Iran- Archaic Signet of Civilization

Presentation by Iranian American Students on Iran:

http://www.4shared.com/file/72691973/76cc80be/IRAN-Archaic_Signet_of_Civilization-2003.html

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?''


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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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Iranians in Germany to visit Auschwitz

JTA
03/28/2008
http://www.jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa/breaking/107770.html)

Thirty Iranian expatriates living in Berlin will visit Auschwitz in April.

The ex-pats want to show Iran's president, who has denied the scope of the Holocaust, that they have no doubt about the facts of the Holocaust, "the most massive, industrialized extermination in the 20th century," a statement by organizers said.

The trip, from April 11 to 14, is sponsored by the Iranian Dialog Circle of Berlin and the Berlin educational branch of the Heinrich-Böll Foundation, which is associated with Germany's Green Party. The group also will meet with the daughter of an Auschwitz survivor in Krakow and with the leadership of the Krakow Jewish community.

The group said this week that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's questioning of the Holocaust and threatening of Israel, "has introduced a new expression of anti-Semitism onto the stage of international politics."

Iranians are associated with such statements "against their will," the statement said. "That is why many Iranians living abroad, for whom it is easier to counter these false statements about history, consider it their moral and democratic duty to show the public that they do not endorse the policy and ideology of the Islamic Republic of Iran."

Taking Issue with Article: The Dating Game

"According to Goldman, who puts on parenting workshops for adults throughout the academic year, several factors explain the double standard. First is the influence of the Islamic culture that, some critics say, dictates the second-class status of women."
Wrong and even if it were true why would a community nearly 10000 miles from those nasty Moslems and after 30 years would still choose to practise backward Islamic customs in place of their tolerant Jewish ways?

""The woman's job was to be subservient," Goldman said. "She had to stay home and take care of the children."
My word, has this lady met any Iranian women? I mean to say, The mere hint of male chauvinism in our family would be enough to start WW III. Ms. Goldman should look closer to home for cultural bias towards women. God bless the United States of Amnesia.

"Women must still wear the traditional head covering, the chador, and are forbidden to ride bicycles in public parks and streets."
They are forced to wear the head scarf which is not the same as the chador by the fanatics in power. We should send Ms. Goldman to Southern California or indeed BC, Canada to see for herself the heights reached by Iranian women in academia and employment. Remember the first female tourist in space, Anoosheh Ansari? Paid for the trip out of her own vast wealth made from selling her telecom company. How about Nazanin Afshin-Jam? Does she look oppressed to you? Dr. Fariba Sadri, the head of computer science at Imperial College, London - I mean to say, Judging by her CV she does come across as a shrinking violet who couldn't manage her life without a man.
"A second factor is class, Goldman said. In Iran, a country based on a class system, the upper echelon could afford to send their male children abroad for education. Thus the men had greater opportunities and freedom to mingle with Western women."
I can think of at least a dozen families who sent their daughters to places like France, Germany or the UK for university education.

"A third factor, according to Goldman, is the fact that Jews in Iran were a minority and consequently adhered more to their cultural ways. Most considered pre-marital
sex and intimacy unacceptable, as stipulated by Jewish laws."
Wait a moment! Ms. Goldman has just contradicted her earlier statement. So which is it to be, Islamic ways force-fed to Persian Jews or Jewish customs that impose these social inequities on Jewish women?
"Here in America, Jewish Iranians again represent a minority community. "But because mainstream American
culture is so different, some values are played out more strongly than they were in the homeland and adhered to with greater tenacity," Goldman said. In Iran this system seemed to work well, observers say. But America is a different story, especially for the new generation of youth born and reared in a culture so different from that of the older generation."
Does this not represent a different issue, that is to say, the inherent hostility in the U.S. towards anyone or anything different to the morality of Sex in the City? Let's all jump into bed with each other and pick up VD but who cares? We're Americans. The world is America and the rest of the planet a theme park which must live up to American standards.
I am getting fed up with the likes of Ms Goldman who on the surface purport to speak for reason and progress but in reality care for nothing but their own political agenda. I remember once reading one of these blogs in which the author referred to "Kalimi as a pejorative term. Kalimi means the people of the word of god. Of course, idiots like him do not care about the truth. Their aim is to blacken Iran and Iranians, as if we don't get enough negative publicity in the mainstream media. The picture created is often that of a country which is the ultimate Islamic paradise and the very symbol of hate and repression for everybody else. Only the other month the UN published a report condemning the treatment of Soofis in Iran. There's been no mention of the situation in the media here in the UK.
When I was little everyone was Iranian first and Moslem, Jewish, Christian, Baha'I etc. second. We could all get together under the same roof and eat Iranian food, laugh at Iranian jokes, listen to Iranian music and, well, gossip about other Iranians. Will we be doing the same thing in 20, 30, 40 years?
Islam, Judaism Christianity, they are all words of Allah, according to the Koran. Allah, a derivative of allam,that is, the ultimate universal set from which everything originates and which is represented in everything. The Persian word for God, Khoda is perhaps the closest you can get to the semantics of the concept. Just think, Khod-a, from within; the universe within. That's what it's all about and not a bunch of bearded blokes up there in the heavens who send down miracles or disasters to their respective followers.
Laurence Aryan

A Sober Analysis of Iran

By only focusing on most extreme, radical notions coming out of Tehran, we let radicals win

(http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3459623,00.html)

Trita Parsi

Ynetnews.com

Iran’s firebrand President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad received the worst possible welcome in New York, yet he managed to walk away the winner. He should dedicate his victory to Lee Bollinger, the President of Columbia University whose infantile introduction of Ahmadinejad provided the Iranian hardliner with an undeserved opportunity to present himself as a defender of academic integrity and freedom of speech.



