry has reported that a high-profile blogger, Hossein Derakhshan, was also arrested this month and accused of spying for Israel. Judiciary officials have not confirmed his arrest but the Web site, Jahan News, reported that he had confessed to spying for Israel.

Derakhshan, an Iranian Canadian, had lived in Canada since 2000 but moved back to Tehran a few weeks ago. He traveled to Israel in 2007 and wrote about it on his blog.

Abraham Rabinovich, an Israeli journalist who interviewed Derakhshan in Jerusalem two years ago, described him in an opinion piece for the International Herald Tribune on Friday as an "Iranian patriot" who through his blog "offered the first views of ordinary life in Israel that Iranians had been able to see."

Rabinovich quoted Derakhshan as saying: "I want to humanize Israel for Iranians and tell them it's not what the Islamic propaganda machine is saying, that Israelis are thirsty for Muslim blood. And I want to show Israel that the average Iranian isn't even thinking about doing harm to Israel."




http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/11/23/MNJB14A9SD.DTL

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Israel Gets Real on Iran

Trita Parsi. 10/15/ 2008. Rootless Cosmopolitan. Tony Karon Blog.
(http://tonykaron.com/2008/10/15/israel-gets-real-on-iran/#comment-38698)



Guest Post: Trita Parsi The distinction between the apocalyptic rhetoric Israeli leaders use publicly in relation to Iran, and the more pragmatic view they hold among themselves on how to deal with Tehran and its nuclear program, has long been clear to anyone paying very close attention. In short, it’s clear that many of Israel’s key leaders don’t believe Iran is a suicidal ideologically-crazed regime that would risk destroying itself in order to destroy Israel, and therefore that even a nuclear-armed Iran would not be an “existential threat” to Israel, although clearly it would present a major strategic challenge by fundamentally reordering the balance of military force in the region. And of late, some of them have begun a gingerly but very clear retreat from the idea that Israel will have to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities if no one else does — President Shimon Peres has said as much, publicly, and outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has echoed that position. I asked Rootless Cosmopolitan’s favorite Iran expert, Dr. Trita Parsi, to weigh in on the basis of his extensive research and interviews with many of the key decision-makers on the Israeli and Iranian sides. Trita’s book Treacherous Alliance — The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the U.S. is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the Israeli-Iranian relationship, and why there’s plenty of room for pragmatic coexistence.

Israel Gets Real on Iran

By Trita Parsi

On the eve of his departure from political life, outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Olmert delivered a stinging parting shot – putting under question not only the wisdom of holding on to Palestinian land, but also the feasibility of an Israeli military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

“We have to make a decision, one that goes against all our instincts, against our collective memory,” he told the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth. Recognizing that no other Israeli leader ever had uttered these words publicly, Olmert went on to declare that “Israel must withdraw from almost all, if not all” of the West Bank to achieve peace.

On Iran, Olmert argued that Israel had lost its “sense of proportion” when stating that it would deal with Iran militarily. “What we can do with the Palestinians, the Syrians and the Lebanese, we cannot do with the Iranians,” Olmert said, in stark contradiction to his own earlier warnings on Iran as well as the rhetoric of many of his hawkish cabinet members. “Let’s be more modest, and act within the bounds of our realistic capabilities,” he cautioned.

Olmert’s interview dashed the hopes of neoconservatives in Washington hoping for an Israeli post-November surprise through the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities. With the U.S. facing a financial crisis and Israel’s lacking the “proportions” to take on Iran, the risk for military confrontation with Iran in the last months of the Bush Administration has decreased significantly, according to most analysts.

Olmert’s statement may signal a long-overdue shift towards Israel’s Plan B on Iran. Israel’s first preference had been to pressure the U.S. to exercise its own military option on Iran, and to prevent any diplomatic breakthrough that might cause Washington to accept some level of Iranian uranium-enrichment capability. In this regard, Israeli warnings of its readiness to attack Iran if the U.S. declined to do so served primarily to pressure Washington to launch a military strike. Talk about the Israeli military option was aimed at keeping the American military option on the table.

Since the mid-1990s, a key tenet of Israel’s foreign policy has been to sound alarm bells on Tehran. Originally, the aim was to prevent any thaw between the U.S. and Iran out of a fear that Israeli security interests would be sacrificed in a potential U.S.-Iran deal. Plan A was to nip this in the bud by undermining efforts to pursue diplomacy in the first place.

This policy did not lack critics, however. An internal Israeli Iran-committee in the early 1990s led by former commander of the Israeli air force, David Ivry, concluded that the aggressive Israeli rhetoric had prompted Iran to turn its focus towards Israel. Iran has enough problems in the region, the committee argued, there was no need to make Israel shine any brighter on Iran’s radar.

As Iran’s power grew in the region, Israeli concerns grew accordingly. The more Iran could present itself as an indispensible actor in the region, the greater the risk of a U.S.-Iran accommodation. Left with few good options, and an unwillingness to consider how a U.S.-Iran deal could change Iran’s behavior towards Israel, the inclination in Israel was to intensify the very policy its Iran-committee had warned against.

But while Israel’s Iran hawks argued against U.S.-Iran diplomacy, they had a hard time digesting the Bush Administration’s opposition to Israeli-Syrian diplomacy. The contradiction in the Israeli position was evident during AIPAC’s conference earlier this summer. Ephraim Sneh – a leading Iran hawk of Israel’s Labor Party – argued passionately against U.S.-Iran diplomacy while making an equally passionate case for diplomacy Syria. His justification was that in case of war, the Israeli public must know that every stone had been turned before their young men and women were sent to battle. On Iran, however, Sneh did not acknowledge the same justification.

Olmert’s valedictory interview may be the first small steps towards a Plan B on Iran – one that takes as its point of departure the new regional realities: A balance of power that has shifted away from Israel, and an Iran that is unlikely to unlearn the technology of enriching uranium. Israel now needs a way out of the prison of its own rhetoric. Repeating statements that a nuclear Iran is “unacceptable” and using a rhetoric that creates an air of inevitability of war has left the Jewish State with no real options. A more nuanced rhetoric on Iran may have the down-side of reducing pressure on the U.S. to act - “If we don’t talk about Iran, the world will forget about Iran,” as Israeli Iran expert David Menashri put it – but has the up-side of enabling new options to emerge for the Jewish state.

Warning about being “boxed into the corner,” a recent Haaretz editorial offered a clear break from Israel’s Plan A: “The best chance of calming the atmosphere and reducing the threat lies in starting negotiations between the United States and Iran… [I]t is the only route not yet tried and is likely to help moderate Iranian policy. Israel must encourage an American rapprochement with Iran, with the understanding that this will serve the Israeli interest as well.” And in a video by the Jewish Council for Education and Research, several high-ranking Israeli generals throw their weight behind U.S.-Iran diplomacy as a path towards advancing Israeli security.

Still, in spite of the many rising voices against Israel’s losing approach on Iran, the Jewish state is a long way from discarding its Plan A.

Unlike Olmert who recognized the unfeasibility of Plan A while leaving office, Israel’s new Prime Minister, Tzipi Livni, may enter office with Plan B in sight. She rejects the idea that Israel “will not be able to live” with a nuclear Iran and says Israel must deal with the challenges it faces. Though Livni won’t go as far as Barack Obama in promising direct diplomacy with Tehran, she may help Israel find a few more options on Iran.