As Newsweek’s Michael Hirsh commented: "I think it's generally a good idea when you're inviting people to your university not to tell them upon arrival that they're not welcome, because then you look crazier than Ahmadinejad."



Yet, the main point Ahmadinejad scored was the media’s willingness to let the limelight exaggerate his power and importance. For a few days, the media spoke of Ahmadinejad as if he actually determined Iran’s nuclear policy, as if he was in charge of the Iranian army and as if it was up to him whether Tehran would seek Israel’s destruction or not.



While the former Tehran mayor questioned the veracity of the Holocaust in New York, ordinary Iranians were glued to their TVs to watch a completely different drama – an Iranian series about the Holocaust, the suffering of the Jewish people and the heroic efforts of Iranian diplomats to help French Jews escape the Nazis by providing them with Iranian passports. The contrast with Ahmadinejad’s fiery rhetoric could not have been any clearer. Apparently, the Iranian President even lacks the power to enforce his Holocaust theories on Iran’s state-run TV.



The contradiction between Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust rhetoric and the Iranian TV-drama exemplifies the dangers of the media’s infatuation with the Iranian hardliner – and all hardline statements coming out of Tehran. Not only does the unwarranted media attention make Ahmadinejad appear more powerful than he is, it also takes attention away from another side of Iran; one that doesn’t question the Holocaust, that understands the dangers of playing the anti-Israeli card to score points on the Arab streets and that is far more concerned about making friends with the US than making permanent enemies with the Jewish state.



Iran’s National Security Advisor Ali Larijani has carefully avoided echoing Ahmadinejad’s fiery rhetoric. Iran’s Foreign Minister Manuchehr Mottaki’s has denied that Iran seeks the destruction of Israel. Their posture is far less sensational than Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric, yet much more indicative of Iran’s real policy.



Contrary to conventional wisdom, Iran’s position on Israel isn’t ideologically driven. Though the ideological component of Iran’s foreign policy is undeniable, it is secondary to Iran’s geostrategic considerations.



Ideology and geopolitics



Throughout the existence of the Islamic Republic, the Iranian theocracy has adopted a harsh, provocative and uncompromising rhetoric on Israel to boost Iran’s credentials as a leader of an imaginary Islamic bloc and use the anti-Israeli card to bridge Iran’s difficulties with the Arab states.



But the rhetoric has only been translated into actual policy when Tehran deemed that its ideological and strategic imperatives coincided. When these two pillars of Iran’s foreign policy have clashed – as they did in the 1980s during the Iraq-Iran war when Tehran quietly sought Israel’s aid and the Jewish state made many efforts to get Iran and the US back on talking terms – Iran’s geostrategic concerns have consistently prevailed over its ideological impulses.



Today, Tehran believes that its ideological and strategic imperatives coincide in regards to the Jewish state. On a strategic level, Iran opposes Israel due to a perception that the Jewish state seeks Iran’s prolonged isolation and exclusion from regional affairs. Whether in Washington or in Ashkhabad, Iran perceives Israel to be countering its interest. On an ideological level, the Islamic Republic’s pretense to leadership in the Islamic world compels it to pursue a line that often times make Iran more Palestinian than the Palestinians.



The key to changing Iran’s behavior vis-à-vis the Jewish state lay in the dynamics between ideology and geopolitics. If these two forces of Iranian foreign policy once again can be arranged to counter each other, the force behind Iran’s belligerence against Israel can be put to rest.



This, however, cannot be achieved solely by increasing pressure or by making threats of war. Only through a larger US-Iran accommodation can Iran’s foreign policy impulses shift away from its current stance on Israel.



To explore this strategic opportunity, Israel must first adopt a more sober analysis of Iran; one in which it sees through Iran’s deliberately misleading hyperbole and pays attention not only to the dangerous rhetoric but also to the less sensationalist voices in the Iranian government. Iran’s pragmatists may not be friendly towards the Jewish state, but neither are they apocalyptic. By only focusing on the most extreme and radical notions coming out of Tehran, we let the radicals win. And their victory is a loss for all.

Dr. Trita Parsi is the author of the new book 'Treacherous Alliance – The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the US' (Yale University Press)

************************************

Iranians visit Yad Vashem Farsi site

THE JERUSALEM POST. Yaniv Salma-Scheer. 01/31/2007
(http://www.jpost.com /servlet/Satellite?cid=1167467851416&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull)


"Dear Yad Vashem, we just wanted to say thanks for the good information. I am an Iranian, but I love Israel and the Jewish nation, and wish the best for them, unlike our crazy President [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad."

"Your site uses very simple and unbiased language to describe a very disturbing and horrific chapter of human history, and I am sure everyone who visits it will come away with a firm belief that we must all work hard, shoulder to shoulder to stop the same happening to our children and future generations. Sincerely, Ahmad."


Ask JPost.com's Iranian blogger about life in Iran
These are just two of the comments posted by Iranians on the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial's Farsi-language Internet mini-site in the five days since it was launched to raise awareness in Iran about the Holocaust.

Since the Persian site went on-line late Thursday night, some 11,000 hits have been recorded, including 2,242 visits from Iran. That figure is just 1,000 hits short of the total number of visits the Yad Vashem Web site received from Iranians in the whole of 2006.

Yad Vashem spokeswoman Estee Yaari said Tuesday evening that none of the Farsi-language posts translated so far had been negative.

"Every year, nearly 20,000 people from Muslim countries, including Iran, visit the Yad Vashem Web site," Avner Shalev, Yad Vashem's chairman, said earlier Tuesday.

"We believe that making credible, comprehensive information about the Holocaust available to Persian speakers can contribute to the fight against Holocaust denial," Shalev added. It was especially important today to reach out to Muslim countries regarding Holocaust awareness, he said, given Ahmadinejad's recent Holocaust-denial conference in Teheran.

The Farsi Web site details, in 20 chronological chapters, the period from the rise of the Nazis in 1925 to the fall of Berlin in 1945, as well as offering pictures, information on post-war trials including Nuremburg, and poems written by victims of the Holocaust such as Abramek Koplowicz. The site was translated into Farsi by Menashe Amir, the veteran Israel Radio Farsi broadcaster, whose programs are widely listened to on short-wave in Iran.

The response to the Farsi mini-site has been very positive, said Shalev. Iranians (some of them Jewish), Iranian exiles and others have posted responses expressing remorse, sympathy and understanding. Many of the respondents stress that Ahmadinejad, in his Holocaust denial, does not speak for the Iranian people, and brand his comments inappropriate, even hateful, and not reflective of the Persian culture or people.

"The world should not allow people such as Ahmadinejad to fulfill their evil intentions. As an Iranian, I feel ashamed of his comments and am quite certain the people of my country feel the same way," writes a man identifying himself as K.R. "I think the Farsi section of this Web site can have a major effect on the understanding of people in Iran toward a situation that is historically distorted, and in Iran, we don't have much information about WWII and the Holocaust."

Paryam, another respondent, praises Yad Vashem, "as a proud Iranian," for "the effort put forth by your respectful organization in taking the time to create a Farsi language Web site to increase public knowledge about the Holocaust."

He encourages more organizations to provide Iran with the empirical knowledge needed to combat Holocaust revisionism and expurgation, and notes that "the tyrants and the Mullahs in Iran should realize the power of the Internet is far beyond their censors.

Paryam urges his own president to not only visit the Web site - at www.yadvashem.org - but to tour Yad Vashem itself and get a first-hand look at the destruction inciting genocide can produce.


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Growing Up As A Minority. We Were Of Moslem, Jewish and Bahai Families But We Were All Iranians

A.s. Mostafanejad
Iranian.com
05/16/2006
http://www.iranian.com/Mostafanejad/2006/May/Minority/index.html

When I was a child in Tehran my father was the only Bahai in his family. His father had been a Bahai and had passed away prior to my birth and his mother was a Moslem. On my mother's side her mother was a Bahai but her father was a Moslem. My upbringing was as a Bahai but my relatives were of both faiths. We associated with all as any family would.

We lived in an apartment at the end of a narrow koocheh, or lane. Above us lived a Jewish family and across the lane there was a Christian family of Armenian descent. The rest of those in our lane were Moslems and we all rented from a Haji we used to call “Haji Esfahani”. We all got along and we were all on friendly terms. The old Haji would sometimes drop by for tea and oranges. He had a unique way of eating his oranges by not peeling them but just quartering the whole orange and savoring each segment. We kids would ask our mother to cut up our oranges “Haji style” as a treat.

When we moved to England in 1959 there were not many Iranians in our city but the few of us, Bahai and Moslem, would visit each other frequently sharing meals and the kids going out to the cinema or the clubs together. We did not get into political or religious debates and if a question was asked about either it would be answered as a matter of fact.

I moved to the United States in 1967 at the age of nineteen and to a community college in a small town in Northern California. When I asked my uncle who had sponsored me as to why he had picked that town he stated that was where he had first arrived from Iran in 1949 and he thought it was a place conducive to quiet study.

He was correct about the quiet study. There was nothing for the young in that town except one cinema and a couple of soda fountains and restaurants. I was enormously gratified to discover the other twenty or so Iranian students in that small college in my first week of attendance. Most of us grew to like each other's company and I still keep tabs on a couple. We were all a minority in that town and we soon learned that as a minority we were highly visible and subject to stereotyping. If there was an incident involving any Iranian we were all painted with the same brush. We each had our religious beliefs and political viewpoints but we shared an identity; a small minority in a small town.

There were a few of the Iranians and other foreign students who lived on the edge so to speak. They either developed a reputation for wild parties or got caught with marijuana and other substances or had a physical altercation in the parking lot. Once the little local newspaper had printed the story or the rumor mill had fed the news to the campus as well as the larger community we all felt the sting of the looks and the comments. We were all Iranians, a minority, and we all got branded together. On as well as off campus we were each other's support and compatriot. We were of Moslem, Jewish and Bahai families but we were all Iranians.

In the evenings we helped each other with the course materials and the language obstacles. On the weekends we all shared rides to the big city of San Francisco to find work to augment the finances from back home. We tipped each other off about job openings and shared rooms or apartments in order to get by. Lacking entertainment locally we entertained ourselves with potluck dinners of Persian food and music as well as moonlight rides through the hills in a couple of cars. We had occasional weekend picnics by the lake eating cotlet, kookoo and watermelon and playing backgammon. We dated, danced, ate, joked all without regard to religious origin or belief. We were simply a small minority community of Iranians.

Yesterday I was at the funeral of the sister of a friend. She had left Iran and the small town she had lived in all her life. She was forced out because she was a Bahai. She had left her friends and community and hop scotched her way across the world to finally end up in California. Those who knew her would say that she constantly talked about the beauty of her little town, the taste of the food, the fruit, the style of poetry, etc. The last few years of her life she had finally succumbed to Alzheimer's and old age. She had chosen to use the brain and the heart God had granted her to believe otherwise. She had suffered estrangement because she was a minority.

All around her grave site, I noticed, were the graves of other Iranians of all ages and all faiths. All shared the same plot of land in their final rest. Some had headstones inscribed solely in Farsi and some in the language of their origin as well as their adopted land. In my mind they all seemed equal in that corner of the cemetery. In my mind there was no majority or minority here and all differences were made meaningless. Looking out across the rest of the cemetery and to the community beyond I could not help but think that we are all human with equal rights to be respected and treated as such; human.