*Trita Parsi is the author of "Treacherous Alliance -- The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the U.S.", a Silver Medal Recipient of the Council on Foreign Relations' Arthur Ross Book Award, the most significant award for a book on foreign affairs.

Israel Radio Often Finds Best Friends Are Iranian

Joel Greenberg. The New York Times. 02/20/1998.
(http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D00E1DE103FF933A15751C0A96E958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print)

The young woman calling from Iran spoke very quietly into the telephone.

''Thank you for your very good program,'' she said to the answering machine of Israeli radio's Persian-language service. ''Your news is very reliable, because in our country the news is worthless. Thank you for the beautiful music you play. Please put on more.''

Another Iranian caller, who also kept his voice down, said: ''I shake your hands. Why do people come and plant bombs, cutting innocent people to shreds and killing Israelis? Why? Putting bombs in buses is really inhuman. Why do people do this? They get a green light from Arafat.''

Such expressions of sympathy from Iran, an implacable enemy of Israel, come as no surprise to Menashe Amir, director of the Voice of Israel's Persian section.

''The people of Iran are not the regime,'' he said, sipping tea at his desk, Persian style, a sugar cube in his mouth. An Iranian-born Jew who immigrated 38 years ago, Mr. Amir, 58, heads a small staff of Iranian-born Israelis who produce the broadcasts to the Islamic republic.

Despite Iran's hostility to Israel, the shortwave broadcasts are received across Iran, along with more than a dozen foreign stations like the BBC and the Voice of America.

For nearly 40 years, Israeli radio has been beaming broadcasts without interference to Iran, as well as more extensive programs in Arabic to neighboring Arab countries. The Israeli broadcasts are not jammed by these countries, apparently to avoid retaliatory blocking of their broadcasts to Israel.

Mr. Amir says Iranian press reports, traveling Iranians and foreign diplomats indicate that the Israeli station enjoys wide popularity. He says it has millions of listeners, and produces piles of mail to support his contention. The letters are sent to a post office box in Europe.

Listeners also contact the station through a phone number in the United States, and some of their remarks are later played on the air. The calls and letters arrive indirectly because there is no phone or mail service from Iran to Israel, although calls can be made from Israel to Iran.

The Israeli broadcasts -- which include detailed news about Iran from sources in the country and abroad as well as reports about Israel -- have an impact. Iranian papers routinely cite reports from the ''Zionist regime radio,'' and Iranian radio rebuts the Israeli radio's commentaries. Even the spiritual leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has inveighed against the broadcasts.

Mr. Amir says his station is popular because it gives Iranians domestic news that goes unreported by the Government-controlled news media, like opposition speeches and information about corruption cases, in a longer news program than other foreign broadcasts.

The Israeli programs also carry foreign recordings of popular Persian music banned under the stern cultural codes of the Islamic Republic, as well as interviews with exiled Iranian intellectuals.

''We present a different Iran, which the younger generation born after the Islamic revolution isn't familiar with,'' Mr. Amir said, adding, ''We talk to the listeners informally, as brothers.''

Iranians sometimes contact the Israeli station to advertise for a prospective spouse or to pour out personal troubles. The station passes along responses to those seeking partners and airs other messages.

''Once I read out a letter from an Iranian woman who described how she had lost her fiance in the war with Iraq,'' Mr. Amir said, ''and I was so moved that I cried on the air. That caused quite a stir in Iran.''

Not all listeners like what they hear. Some call the Israeli station's answering machine to hurl abuse or to leave messages like ''Death to Israel!''

Once a week Mr. Amir delivers a commentary that seeks to counter the harsh anti-Israeli positions of the Iranian leadership.

In a recent broadcast, he even enlisted conciliatory remarks toward the West made by the Iranian President, Mohammad Khatami. The coincidence of Christmas, Hannukah and the Muslim holy month of Ramadan this year shows links between the three monotheistic religions, Mr. Amir told his listeners.

The constant flow of listener responses has convinced him that ordinary Iranians are much less hostile to Israel than might be expected from the Government's position. He recalled a stream of sympathetic phone calls after Hamas suicide bombings in Israel, even as the attacks were officially being praised.

Clearly, the Israeli station provides an outlet for dissent.

''I believe in Islam, but not in the regime of the mullahs,'' said one caller.

But another asked, ''If the Iranian regime is compelled to stop its hostile policies toward Israel, will the Voice of Israel change its policy, and stop telling the truth about Iran?''


Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Back to Top

Israeli Hasbara to Say it in Persian

Amir Mizroch. The Jerusalem Post. 07/08/2007.
(http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1183901655227&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FPrinter)

While American and Israeli leaders vow that all options remain on the table in dealing with Iran's race to acquire nuclear weapons, it seems that all options are being kept open on the desktop as well.

The Foreign Ministry unveiled a Persian-language version of its Web site on Monday that it hopes will speak "above the heads" of the regime in Teheran, directly to Iran's younger generation.

The site is part of diplomatic efforts to educate the Iranian people about the Jewish state, "who have been purposely distanced from information about Israel, and fed lies and hatred by the Iranian regime." The site, called Hamdami ("clarity" in Persian), can be found at https://hamdami.com.

The site was the brainchild of Israel's ambassador in Dublin, Dr. Zion Avroni during his tenure as head of policy planning at the foreign ministry.

The site is managed by the department of Arab communications in the ministry's public diplomacy division. Menashe Amir, the former director of Israel Radio's Persian service, is its editor-in-chief, supervising a small staff who will translate content into Persian, as well as answer questions from readers and provide on-line feedback.

Amir told The Jerusalem Post his team was expecting a great deal of such feedback. "Studies show that over 60 percent of the Iranian population is under 40 years of age, and that the number of Web surfers is somewhere around 11 million out of a population of 70 million. So the Internet is now the most effective means of communication to the Iranian people," he said.

The ministry has versions of its site in Hebrew, Arabic and English. The Arabic site receives a large volume of feedback ranging from requests for information from students and researchers, to requests for immigration information, asylum and employment, as well as encouragement and of course, vicious slurs. The sites are frequently attacked by hackers. All of the ministry's sites are subjected to constant cyberspace attacks, even more so than the other Israel government Web sites, a Foreign Ministry representative told the Post.

The Persian-language site is expected to come under particularly vicious cyber-attacks, as the Iranian regime sees the Internet as a potent threat to its hold on power and is particularly worried about the spread of Western influence through the Internet, especially when it comes to culture and religion.

"Iran's regime actively fights against the spread of Internet freedom in Iran, and we have taken this into account," a ministry representative said, adding that the ministry had a department that combated, "in a Sisyphean manner," attacks on Israeli government cyber assets.

Making Music, Not War. Iranian and Israeli musicians in Prague bridge their countries

Nima Tamaddon. 07/06/2008. Iranian.com (http://www.iranian.com/main)

On Saturday, June 28, when the fear of looming [1]war [2]against Iran [3] was on the rise, here, in Prague, Iranian and Israeli musicians came together to perform in a warm and memorable concert in a prestigious and the oldest Czech world music festival, Respect [4], in a Woodstockesque flavor and atmosphere. [photos [5]]

Saeed Shanbehzadeh, a maestro of Ney-Anban (or as we call it in southern Iran: Ney-Anbooneh), after an hour of playing Bushehri ethnic music together with his 15 year old son Nagheeb, a very skilled drummer and percussionist, invited two Israeli percussionists [6] participating in the festival to join them and let the people listen to an improvisation.