On the Jewish Presence in Iranian History

Arshin Adib-Moghaddam
MR Zine. 03/05/07
http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/aam030507.html

When the chairman of Iran's Jewish Council, Haroun Yashayaei, criticized President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a letter condemning his remarks on the Holocaust, he was supported by a range of Iranian intellectuals, artists, poets, and others both within the country and without. For those amongst us with some understanding about the Jewish presence in Iranian history, it was immediately clear that Ahmadinejad's comments could be attributed to a mixture of individual ignorance about the factual circumstances of the holocaust and, more importantly, Machiavellian expediency during a period when the Iranian state was targeted by a relentless public relations campaign in the international media. As such, his comments are quite comparable to Bush's declaration that, after 11 September 2001, the United States was on a "crusade" or Silvio Berlusconi's statement about the inherent superiority of "Western" values during the same period. Indeed, I do not think it an exaggeration to place Ahmadinejad in the same category as Bush and Berlusconi. All three represent that type of politician that adhere to a dichotomous worldview: things are either black or white, good or bad, you are either with them or against them.

Ironically enough, Ahmadinejad's shortcomings are most evident in his understanding of his own civilization, especially Iran's intimate historical encounters with Judaism. A few lessons in theology communicate to us that the Bible is dotted with praise for ancient Persia and its imperial masters. The Old Testament describes the Persian king Cyrus the Great as God's "anointed" and "chosen" ruler because it was he who gave refuge to the Jews when they were persecuted by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar in sixth century B.C. These actions also explain why Cyrus is mentioned in the Torah as a saint and savior of the Jewish people. Indeed one of his successors to the Persian throne, Xerxes I (Artaxerxes), married a Jewish woman, Esther, the daughter of one of his ministers. The tomb of Esther in the north-western Iranian city of Hamadan (originally called Ecabatana) draws Jewish pilgrims from all over Iran, especially during the holiday of Purim (the walls of the building explain the origins of Esther in Hebrew).

It should be added as a footnote to the contemporary history of the Persian Gulf area that Iran's real and perceived support to persecuted Jews was used by Saddam Hussein in order to demonize the "Persian menace from the East" during the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988). This was the central theme of two books published in Baghdad in the early 1980s: Al-Madaris al-Yahudiyya wa-l-Iraniyya fi-l-'Iraq (Jewish and Iranian Schools in Iraq) by Fadil al-Barrak; and Al-Harb al-sirriyya, khafaya al-dawr al-Isra'ili fi harb al-khalij (The Secret War: The Mysterious Role of Israel in the [First] Gulf War) by Sa'd al-Bazzaz. The former alleges the "destructive" and "dangerous" impact of Jewish and Iranian schools on Iraqi society. The latter claims to outline how Israel and Iran conspired to combat Iraq, with special reference to the destruction of the nuclear reactor in Osirak by Israeli Air Force in June 1981.

Further lessons in Iran's contemporary history show that at a time when Nazi Germany was busy implementing the "Endlösung," Iranian diplomats offered hundreds of Iranian passports to European Jews in order to facilitate their exodus, especially from Poland (there continues to be a sizeable Polish-Jewish minority in Iran to this date). The Islamic Republic itself guarantees the rights of Iran's Jewish minority, which is the largest in West Asia outside of Israel and Palestine. The 25.000 to 60.000 Jews of Tehran, Shiraz, Isfahan, Boroujerd, and Yazd have their own cemeteries (Tehran's Jewish cemetery is online at www.beheshtieh.com), which, unlike those in Europe and Russia, are not desecrated by skinhead mobs; attend packed synagogues; send their children to Jewish schools; buy their meat in kosher butchers; and are exempt from prohibitions on alcohol. Their political representation in the Iranian parliament (majlis) is secured in the Iranian Constitution. Indeed, many Iranian-Jews fought Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988), and Ahmadinejad himself recently honored an Iranian-Jewish war veteran on the occasion of the commemoration ceremony for the liberation of the south-western town of Khorramshahr from Saddam Hussein's forces. It should be added that, in August of last year, the "Association of the Iranian Jewish Community" and the management of the Jewish hospital "Sepir" in Tehran facilitated the medical support to Palestinians wounded by Israeli armed forces during the latest intifadah against the occupation.

"Anti-Semitism" is a distinctively European invention, and projecting its ideological tenets and political agenda to the Muslim world is intellectually unrewarding and analytically flawed. This is not to say that there are no anti-Jewish sentiments in the region. There are, but they are not racially motivated. They are political in nature. The equivalent to the attitudes of Ahmadinejad exists in many countries today as a consequence, in my opinion, of both the resurgence of ultra-nationalist ideologies which are always intrinsically xenophobic and the continued occupation of Palestinian territories by the Israeli state. The real object of this type of politics is thus not the holocaust per se. It is the Israeli state and its underlying Zionist ideology. That is why Ahmadinejad received the support of Jewish organizations such as "Neturei Karta International" which presents itself as a "world wide organization of Orthodox Jews opposed to Zionism." Anti-Zionism as opposed to anti-Semitism is a legitimate political position to take, and many will continue to voice their dissent in order to protest the abominations committed in the name of the Zionist ideal. In the meantime, it is important to divorce facts from fiction. The calculated ignorance of states means that we should strengthen our empathy and alertness, especially when it comes to unearthing their myths and distortions, whether with regard to established historical facts such as the holocaust or in relation to the deaths and destructions in Gaza, Kabul, Baghdad, or Grozny. What is needed, above all else then, is inclusive dialogue that is ideologically dispassionate and intellectually honest.

For those readers who think that this is merely an abstract demand from an idealistic intellectual, allow me to discuss a very specific example. In May 2006, bloggers and investigative journalists exposed as wholly invented a story by Amir Taheri, a story that was concocted in order to present Iran as an anti-Semitic entity. In an article for the National Post of Canada, Taheri had claimed that a new law would require Iranian Jews to "be marked out with a yellow strip of cloth sewn in front of their clothes while Christians will be assigned the color red. Zoroastrians end up with Persian blue as the color of their zonnar." Accordind to Taheri, "the new codes would enable Muslims to easily recognize non-Muslims so that they can avoid shaking hands with them by mistake and thus becoming najis (unclean)." To reiterate the message, the paper ran alongside the article a 1935 photograph of a Jewish businessman in Berlin with a yellow, six-pointed star sewn on his overcoat. The National Post was forced to retract the bogus piece and apologize publicly. But by then the New York Post and the Jerusalem Post, which also featured a photo of a yellow star from the Nazi era over a photo of Ahmadinejad, and the New York Sun had picked up the story. It should be added that, in another New York Post column in 2005, Taheri claimed that Iran's ambassador to the UN, Javad Zarif, was one of the students involved in the capture of US diplomats in Tehran between 1979 and 1980. The story was retracted after Dwight Simpson, a professor at San Francisco State University, wrote to the newspaper explaining that the allegation was "false." On the day of the seizure of the US embassy in Tehran, Zarif was a "graduate student in the Department of International Relations of San Francisco State University. He was my student," Simpson told the editors, "and he served also as my teaching assistant." Worringly, Amir Taheri was amongst a group of "experts" on Iran and the region invited to the White House in a meeting with Tony Blair and George W. Bush in May 2006.

There is a particular interest linked to the representation of Iran as an irrational, "anti-Semitic" polity. At the least, it legitimates the demonization of the Iranian state, at most it mobilizes public opinion in support of military action. The ball is in our court. Unravelling the myths and distortions of politicians or the transnational media is not a futile endeavor. Our powers to dissent from the mainstream are real. Our instruments, scholarly research and critical analysis, are strong. You will find that anyone who tells you otherwise is either chronically disillusioned or the agent of a particular ideology opposed to the merits of international dialogue and cross-cultural empathy.


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Arshin Adib-Moghaddam is the author of The International Politics of the Persian Gulf: A Cultural Genealogy (London: Routledge, 2006). He teaches international relations at Oxford University. MRZine has published his "The Muslim in the Mirror" (23 Feb. 2006); "Persian Atoms: Enriching Facts, Diverting Fiction" (26 April 2006); "Iraq, Iran, and the New World Order" (25 May 2006); "The Muslim Presence in the Racist Mind" (15 June 2006); "Palestine Sans Frontières" (18 July 2006); "Reflections on Arab and Iranian Ultra-Nationalism" (20 November 2006); and "Uprising against the 'War on Terror': The Danger of US Foreign Policy to International Security" (16 February 2007) . Consult Adib-Moghaddam's Web site for his upcoming publications.
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ON THE HOLOCAUST CONFERENCE SPONSORED BY THE GOVERNMENT OF IRAN

The New York Review of Books
Volume 54, Number 2, February 15, 2007
By Gholam Reza Afkhami and over one hundred others


To the Editors:

We the undersigned Iranians,

Notwithstanding our diverse views on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict;

Considering that the Nazis' coldly planned "Final Solution" and their ensuing campaign of genocide against Jews and other minorities during World War II constitute undeniable historical facts;

Deploring that the denial of these unspeakable crimes has become a propaganda tool that the Islamic Republic of Iran is using to further its own agendas;

Noting that the new brand of anti-Semitism prevalent in the Middle East today is rooted in European ideological doctrines of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and has no precedent in Iran's history;

Emphasizing that this is not the first time that the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran has resorted to the denial and distortion of historical facts;

Recalling that this government has refused to acknowledge, among other things, its mass execution of its own citizens in 1988, when thousands of political prisoners, previously sentenced to prison terms, were secretly executed because of their beliefs;

Strongly condemn the Holocaust Conference sponsored by the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Tehran on December 11–12, 2006, and its attempt to falsify history;

Pay homage to the memory of the millions of Jewish and non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust, and express our empathy for the survivors of this immense tragedy as well as all other victims of crimes against humanity across the world.