Shanbehzadeh has been based in Paris for the last five years and has not been to Iran, because his music does not match the Islamic Republic’s decency codes. Ironically, before inviting his Israeli colleagues to the stage, he explained to the audience that as an Iranian, he can not travel to Israel. “It is mentioned in my passport that the holder of this passport is not entitled to travel to the occupied Palestine.”

Then Saeed, Nagheeb and the two Israeli percussionists started to play an improvisation by Ney-Anban, Timpo and Tonbak.

As the show drew to a close, Saeed reminded the excited and ecstatic audience, “Did you see? Now with music, I traveled to Israel and the Israelis travelled to Iran...” The audience responded with delight and roaring applause.

Next day, while the danger of war with Iran was still looming, the most popular daily in the Czech Republic described the event as “Respect festival, in its best year, linked Iran with Israel [7].”

The Czech newspaper added: “They improvised and everybody got the impression that Iranian and Israeli musicians do not care about the politico-religious issues between policy makers. In the field of music, there is no dispute between them and both nations have great culture(s) … what the audience appropriately valued.”

After the concert, Saeed Shanbehzadeh who is very familiar with World Music events and is a well known musician in international festivals such as WOMAD [8], told me that in different places like Singapore, he had played with Israeli musicians to show audiences that, people of Iran, are not willing to wipe Israel off the map.

I personally know Saeed since the late 80's when I was living with my family in Bushehr. During that time we used to call him Ferazoo, and I still remember his strong motivation to reach success in music and in sports (I think he became a champion once in middle distance running in the province).

In his effort to send the massage of peace by performing with musicians from a country labeled as the archenemy of the Islamic Republic, Saeed is not trying to behave ostentatiously or in a conspicuous way. His intention is not to use such gestures to make a name for himself among Iranians or in the wider international arena.

Saeed wishes to be a representative of unknown Iranian musicians who put a lot of effort into their music in a place where their art is not appreciated by the government. Not only they endure official restrictions and pressures in their daily work but it is also hard for them to travel abroad and present their music to non-Iranian music lovers.

Shanbehzadeh believes that lack of government support makes Iranian music more and more isolated and the ones who are potentially the true love and peace messengers of the people of Iran can not get a chance to make their voices heard in the world.

Such an atmosphere gives a chance to “unqualified musicians to pick up an instrument like Tar, Setar, Tonbak and make themselves established as guardians of Persian music.”

Saeed Shanbehzadeh has played Bushehri ethnic music alongside other famous [9]artists [10] from the four corners of the world [11] in different international jazz and World Music festivals, including Peter Gabriel's WOMAD.

As we were having a friendly chat during his trip to Prague, he joked about the situation of Iranian music abroad and said “the efforts of those who profess to be the guardians of Iranian music abroad, while no one knows their music, shouldn't be taken so seriously, and there is a Persian proverb which truly expresses this situation by saying: LAAF DAR GHORBAT, VA GOOZ DAR BAZAR-E MESGAR-HAA.”

Will Iranian 'friend of Israel' be dismissed?

Dudi Cohen. Y Net News. 08/14/08
(http://www.ynet.co.il/english/Ext/Comp/ArticleLayout/CdaArticlePrintPreview/1,2506,L-3582488,00.html)

Parliament members call on President Ahmadinejad to deal 'with severity' with his deputy who was quoted as saying Iranians are 'friends of all people in the world — even Israelis'
Parliament members call on President Ahmadinejad to deal 'with severity' with his deputy who was quoted as saying Iranians are 'friends of all people in the world — even Israelis'
Dudi Cohen

More than 200 Iranian parliament members slammed Vice President Esfandiar Rahim Mashai for stating that Iranians are 'friends of all people in the world — even Israelis.'



In a condemnation statement issued by the parliament members, they called on President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to "deal with his deputy with severity" – in other words, to ensure that he is dismissed.



The Graduate

Iranian minister's Oxford degree 'a fake' / Associated Press

British university denies claim it bestowed honorary doctorate on Tehran interior minister, who, in turn, displays forged degree certificate riddled with errors as 'proof'
Full story



"Mr. Mashai has no right to make such shameful remarks, and is not at the position to take such responsibility," the statement said. "It appears that Mr. Mashai is unaware of the fact that those who he refers to as a people are the ones occupying the homes of millions of Palestinians."



The statement noted that "these people created the illegitimate Zionist regime. We do not recognize a country called Israel, let alone its people."





Esfandiar Rahim Mashai, who is in charge of Iranian tourism affairs, is one of the closest people to Ahmadinejad and his daughter is even married to the Iranian president's son.



Speaking at a conference in Iran about a month ago, he deviated from the Tehran regime's official stance against Israel, saying that "no nation in the world is our enemy. Iran today is the friend of the people in the United States and in Israel."



A day later he denied saying the remarks, and in a press conference held earlier this week he claimed that he had referred to "the original Jews of Zionism, not those who immigrated there following the Zionist invasion."



In another attempt to prove his remarks, Mashai added that he would have said them again. "I said earlier that we have no hostility against the Israeli people and that I would have said the same thing again proudly," the vice president was quoted as saying by several newspapers in the country and on the Tourism Ministry's official website.



"Not all Israelis war military boots on the streets," he added.



Mashai's remarks were most likely a slip of the tongue by a senior Iranian official who did not bother to do his homework before his address.




Meanwhile, the Iranian president continued to give an example to his people by stating Wednesday that Western countries must stop supporting Israel and that "the life of the regime there has come to an end."



Now that the Iranian parliament has spoken, Ahmadinejad may be forced to make some difficult decisions and find another associate to act as his deputy.

Reading Solana in Tehran

Trita Parsi. 07/07/08. IPS News.
(http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=43097)



WASHINGTON, Jul 7 (IPS) - Conciliatory noises from Tehran over the nuclear issue have left Washington and Brussels baffled, and unconvinced of Iran's intentions. Having grown accustomed to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's uncompromising language, Tehran's new tone has raised more suspicion than hope among cynics in Western capitals.

At a lunch with a dozen U.S. journalists in New York last week, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki indicated that Iran would likely respond favourably to the latest proposal by the Security Council's permanent members plus Germany (P5+1). The reason seems to be that alongside an incentive package that didn't differ significantly from a 2006 package that Tehran rejected, a formula may have been agreed upon that would enable all parties to come to the negotiating table without losing face.

European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana presented the formula orally to the Iranians: For a period of six weeks, Iran would halt any advancement in its enrichment activities while the Security Council would refrain from imposing additional sanctions on Iran. During this period, the Europeans and Iran would negotiate an agreement on the modalities of a full suspension, after which the United States would formally join the talks. This way, Tehran can claim that it didn't suspend as a precondition, but rather as a result of talks, and Washington can claim that it did not join talks until Iran had suspended all enrichment activities.

This formula is not new, however. Why -- and whether -- Iran would agree to it now has become the subject of much speculation. In typical fashion, Iran has sent contradictory signals. Iran's foreign minister struck an uncharacteristically conciliatory tone in New York, refusing to repeat Tehran's mantra that enrichment is non-negotiable. Days before, former foreign minister Ali Akbar Velayati argued in favour of negotiations in an interview to the conservative daily, Jomhouriye Eslami.