Abadi, Delnaz (Filmmaker, USA)
Abghari, Shahla (Professor, Life University, USA)
Abghari, Siavash (Professor/Chair, Department of Business Administration, Morehouse College, USA)
Afary, Janet (Faculty Scholar/Associate Professor of History, Purdue University, USA)
Afkhami, Gholam Reza (Senior Scholar, Foundation for Iranian Studies, USA)
Afkhami, Mahnaz (Executive Director, Foundation for Iranian Studies/Women's Rights Advocate, USA)
Afshar, Mahasti (Arts/Culture Executive, USA)
Afshari, Ali (Human Rights Advocate/Political Activist, USA)
Ahmadi, Ramin (Associate Professor, Yale School of Medicine/Founder, Griffin Center for Health and Human Rights, USA)
Akashe-Bohme, Farideh (Social Scientist/Writer, Germany)
Akbari, Hamid (Human Rights Advocate/Chair/Associate Professor, Department of Management and Marketing, Northeastern Illinois University, USA)
Akhavan, Payam (Jurist/Senior Fellow, Faculty of Law of McGill University, Canada)
Amin, Shadi (Journalist/Women's Rights Activist, Germany)
Amini, Bahman (Publisher, France)
Amini, Mohammad (Writer/Political Activist, USA)
Amjadi, Kurosh (Human Rights Advocate)
Apick, Mary (Actress/Playwright/Producer/Human Rights Advocate, USA)
Ashouri, Daryoush (Writer/Translator, France)
Atri, Akbar (Student Rights and Political Activist, USA)
Bagher Zadeh, Hossein (Human Rights Advocate/Former Professor, Tehran University, Great Britain)
Bakhtiari, Abbas (Musician/Director, Pouya Iranian Cultural Center, France)
Baradaran, Monireh (Human Rights Advocate/Writer, Germany)
Behnoud, Massoud (Writer/Journalist, Great Britain)
Behroozi, Jaleh (Human Rights Advocate/Iranian Mothers' Committee for Freedom, USA)
Beyzaie, Niloofar (Theater Director/Playwright, Germany)
Boroumand, Ali-Mohammad (Lawyer, France)
Boroumand, Ladan (Historian/Research Director, Boroumand Foundation, USA)
Boroumand, Roya (Historian/Human Rights Advocate, USA)
Chafiq, Chahla (Sociologist/Writer/ Women's Rights Advocate, France)
Dadsetan, Javad (Filmmaker)
Daneshvar, Abbas (Chemist, Netherlands)
Daneshvar, Hassan (Mathematician, Netherlands)
Daneshvar, Reza (Writer, France)
Davari, Arta (Painter, Germany)
Djalili, Mohammad Reza (Professor, L'Institut Universitaire de Hautes Études Internationales, Switzerland)
Ebrahimi, Farah (USA)
Eskandani, Ahmad (Entrepreneur, France)
Fani Yazdi, Reza (Political Activist, USA)
Farahmand, Fariborz (Engineer, USA)
Farssai, Fahimeh (Writer, Germany)
Ghahari, Keivandokht (Historian/Journalist, Germany)
Ghassemi, Farhang (Professor in Strategic Management, France)
Hejazi, Ghodsi (Professor/Researcher, Frankfurt University, Germany)
Hekmat, Hormoz (Human Rights Advocate/Editor, Iran Nameh, USA)
Hojat, Ali (Entrepreneur/Human Rights Advocate, Great Britain)
Homayoun, Dariush (Writer, Switzerland)
Idjadi, Didier (Professor/Associate Mayor, France)
Jahangiri, Golroch (Women's Rights Advocate, Germany)
Jahanshahi, Marjan (Professor, Institute of Neurology, University College London, Great Britain)
Karimi Hakkak (Director, Center for Persian Studies, University of Maryland, USA)
Kazemi, Monireh (Women's Rights Advocate, Germany)
Khajeh Aldin, Minoo (Painter, Germany)
Khaksar, Nasim (Writer, Germany)
Khazenie, Nahid (Remote Sensing Scientist/Program Director, NASA, USA)
Khodaparast Santner, Zari (Landscape Architect, USA)
Khonsari, Mehrdad (Political Activist, Great Britain)
Khorsandi, Hadi (Poet/Writer, Great Britain)
Khounani, Azar (Educator/Human Rights Advocate, USA)
Mafan, Massoud (Publisher, Germany)
Malakooty, Sirus (Composer/Chairman, Artists Without Frontiers, Germany)
Manafzadeh, Alireza (Writer, France)
Mazahery, Ahmad (Engineer/Political Activist, USA)
Mazahery, Lily (Lawyer, President of the Legal Rights Institute/Human Rights Advocate, USA)
Memarsadeghi, Mariam (Freedom House, USA)
Mesdaghi, Iraj (Human Rights Advocate/Writer, Sweden)
Milani, Abbas (Director, Iranian Studies Program, Stanford University, USA)
Mohyeddin, Samira (Graduate Student, University of Toronto, Canada)
Moini, Mohammadreza (Journalist/ Human Rights Advocate, RSF, France)
Molavi, Afshin (Journalist, USA)
Monzavi, Faeze (Women's Rights Advocate, Germany)
Moradi, Golmorad (Political Scientist/Translator, Germany)
Moradi, Homa (Women's Rights Advocate, Germany)
Moshaver, Ziba (London Middle East Institute, SOAS, Research Fellow, Great Britain)
Moshkin-Ghalam, Shahrokh (Ballet Dancer/Actor, France)
Mourim, Khosro (Sociologist, France)
Mozaffari, Mehdi (Professor of Political Science, Denmark)
Naficy, Majid (Poet/Writer, USA)
Nafisi, Azar (Writer/Johns Hopkins University, USA)
Nassehi, Reza (Human Rights Advocate/Translator, France)
Pakzad, Jahan (Teacher/Researcher, France)
Parham, Bagher (Writer/Translator, France)
Parsipour, Shahrnush (Writer, USA)
Parvin, Mohammad (Human Rights Advocate/Founding Director of Mehr/Adjunct Professor, California State University, USA)
Pirnazar, Jaleh (Professor, Iranian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, USA)
Pourabdollah, Farideh (Human Rights Advocate, USA)
Pourabdollah, Saeid (Human Rights Advocate, USA)
Rashid, Shahrouz (Poet/Writer, Germany)
Royaie, Yadollah (Poet, France)
Rusta, Mihan (Human Rights Advocate/Refugee Adviser, Germany)
Sadr, Hamid (Writer, Austria)
Sarchar, Houman (Independent Scholar, USA)
Sarshar, Homa (Journalist, USA)
Satrapi, Marjane (Writer, France)
Sayyad, Parviz (Actor/Playwright, USA)
Shahriari, Sheila (World Bank, USA)
Soltani, Parvaneh (Actor/Theater Director, Great Britain)
Tabari, Shahran (Journalist, Great Britain)
Taghvaie, Ahmad (Founding Member, Iranian Futurist Association, USA)
Toloui, Roya (Human Rights Advocate, USA)
Vaziri, Hellen (Germany)
Wahdat-Hagh, Wahied (Social Scientist, USA)
Zarkesh Yazdi, Fathieh (Human Rights and Refugee Rights Advocate, Great Britain)
Ziazie, Arsalan (Writer, Germany)

Dissent in Iran over Holocaust conference

International Herald Tribune. Nazila Fathi. February 26, 2007
(http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/26/news/holocaust.php)

TEHRAN: A group of Iranian academics, writers and artists has issued a statement to denounce the Holocaust conference held in Tehran in December, calling it a move that endangered peace and hurt the reputations of Iranian academics.