As a senior advisor to Iran's Supreme Leader, Ali Khamanei, Velayati's words carry particular weight. Not only did Velayati reassert Khamenei's dominion over Iranian foreign policy-making, he indirectly rebuked Ahmadinejad for his radical stance and argued that Iran should negotiate since it had won de facto recognition for its right to enrich. Iran would negotiate from a position of strength, unlike other regional powers that had negotiated out of weakness and had been humiliated by the West accordingly. And since the George W. Bush administration didn't want Iran to respond favourably to the P5+1 proposal, Iran should engage in diplomacy and show the international community that it was not the obstacle to peace, in Velayati's view.

On the other hand, government spokesperson Gholamhossein Elham dampened hopes of a breakthrough by publicly rejecting a freeze on Iran's nuclear activities, asserting that negotiations should take place without Iran agreeing to Solana's formula. According to early reports, Iran's formal response to Solana seemed to have been in line with Elham's -- and not Velayati or Mottaki's -- statements.

Reactions in the West have varied from scepticism to outright suspicion. Tehran is either putting on a nicer face to win time or it has recognised the dangers of an Israeli attack and is showing greater flexibility as a direct result of the Jewish state's muscle flexing. Tehran only responds to force (or threats of force) and the imposition of new sanctions by the EU combined with Israeli bluster has proven that point, the argument reads.

While Iran certainly may be playing for time -- reducing tensions tactically while awaiting the Bush administration's exit from the U.S. political scene could help outmanoeuvre any effort by Washington to push for additional measures against Iran -- the idea that Iran is responding to the threat of force remains, at best, an incomplete explanation of the latest developments.

If the threat of force has caused the Iranians to bend, then it remains a mystery as to why Tehran didn't succumb two years ago when it was more vulnerable and the credibility of the threat was greater. Today, oil prices are twice as high as they were in 2006, the Bush administration's credibility is at an all time low, the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate has made military strikes more complicated politically, and the public mood in the United States -- even among supporters of John McCain -- is in favour of diplomacy.

If Velayati's words are to be taken at face value, then confidence rather than fear may have been a more important factor in the prospective Iranian decision.

The debate in Tehran over this issue seems to have centred on whether to continue defying the Security Council or to consolidate Iranian gains. Those favouring the latter have likely realised the Bush administration itself has helped make Iranian defiance successful. Critics argue that the Bush team's lack of credibility and incompetence has made it more difficult to assemble a strong international coalition against Iran. Washington's soft power with the EU under Bush has been negligible, forcing the president to strong-arm his European allies to go along with more stringent economic measures against Iran.

But with President Bush out of the picture by January 2009, the utility and risk of the Ahmadinejad line can change dramatically. Whether it is Barack Obama or John McCain, the next commander in chief will begin his presidency with significantly higher cachet with the Europeans. The hunger for strengthening trans-Atlantic ties and putting the past eight years of bickering behind them is palpable in Europe. One European diplomat indicated to IPS that Europe would even willingly go along with all the measures Bush has called for -- as long as they are consulted by the next president.

In addition, Washington could enjoy much greater pull with non-aligned countries, including Asian nations whose unwillingness to go along with sanctions have provided Tehran with an economic escape route.

Consequently, greater interest in the freeze-for-freeze formula may have less to do with recent Israeli bluster and more to do with the greater political pull enjoyed by the next U.S. administration.

Furthermore, proponents of the Solana proposal in Tehran believe that a U.S.-Iran rapprochement can be achieved under the next U.S. administration if diplomacy is pursued. To facilitate the next U.S. president's decision to negotiate, however, Tehran must help improve the political atmosphere and provide the next U.S. commander-in-chief with a better starting point for diplomacy.

Initiating discussions at this stage could tie both an Obama and a McCain presidency to the diplomatic track. Whoever wins the elections will inherit a less problematic dispute and enjoy greater political maneuverability as a result. This is particularly true for Obama, since the Illinois senator's willingness to pursue diplomacy may not match his political ability to do so if the nuclear deadlock persists.

Mottaki may have alluded to just that in his interview with CNN yesterday. "We hear new voices in America... and we think that the rational thinkers in America can, based on these new approaches, seek reality as it is. We are ready to help them in this endeavour," Mottaki told CNN.

Whether proponents of dialogue in Tehran and Washington can initiate a process of mutual reinforcement remains to be seen. Even if Tehran agrees to the freeze-for-freeze formula, the Iranians will likely only agree to a full suspension if it isn't open-ended, isn't tied to the continuation of talks but progress in talks, and if the aim of the diplomacy is to limit but not eliminate Iran's enrichment capability.

Neither Britain nor France has shown any flexibility on these central points so far. But fearing that a prospective Obama administration will do away with "self-defeating preconditions" and soften Washington's stance on enrichment, the EU might feel compelled to talk to Tehran with the next U.S. administration in mind and not the current. If so, Tehran's softer tone may drive a wedge between the U.S. and its allies -- an objective all Iranian factions agree upon.

The Child and The Invader. An Iranian Cartoon Series.

Unfortunately, the Iranian government has invested its time and resources in creating a cartoon series aimed at increasing fear and anti-semitism in the minds of young people. See an excerpt of this new series thanks the Middle East Research Institute's TV Monitor project:

http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/1715.htm

Shah's exiled son: Don't attack Iran

Lily Galili
06/10/07
(http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/868822.html)

PRAGUE - Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the last shah of Iran, suggests taking Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's threat to annihilate Israel very seriously. However, he suggests refraining from military action against his country.

That's not what scares the regime there," he explains. "What scares it are the opponents from within, who should be strengthened. An attack from outside could give this regime carte blanche to do anything, and even lead to a nationalist awakening that would bring into its camp people who do not belong to it now."

Pahlavi spoke with Haaretz at a gathering in Prague of dissidents from 17 countries that was sponsored by the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies at the Shalem Center. For the past 19 years he has lived in Washington, where he married a woman of Iranian descent and fathered three daughters. He operates from the exile he entered at age 19 like a bench player who practices determinedly for the moment when he is called to step back onto the court. Two years ago he even went on a hunger strike to demand the release of political prisoners, even though he cannot escape the fact that during his father's reign there were many political prisoners in Iran.




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"I am not saying there were no mistakes made under the previous regime," he says. "But you have to remember the context of that time. Those were the days of the Cold War, and there was in Iran a sense that the Soviet Union wanted to turn us into its satellite. I can understand why the public went along with the revolution, but I also know that no one wished for the tragic result of today."

Iranian exiles, who come from polar opposite groups, have a complicated attitude toward the Shah's son, and their interests truly overlap only in the desire to overthrow the current regime.

Asked whether he supports a return of the monarchy, Pahlavi replies diplomatically. "The people will decide," he says. "One of the options is indeed a parliamentary monarchy. That suits the character of our people. In heterogeneous societies, the monarchy is a symbol of unity".

Pahlavi says he has been feeling encouraged lately, especially following the recent statements on Iran by France's new president.

"It is possible that the divide-and-conquer system that sabotages the efforts to eradicate such regimes is now being replaced by greater unity," he says hopefully. "We have in Iran now an inquisition like the one they had in Europe and that was followed by the Renaissance. We are not far from that. Iran needs a further push, additional pressure on the regime by means of sanctions that hurt the system without hurting its citizens.... The Iranians must become convinced that the world is serious enough not to abandon them along the way."

Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the Shah's son is accorded a wary respect. He wasn't an original invitee to the conference, which was organized by Natan Sharansky, Vaclav Havel and former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, and whose high point was an appearance by George Bush en route to the G-8 meeting. With so many conflicting interests among the regimes the human rights crusaders hailed from including Egypt, Sudan, Russia, Saudi Arabia and others it was hard to spot the unifying political interest, aside from the participants' subjective feeling that they represent absolute good opposing the absolute evil in the world. At times, the uniting factor was anger at Bush, like that which linked Garry Kasparov, a vehement Putin opponent, and Saad al-Din Ibrahim, a noted freedom fighter from Egypt and longtime opponent of Mubarak's. For years they have felt that Bush betrayed them along the way, based on erroneous considerations, and they got a chance to tell him so during a brief meeting with the U.S. president in Prague.









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"Wiped off the Map" - The Rumor of the Century

by Arash Norouzi
(http://www.mohammadmossadegh.com/news/rumor-of-the-century/)
Accessed 03/03/08

Across the world, a dangerous rumor has spread that could have catastrophic implications. According to legend, Iran's President has threatened to destroy Israel, or, to quote the misquote, "Israel must be wiped off the map". Contrary to popular belief, this statement was never made, as the following article will prove.

On Wednesday, October 26th, 2005 at the Ministry of Interior conference hall in Tehran, newly elected Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad delivered a speech at a program, reportedly attended by thousands, titled "The World Without Zionism". Large posters surrounding him displayed this title prominently in English, obviously for the benefit of the international press. Below the poster's title was a slick graphic depicting an hour glass containing planet Earth at its top. Two small round orbs representing the United States and Israel are shown falling through the hour glass' narrow neck and crashing to the bottom.



Before we get to the infamous remark, it's important to note that the "quote" in question was itself a quote— they are the words of the late Ayatollah Khomeini, the father of the Islamic Revolution. Although he quoted Khomeini to affirm his own position on Zionism, the actual words belong to Khomeini and not Ahmadinejad. Thus, Ahmadinejad has essentially been credited (or blamed) for a quote that is not only unoriginal, but represents a viewpoint already in place well before he ever took office.



THE ACTUAL QUOTE:



So what did Ahmadinejad actually say? To quote his exact words in farsi:



"Imam ghoft een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad."



That passage will mean nothing to most people, but one word might ring a bell: rezhim-e. It is the word "Regime", pronounced just like the English word with an extra "eh" sound at the end. Ahmadinejad did not refer to Israel the country or Israel the land mass, but the Israeli regime. This is a vastly significant distinction, as one cannot wipe a regime off the map. Ahmadinejad does not even refer to Israel by name, he instead uses the specific phrase "rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods" (regime occupying Jerusalem).



So this raises the question.. what exactly did he want "wiped from the map"? The answer is: nothing. That's because the word "map" was never used. The Persian word for map, "nagsheh", is not contained anywhere in his original farsi quote, or, for that matter, anywhere in his entire speech. Nor was the western phrase "wipe out" ever said. Yet we are led to believe that Iran's President threatened to "wipe Israel off the map", despite never having uttered the words "map", "wipe out" or even "Israel".




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



THE PROOF:



The full quote translated directly to English:



"The Imam said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time".



Word by word translation:



Imam (Khomeini) ghoft (said) een (this) rezhim-e (regime) ishghalgar-e (occupying) qods (Jerusalem) bayad (must) az safheh-ye ruzgar (from page of time) mahv shavad (vanish from).





Here is the full transcript of the speech in farsi, archived on Ahmadinejad's web site

www.president.ir/farsi/ahmadinejad/speeches/1384/aban-84/840804sahyonizm.htm




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



THE SPEECH AND CONTEXT:



While the false "wiped off the map" extract has been repeated infinitely without verification, Ahmadinejad's actual speech itself has been almost entirely ignored. Given the importance placed on the "map" comment, it would be sensible to present his words in their full context to get a fuller understanding of his position. In fact, by looking at the entire speech, there is a clear, logical trajectory leading up to his call for a "world without Zionism". One may disagree with his reasoning, but critical appraisals are infeasible without first knowing what that reasoning is.



In his speech, Ahmadinejad declares that Zionism is the West's apparatus of political oppression against Muslims. He says the "Zionist regime" was imposed on the Islamic world as a strategic bridgehead to ensure domination of the region and its assets. Palestine, he insists, is the frontline of the Islamic world's struggle with American hegemony, and its fate will have repercussions for the entire Middle East.

Ahmadinejad acknowledges that the removal of America's powerful grip on the region via the Zionists may seem unimaginable to some, but reminds the audience that, as Khomeini predicted, other seemingly invincible empires have disappeared and now only exist in history books. He then proceeds to list three such regimes that have collapsed, crumbled or vanished, all within the last 30 years:



(1) The Shah of Iran- the U.S. installed monarch

(2) The Soviet Union

(3) Iran's former arch-enemy, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein



In the first and third examples, Ahmadinejad prefaces their mention with Khomeini's own words foretelling that individual regime's demise. He concludes by referring to Khomeini's unfulfilled wish: "The Imam said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time. This statement is very wise". This is the passage that has been isolated, twisted and distorted so famously. By measure of comparison, Ahmadinejad would seem to be calling for regime change, not war.





THE ORIGIN:



One may wonder: where did this false interpretation originate? Who is responsible for the translation that has sparked such worldwide controversy? The answer is surprising.



The inflammatory "wiped off the map" quote was first disseminated not by Iran's enemies, but by Iran itself. The Islamic Republic News Agency, Iran's official propaganda arm, used this phrasing in the English version of some of their news releases covering the World Without Zionism conference. International media including the BBC, Al Jazeera, Time magazine and countless others picked up the IRNA quote and made headlines out of it without verifying its accuracy, and rarely referring to the source. Iran's Foreign Minister soon attempted to clarify the statement, but the quote had a life of its own. Though the IRNA wording was inaccurate and misleading, the media assumed it was true, and besides, it made great copy.

Amid heated wrangling over Iran's nuclear program, and months of continuous, unfounded accusations against Iran in an attempt to rally support for preemptive strikes against the country, the imperialists had just been handed the perfect raison d'être to invade. To the war hawks, it was a gift from the skies.



It should be noted that in other references to the conference, the IRNA's translation changed. For instance, "map" was replaced with "earth". In some articles it was "The Qods occupier regime should be eliminated from the surface of earth", or the similar "The Qods occupying regime must be eliminated from the surface of earth". The inconsistency of the IRNA's translation should be evidence enough of the unreliability of the source, particularly when transcribing their news from Farsi into the English language.





THE REACTION:



The mistranslated "wiped off the map" quote attributed to Iran's President has been spread worldwide, repeated thousands of times in international media, and prompted the denouncements of numerous world leaders. Virtually every major and minor media outlet has published or broadcast this false statement to the masses. Big news agencies such as The Associated Press and Reuters refer to the misquote, literally, on an almost daily basis.



Following news of Iran's remark, condemnation was swift. British Prime Minister Tony Blair expressed "revulsion" and implied that it might be necessary to attack Iran. U.N. chief Kofi Annan cancelled his scheduled trip to Iran due to the controversy. Ariel Sharon demanded that Iran be expelled from the United Nations for calling for Israel's destruction. Shimon Peres, more than once, threatened to wipe Iran off the map. More recently, Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu, who has warned that Iran is "preparing another holocaust for the Jewish state" is calling for Ahmadinejad to be tried for war crimes for inciting genocide.