The Iranian government organized a two-day gathering in December, billed it as a legitimate conference on the historical record and invited notorious Holocaust deniers and white supremacists from around the world. Among those from the United States was a former Ku Klux Klan leader, David Duke.

The Foreign Ministry held the event after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed several times that the Holocaust was a myth and was invented by Zionists to justify the establishment of Israel.

The statement criticizing the conference was signed by 23 academics, writers and translators, many of whom live outside Iran. It was sent to The New York Times and circulated on the Internet last week. It argued that the gathering lacked academic credentials and was held for propaganda purposes.

The statement said that the conference harmed the academic image of Iranian universities and provided a pretext for warmongers in the region. It added that the gathering perpetuated the immoral stance of Holocaust denial, a position that "seriously endangers" the "peaceful cohabitation of human beings."

"The extensive material evidence, the confessions made in the Nuremberg trials and other trials that took place after the war and the testimonies of the survivors established the veracity of the accounts beyond any doubt," the statement said.

"The accuracy of the accounts has been acknowledged by many academic, political and religious authorities, including the Catholic Church."

The statement added that "talking inconsiderately" about the Holocaust can only be described as rubbing salt into a historical wound. "Those who perpetuate the discourse on Holocaust denial ignore the feelings of the people directly affected by this event," it said.

The statement also argued that denying the Holocaust would not help the Palestinian cause.

"No matter what political position we adopt regarding the creation of Israel and its further expansion, the historical evidence for the Holocaust remains intact," it said.

"The Palestinians, like all other nations, have a right to enjoy their livelihood in their own independent state. This right has nothing to do with the denial or acknowledgment of the Holocaust," the statement added.

Given the risk of harassment and repression for those who criticize the government, dissent to the conference has been slow to build. But reformist politicians and some members of Parliament have voiced their outrage over the consequences of holding the event.

Akbar Alami, the parliamentary representative from the northwestern city of Tabriz, asked Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki to appear in Parliament in January to explain the ministry's plans for decreasing tensions with the West and accused Ahmadinejad's foreign policy of being reckless.

"Why did we have to bring up the issue of the Holocaust, which belongs to 60 years ago," Alami asked the foreign minister.

Mehdi Karoubi, a politician who was once a speaker of Parliament, criticized the conference last week, saying it had led to a resolution in the United Nations that reflected badly on Iran.

"Have we ever asked how questioning the Holocaust has harmed us and what prices we had to pay for it?" he said in a speech at Tehran University last week, the ILNA Labor press agency reported.

The United Nations reacted to the Tehran conference by adopting a resolution without a vote that rejected any denial of the Holocaust as a historical event.

Israeli Diplomats Reach Out to L.A. Iranian Media

The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. 09/08/06
(http://www.jewishjournal.com/home/searchview.php?id=16427)
By Karmel Melamed


Representatives from Southern California-based Persian-language satellite radio stations and television shows attended a special press conference on Aug. 28, held for them at Los Angeles' Israeli consulate, the first public interaction between the Israeli government and local Persian-language media in more than 25 years.

The local Iranian media outlets are owned and operated by expatriate Iranian Muslims, and the gathering was a move by the consulate to reach out directly to the people of Iran.

"I received feedback from a lot of channels in the Iranian media for interviews, so I saw the desire by them to understand what we think and we believe, so we setup this event specifically to address their questions," said Israeli Consul General Ehud Danoch.

Local Persian Jewish activists were instrumental in helping to connect the Iranian media with the consulate for the press conference, as many Persian Jews still share common cultural and linguistic ties with other Iranian groups in Southern California.

"This is indeed something that has never been done before in this city where there is a community of Iranian and a center of Iranian media outside of Iran," said George Haroonian, a Persian Jewish activist who helped organize the press conference with the consulate.

"We need to be the connector between the people of Israel and people of Iran," Haroonian said.

During the nearly two-hour press conference, Danoch responded to reporters' questions about the aftermath of the war with Hezbollah and addressed the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's repeated calls for Israel's destruction.

"The most important message for us to get across is that the government of Israel and Israelis have nothing against the Iranian people or Islam," Danoch said. "But we will not tolerate the extremist expressions of that president of Iran".

Since the collapse in 1979 of the regime of the late shah of Iran, many Iranian Muslim politicians and Western-educated professionals have been among the large groups of Iranians in the United States and, particularly, Los Angeles. During the past two decades, these communities have established media outlets in Southern California that oppose the current government in Iran, and regularly broadcast news and political commentary to Iran through satellite radio and television, as well as via the internet, much of it in an attempt to help bring down the regime there.

Southern California's Iranian Muslim media has also frequently voiced criticism of Israel, as well, and the consulate's outreach at this event was an attempt to counter that. On the part of the Iranian media, this was one more way to take a jab at the regime.

"This is an important event for us because we don't want our viewers to receive one-sided bias news from the media in Iran and get brainwashed -- we must show the other side," said Afshin Gorgin, a reporter for the Iranian news program on the Voice of America satellite television. "Here they get to see and hear the views of the other side directly from a representative of Israel".

Members of the Iranian media in attendance said the press conference was later broadcast in its entirety into Iran, which has a population of nearly 70 million, many of whom said they oppose their government's support of terrorist organizations like Hezbollah, but are afraid to express their views.