The artificial quote has also been subject to additional alterations. U.S. officials and media often take the liberty of dropping the "map" reference altogether, replacing it with the more acutely threatening phrase "wipe Israel off the face of the earth". Newspaper and magazine articles dutifully report Ahmadinejad has "called for the destruction of Israel", as do senior officials in the United States government.



President George W. Bush said the comments represented a "specific threat" to destroy Israel. In a March 2006 speech in Cleveland, Bush vowed he would resort to war to protect Israel from Iran, because, "..the threat from Iran is, of course, their stated objective to destroy our strong ally Israel." Former Presidential advisor Richard Clarke told Australian TV that Iran "talks openly about destroying Israel", and insists, "The President of Iran has said repeatedly that he wants to wipe Israel off the face of the earth". In an October 2006 interview with Amy Goodman, former UN Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter referred to Ahmadinejad as "the idiot that comes out and says really stupid, vile things, such as, 'It is the goal of Iran to wipe Israel off the face of the earth' ". The consensus is clear.



Confusing matters further, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad pontificates rather than give a direct answer when questioned about the statement, such as in Lally Weymouth's Washington Post interview in September 2006:



Are you really serious when you say that Israel should be wiped off the face of the Earth?

We need to look at the scene in the Middle East — 60 years of war, 60 years of displacement, 60 years of conflict, not even a day of peace. Look at the war in Lebanon, the war in Gaza — what are the reasons for these conditions? We need to address and resolve the root problem.



Your suggestion is to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth?

Our suggestion is very clear:... Let the Palestinian people decide their fate in a free and fair referendum, and the result, whatever it is, should be accepted.... The people with no roots there are now ruling the land.



You've been quoted as saying that Israel should be wiped off the face of the Earth. Is that your belief?

What I have said has made my position clear. If we look at a map of the Middle East from 70 years ago...



So, the answer is yes, you do believe that it should be wiped off the face of the Earth?

Are you asking me yes or no? Is this a test? Do you respect the right to self-determination for the Palestinian nation? Yes or no? Is Palestine, as a nation, considered a nation with the right to live under humane conditions or not? Let's allow those rights to be enforced for these 5 million displaced people.



The exchange is typical of Ahmadinejad's interviews with the American media. Predictably, both Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes and CNN's Anderson Cooper asked if he wants to "wipe Israel off the map". As usual, the question is thrown back in the reporter's face with his standard "Don't the Palestinians have rights?, etc." retort (which is never directly answered either). Yet he never confirms the "map" comment to be true. This did not prevent Anderson Cooper from referring to earlier portions of his interview after a commercial break and lying, "as he said earlier, he wants Israel wiped off the map".



Even if every media outlet in the world were to retract the mistranslated quote tomorrow, the major damage has already been done, providing the groundwork for the next phase of disinformation: complete character demonization. Ahmadinejad, we are told, is the next Hitler, a grave threat to world peace who wants to bring about a new Holocaust. According to some detractors, he not only wants to destroy Israel, but after that, he will nuke America, and then Europe! An October 2006 memo titled Words of Hate: Iran's Escalating Threats released by the powerful Israeli lobby group AIPAC opens with the warning, "Ahmadinejad and other top Iranian leaders are issuing increasingly belligerent statements threatening to destroy the United States, Europe and Israel." These claims not only fabricate an unsubstantiated threat, but assume far more power than he actually possesses. Alarmists would be better off monitoring the statements of the ultra-conservative Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, who holds the most power in Iran.



As Iran's U.N. Press Officer, M.A. Mohammadi, complained to The Washington Post in a June 2006 letter:



It is not amazing at all, the pick-and-choose approach of highlighting the misinterpreted remarks of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in October and ignoring this month's remarks by Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that "We have no problem with the world. We are not a threat whatsoever to the world, and the world knows it. We will never start a war. We have no intention of going to war with any state."



The Israeli government has milked every drop of the spurious quote to its supposed advantage. In her September 2006 address to the United Nations General Assembly, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni accused Iran of working to nuke Israel and bully the world. "They speak proudly and openly of their desire to 'wipe Israel off the map.' And now, by their actions, they pursue the weapons to achieve this objective to imperil the region and threaten the world." Addressing the threat in December, a fervent Prime Minister Ehud Olmert inadvertently disclosed that his country already possesses nuclear weapons: "We have never threatened any nation with annihilation. Iran, openly, explicitly and publicly threatens to wipe Israel off the map. Can you say that this is the same level, when they are aspiring to have nuclear weapons, as America, France, Israel, Russia?"





MEDIA IRRESPONSIBILITY:



On December 13, 2006, more than a year after The World Without Zionism conference, two leading Israeli newspapers, The Jerusalem Post and Haaretz, published reports of a renewed threat from Ahmadinejad. The Jerusalem Post's headline was Ahmadinejad: Israel will be 'wiped out', while Haaretz posted the title Ahmadinejad at Holocaust conference: Israel will 'soon be wiped out'.



Where did they get their information? It turns out that both papers, like most American and western media, rely heavily on write ups by news wire services such as the Associated Press and Reuters as a source for their articles. Sure enough, their sources are in fact December 12th articles by Reuter's Paul Hughes [Iran president says Israel's days are numbered], and the AP's Ali Akbar Dareini [Iran President: Israel Will be wiped out].

The first five paragraphs of the Haaretz article, credited to "Haaretz Service and Agencies", are plagiarized almost 100% from the first five paragraphs of the Reuters piece. The only difference is that Haaretz changed "the Jewish state" to "Israel" in the second paragraph, otherwise they are identical.



The Jerusalem Post article by Herb Keinon pilfers from both the Reuters and AP stories. Like Haaretz, it uses the following Ahmadinejad quote without attribution: ["Just as the Soviet Union was wiped out and today does not exist, so will the Zionist regime soon be wiped out," he added]. Another passage apparently relies on an IRNA report:



"The Zionist regime will be wiped out soon the same way the Soviet Union was, and humanity will achieve freedom," Ahmadinejad said at Tuesday's meeting with the conference participants in his offices, according to Iran's official news agency, IRNA.

He said elections should be held among "Jews, Christians and Muslims so the population of Palestine can select their government and destiny for themselves in a democratic manner."



Once again, the first sentence above was wholly plagiarized from the AP article. The second sentence was also the same, except "He called for elections" became "He said elections should be held..".




It gets more interesting.



The quote used in the original AP article and copied in The Jerusalem Post article supposedly derives from the IRNA. If true, this can easily be checked. Care to find out? Go to:

www.irna.ir/en/news/view/menu-234/0612134902101231.htm



There you will discover the actual IRNA quote was:




"As the Soviet Union disappeared, the Zionist regime will also vanish and humanity will be liberated".



Compare this to the alleged IRNA quote reported by the Associated Press:




"The Zionist regime will be wiped out soon the same way the Soviet Union was, and humanity will achieve freedom".



In the IRNA's actual report, the Zionist regime will vanish just as the Soviet Union disappeared. Vanish. Disappear. In the dishonest AP version, the Zionist regime will be "wiped out". And how will it be wiped out? "The same way the Soviet Union was". Rather than imply a military threat or escalation in rhetoric, this reference to Russia actually validates the intended meaning of Ahmadinejad's previous misinterpreted anti-Zionist statements.



What has just been demonstrated is irrefutable proof of media manipulation and propaganda in action. The AP deliberately alters an IRNA quote to sound more threatening. The Israeli media not only repeats the fake quote but also steals the original authors' words. The unsuspecting public reads this, forms an opinion and supports unnecessary wars of aggression, presented as self defense, based on the misinformation.

This scenario mirrors the kind of false claims that led to the illegal U.S. invasion of Iraq, a war now widely viewed as a catastrophic mistake. And yet the Bush administration and the compliant corporate media continue to marinate in propaganda and speculation about attacking Iraq's much larger and more formidable neighbor, Iran. Most of this rests on the unproven assumption that Iran is building nuclear weapons, and the lie that Iran has vowed to physically destroy Israel. Given its scope and potentially disastrous outcome, all this amounts to what is arguably the rumor of the century.



Iran's President has written two rather philosophical letters to America. In his first letter, he pointed out that "History shows us that oppressive and cruel governments do not survive". With this statement, Ahmadinejad has also projected the outcome of his own backwards regime, which will likewise "vanish from the page of time".



Arash Norouzi is an artist and co-founder of The Mossadegh Project.




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Israel and Iran: The bonds that tie Persians and Jews

Stanley A. Weiss. International Herald Tribune. 07/10/2006
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/07/10/opinion/edweiss.php

LONDON: As an American Jew visiting Iran, I apparently made an irresistible target. "Zionist Israel," an Iranian official instructed me, was the root of all problems in the Middle East; a Western "colonial imposition" on Muslim lands that must be reversed.

"It's Iran's own fault," I replied. "If Cyrus the Greathadn't freed the Jews from Persian slavery 2,500 years ago and told them to return to Jerusalem and rebuild their Temple, there wouldn't be an Israel."The official chuckled and changed the subject.

Today, it's hard to imagine two more bitter enemies than Iran and Israel. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad calls for Israel to be wiped off the map.Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert calls a nuclear- armed Iran an existential threat to Israel.

Yet animosity between Iran and Israel is an historical aberration. Before Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution, ancient cultural bonds and common strategic interests between Persians and Jews made Iran and Israel close allies. Even today, enduring strategic interests suggest that a revived Persian-Jewish partnership, while by no means imminent, is inevitable.

If he knew his history, Ahmadinejad would recall that Iranian diplomats in Europe saved thousands of Jews from the Holocaust and that Iran served as an escape route for Iraqi Jews fleeing to Israel after the 1948 war for Israeli independence.In fact, Iran was one of the first Muslim countries to establish diplomatic and trade relations with the state of Israel.

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Sunni Arab enemies made Persians and Jews close friends for the next three decades. Iran's Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi depended on Israel for a steady stream of arms and intelligence. Israel depended on Iran as part of its "periphery policy" of security alliances with non-Arabs on the Middle Eastern periphery along with Turkey, Ethiopia and Lebanese Christians.

Persian Iran sat out all three Arab-Israeli wars and even during the Arab oil boycott of the 1970s, continued supplying Israel with oil. The 100,000 Jews in Iran helped sustain robust Iranian-Israeli trade.

Even after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's Islamic Revolution severed these ties and sent most Iranian Jews fleeing, overlapping interests allowed these arch-enemies to do business. Mutual animosity toward Iraq - and Israel's desire to preserve influence with Tehran moderates - led Israel to supply weapons to the Islamic Republic well into the 1980s, including service as middleman in the Reagan administration's arms-for-hostages deal.

Flickers of an Iranian-Israeli rapprochement continued even during the heightened tensions of the 1990s, despite Iran's support for Hezbollah in Lebanon, Palestinian militants and the bombings of the Israeli embassy and Jewish cultural center in Argentina.

By the time of my visit to Iran, during the first year of Mohammad Khatami's reformist presidency, Israeli officials were exploring ways to repay shah-era oil debts to Iran. Israeli exports to Iran, mostly agricultural equipment through European third parties, were said to exceed $300 million.

Although hardliners in Tehran, Jerusalem and Washington have sabotaged attempts at dialogue at every turn, Iran and Israel's common interests endure. Both have a vital interest in avoiding Israeli attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities and preventing the fracturing of Iraq along ethnic lines. In the event of a wider regional war between Sunnis and Shiites, Iran and Israel could once again find themselves with a common adversary.

Israel will need Iran, and Syria, to reign in Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Iran will need Israel, and its powerful lobby in Washington, to repeal U.S. economic sanctions.

Indeed, now that Washington has ended its 27- year-old policy against direct talks with Tehran, the door has opened, if only slightly, to a broader Iranian-American rapprochement. But for both Tehran and Washington, the road to reconciliation runs through Jerusalem.

When their governments are ready, the best bridge between Iran and Israel will be the enduring cultural links between their peoples.

Israel's community of 200,000 Iranian Jews - including a deputy prime minister, military chief and a Farsi-speaking president - are well-placed to forge new ties and trade with their ancestral homeland.

The Iranian people - led by the country's Jewish community, at 25,000 the largest in the Middle East outside Israel - would welcome Israeli overtures.

As Benjamin Disraeli famously observed, "nations have no permanent friends and no permanent enemies, only permanent interests." Though hard to imagine today, the permanent interests between Persian Iran and Jewish Israel will, in time, make these enemies friends again.

Stanley A. Weiss is founder and chairman of Business Executives for National Security, a nonpartisan organization based in Washington.

Romance on Iranian TV Crosses Cultures

Radio Transcript

All Things Considered: September 20, 2007
http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=14574945

ROBERT SIEGEL, host:

Here's a scene from "Zero Degree Turn," a popular serial that's running on television overseas. It's Paris 1940-something, Nazis are rousting French Jews from their homes deporting them to concentration camps.

(Soundbite of show "Zero Degree Turn")

Unidentified Man #1: (Farsi spoken)

SIEGEL: The Germans are speaking Farsi, so are the Jews. This is an Iranian holocaust drama in which the hero is a kind of Persian Schindler, an Iranian Muslim student named Habib Parsa, who obtains documents for the family of Sara Stroke, the Jewish woman he loves. With those documents, they can escape to Tehran. Or can they?

You can watch this series with subtitles on YouTube.

Farnaz Fassihi writes for the Wall Street Journal, watched it recently in Tehran and wrote about it and she's now back home in Beirut. What's going on here? A Jewish holocaust drama on Iranian television?

Ms. FARNAZ FASSIHI (Reporter, Wall Street Journal): It was a big surprise to me, too, to hear relatives and friends talking about this series with a plot about Jews and Holocaust and how popular it was. I think there are two things going on here. I think that the Iranian government is trying to send a message that it separates Judaism, people of the Jewish faith from what it calls Zionism, which are supporters of Israel. It also, I think, you know, shows the way in which Iran often uses its media, particularly television, to influence the masses and send political messages.

SIEGEL: Iran still has a Jewish community of 25,000. That's a lot smaller than it was before the Islamic revolution or for that matter, before the creation of the State of Israel. The message that seems to be coming out of this series is Jews are well regarded. How does this very empty Israel country, or government at least, deal with the issue of Zionism in this series?

Ms. FASSIHI: The way it deals with it is that it has subplot in the story where there's a little bit of history revisionism going on, where they try to push Iran's political belief that Israel was conceptualized by European governments to solve the problem after World War II, and that it wasn't a desire of Jewish people to have a home state.

And the second thing that it's doing is it's trying to portray the differences, a lot of violence, that Jewish people killing other Jews because they don't agree with going to - resettling in Arab lands. So there's both of that going on.

SIEGEL: Do the Iranian Jews seem to approve of this?

Ms. FASSIHI: The Iranian Jews have approved of this. They have come out and put out a statement praising the show. When I spoke to them and when I spoke to Maurice Motamed, who is the parliamentarian - Jewish parliamentarian in Iran, he praised it and he said that every Monday night, he finds the television set and watches it and that it's a captivating show.

SIEGEL: Now in the story, Sara, the young Jewish woman who's getting out, I gather, is trying to get to Tehran is in love with the Iranian Muslim student, Mr. Parsa, or Habib. If all goes well, according to this drama, in the end, I assume if she makes it to Tehran, she's not going to be Jewish by the end of the series.

Ms. FASSIHI: No, that's not - Iranian men are, by sharia law, allowed to marry women of other faiths. And their wives are allowed to practice and keep their faiths. However, because Islam is a religion that's passed on by the father, Muslim women are prohibited from changing their religion or marrying a man outside of the faith.

SIEGEL: What historical truth is there at all to the idea that Iran or Iranians in occupied France were helping European Jews - French Jews get out and get to Tehran?

Ms. FASSIHI: It is a well-documented historical fact. The charge d'affaires at the Iranian Embassy in Paris, a man named Abdul Hussein Zathary(ph) forged Iranian passports for about a thousand Jews and smuggled them to Iran and claimed to the German authorities in occupied France that they belong to an Iranian tribe. So this is a true story.

SIEGEL: Farnaz Fassihi, thank you very much for talking with us.

Ms. FASSIHI: Thank you very much for having me.

SIEGEL: That's Farnaz Fassihi of the Wall Street Journal who was talking to us about the Iranian TV show, "Zero Degree Turn." She spoke to us from Beirut.

POLITICS: Is Iran NIE a Blessing in Disguise for Israel?

Inter Press Service News Agency
Trita Parsi
Accessed 12/07/07
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=40373)

WASHINGTON, Dec 6 (IPS) - The U.S. National Intelligence Estimate's assertion that Iran currently does not have a nuclear weapons programme has caused much frustration in Israel. Deputy Defence Minister Ephraim Sneh referred to the report as a lie at a recent breakfast in New York, and Infrastructure Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer reportedly "doesn't buy" its findings.

Though the report aggravates Israel's effort to compel Washington to pursue an increasingly harsh line against Tehran, all is not lost for Israel. In fact, despite these initial knee-jerk reactions, the NIE may very well end up being a blessing in disguise for the Jewish state by pulling Israel out of its state of paralysis vis-à-vis Iran.

Israel has long been at odds with Washington's intelligence agencies. It started sounding the alarm bells on Iran's nuclear programme back in 1991, arguing that in the post-Cold War world, Iran and Shiite fundamentalism were emerging as the new strategic threat to the Middle East.

The Israeli warnings were met with great scepticism and surprise within the Beltway. After all, only a few years earlier -- at a time when Iran's revolutionary fervour was still riding high -- the Israelis had gone to great lengths to bring Iran and the U.S. back on talking terms, dismissing all notions that Iran was a threat.

But Israel stuck to its guns and ever since 1992, the Jewish state has employed a bellicose rhetoric against Tehran (echoing the Islamic Republic's venomous verbal attacks on Israel) and maintained that Iran is just a few years away from the bomb.

"Remember, the Iranians are always five to seven years from the bomb," Shlomo Brom, deputy national security adviser under former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, told this analyst sarcastically during an interview for a book on Israeli-Iranian relations. "Time passes, but they're always five to seven years from the bomb."

But Israel's new and aggressive Iran policy didn't lack critics. An internal government committee concluded in the mid-1990s that Israel's harsh public position on Iran had backfired, caused Israel to unnecessarily make itself a target of Iran and made Tehran's nuclear ambitions appear as an Israeli problem, rather than being a concern of the entire international community. The Rabin-Peres government countered that its aggressive stance had pushed Washington to take on Tehran instead of striking a deal with the Iranian clergy, an argument that was well received even by the Labour government's critics.

This is precisely why NIE is so problematic for Israel's current strategy on Iran. On the one hand, Israel fears U.S.-Iran negotiations since an accommodation between Washington and Tehran most likely would entail a small-scale enrichment programme on Iranian soil. Such a development would significantly shift the balance of power against Israel. Furthermore, Iran's interest in the region would increasingly be viewed as legitimate by Washington, which in turn would exacerbate the problems with the new balance.

On the other hand, to prevent such a scenario from arising in the first place, Israel has felt the need to ring the alarm bells, create political obstacles to a U.S.-Iran dialogue and pressure Washington to keep all options open -- without making itself appear as being on the frontline against Iran.

The NIE has pulled the rug out from under Israel's feet and caused Israel to fail on both counts. The likelihood of U.S.-Iran diplomacy has grown significantly while Israel appears increasingly alone in the world, toeing a hawkish and excessive line on Iran.

But the uncompromising line on Iran was doomed to fail regardless. First, Iran has in the past two years walked through all of Israel's red lines on the nuclear issue -- without facing a robust Israeli response. Instead, the Israeli strategy has been to revise its red lines every time Iran crossed them. This has eroded Israel's credibility.

Secondly, the pressure on Iran was increasingly likely leading to either an Iranian nuclear fait accompli through negotiations with Washington or a military confrontation with Tehran, with unpredictable consequences for Israel. The dangers of war have become increasingly clear to the Jewish state. In the end, all three previous military confrontations in the region -- Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon -- have surprisingly ended up benefiting Iran rather than Israel.

A growing number of people in Israel have recognised the folly of its Iran policy. The chessboard has changed but Israel has not adjusted its policy to the new realities. Israel is on auto-pilot, pursuing a policy which ignores the new strategic fundamentals -- Hezbollah's military success last year, the U.S.'s quagmire in Iraq and Iran's irreversible nuclear advances.

Israeli decision-makers have been in a state of strategic paralysis, incapable of recognising the new chessboard and the necessary adjustments they need to make. They have feared recognising publicly that Iran is a rational actor and that even a nuclear Iran wouldn't be an existential threat to the Jewish state, out of fear that such admissions would take pressure off of Washington to act firmly against Iran -- the same argument Peres and Rabin used in the mid-1990s.

Politically, this is understandable. No Israeli leader wishes to be the one to declare to the Israeli public that a critical step in the strategic rivalry with Iran has been lost, even though it was never really winnable.

But some past politicians and decision-makers have started to speak up, arguably to end the strategic paralysis and cut Israel's losses. Shlomo Ben-Ami, Israel's former foreign minister, publicly argues that a U.S.-Iran dialogue could benefit Israel. Ephraim Halevi, the former head of the Mossad, echoed in the Washington Post what he told this analyst last year -- Iran is rational, it is not suicidal, it can be deterred, Israel can handle even a nuclear Iran and a dialogue is now needed between the Jewish State and the Islamic Republic.

Noted Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld even told Newsmax last week that he "cannot think of even one case since 1980 and the Iranian Islamic Revolution that this country has behaved irrationally."

The NIE has given these voices of reason in Israel a great boost, helping them turn off the auto-pilot and ending Israel's strategic paralysis. By adjusting its Iran policy to the new strategic realities and putting its weight behind U.S.-Iran negotiations, Israel can still avoid both an Iranian nuclear weapon and a disastrous war with Iran.

Trita Parsi, author of the newly released "Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the U.S." (Yale), is president of the National Iranian American Council.

(END/2007)