"I receive phone calls from listeners in Iran, and they say we do not have a problem with Israel, and we do not have border disputes with Israel," said Siavash Azari, a news commentator on KRSI, a Beverly Hills-based satellite radio station that broadcasts daily into Iran.

The Iranian Muslim media stepped up interest in issues concerning Israel when, late last year, Iranian President Ahmadinejad called Israel a "disgraceful blot" that should be "wiped off the map." In response, they condemned Ahmadinejad and organized a pro-Israel rally in Westwood, which drew nearly 2,000 Iranians from various religions.

"We spoke out against him because his words were utterly absurd for anyone to say, and we would have spoken out against such statements if they were made by any other leader," said Reza Fazeli, a news commentator for the satellite television station Pars TV.

Earlier this month, Israeli Deputy Consul General Yaron Gamburg was also interviewed by Hossien Hejazi, an Iranian news commentator at KIRN-AM. 670, a Persian-language radio station based in Hollywood.

In January, when Ahmadinejad denied the existence of the Holocaust, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, working with Iranian Jewish leaders, invited Iranian journalists to tour the Museum of Tolerance in an effort to educate them about the Holocaust so that they could send information back to Iran on the topic.

The January event, as well as the recent press conference, seem to be having the desired effect of opening up dialogue. At the conference, Danoch offered to make himself available for interviews and said the consulate would help to get their message across to the people of Iran in any way possible.


Karmel Melamed is an internationally published freelance journalist based in Southern California.

How Jew-Friendly Persia Became Anti-Semitic Iran

Rachel Safier contributed to the reporting of this story. December, 2006
(http://www.momentmag.com/features/dec06/2006-12_Iran.html)

Copywrite Moment Magazine

The complex tale of how the Persian Empire founded by Cyrus the Great—the world’s “first” Zionist—metamorphosed into the Israel-Hating nation we know today.

How Jew- Friendly Persia Became Anti-Semitic Iran

Abdol Hossein Sardari didn’t look like a hero. But when Paris fell to Hitler in June 1940, the 30-year-old Muslim—a dapper man with a receding hairline—took it upon himself to save Jews trapped inside Nazi-occupied France. Sardari, a junior official at the Iranian Embassy, had been left behind to look after the building when the Iranian ambassador and his staff abandoned Paris to establish residence in Vichy, the new home of France’s pro-Nazi government. Once the Nazis began rounding up Jews, Sardari, without authorization from his government, made liberal use of the embassy’s supply of blank Iranian passports to assign new, non-Jewish identities to those in need, creating his own version of Schindler’s list.

Ibrahim Morady, who died this past June in Los Angeles at the age of 95, was one of the hundreds of Jews Sardari helped spare from deportation. “My father moved to Paris from Persia when he was six,” recounts his son Fred. Once Morady, a well-to-do rug merchant, had his new identity, he and two colleagues arranged to purchase false papers for about 100 other Jews of Iranian descent. Sardari served as their go-between, passing a bribe to a German official. In return, these Jews were given documents asserting that they were members of “some strange tribe in Iran—Djouguti, or something like that,” Fred Morady explains. “I asked my father: ‘What does this name mean?’ And he said: ‘They just made it up.’”
Sardari was not the only Iranian to protect Jews during World War II. The Iranian government itself kept its 3,000-year-old Jewish community out of Nazi reach. But his heroism is representative of Iran’s civilized and empathetic attitude toward its Jews.
This attitude stands in marked contrast to the vitriolic Islamic Republic of Iran led by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that we hear and read about today. The world was stunned when Ahmadinejad, the former mayor of Tehran, felled an Iranian political giant—Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani—in the 2005 presidential election. Ahmadinejad, a radically conservative veteran of the Revolutionary Guards, an arm of the country’s Islamic establishment, quickly became a confrontational presence. Standing aside a banner that read “The World Without Zionism,” he whipped up a crowd of 4,000 students at an October 2005 conference in Tehran. “Our dear Imam ordered that the occupying regime in Al Quds be wiped off the face of the earth,” Ahmadinejad declared, referring to the late Ayatollah Khomeini and using the Arabic name for Jerusalem. “Anyone who would recognize this state has put his signature under the defeat of the Islamic world.”
The president also garnered world headlines when he publicly pronounced the Holocaust a “myth.” He has since slightly toned down his rhetoric, questioning why, if the Holocaust happened, the Palestinians should suffer for it. “Under the pretext of protecting some of the survivors of the war, the land of Palestine was occupied through war, aggression and the displacement of millions of its inhabitants,” he told the United Nations General Assembly this September, ignoring the historic presence of Jews in Palestine.
When it comes to the Jews, Abdol Hossein Sardari and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad represent the two faces of Iran. This Muslim, but not Arab, country that protected its Jews from the Holocaust now questions whether that genocide ever occurred. Once one of Israel’s closest Muslim allies, Iran now seeks to wipe the “Zionist entity” off the map. Tens of thousands of its Jews have left, yet Iran still retains the largest Jewish population of any Muslim country.
These contradictions have been embedded in the country’s history since ancient times. “In a sense, the story of the Jews of Iran is literally the Bible itself,” says Abbas Milani, director of the Iranian Studies Program at Stanford University and co-director of the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution. “The Bible says God asked Cyrus the Great [the founder of the Persian Empire] to build the Second Temple and Cyrus did. And Esther, a Jew married to the king of Persia, exposed the anti-Semitic, genocidal plot of Haman [his chief minister], and it was aborted. These two tendencies—the Hamanic anti-Semitic tendency and the tendency to welcome and accept the Jews and the rights that they have—have come all the way to the 21st century.”


The first charter of human rights ever set to paper predates the Magna Carta by some 1,700 years. It was drafted not within the baronial estates of medieval England but in a desert palace in the Middle East. “I announce that I will respect the traditions, customs and religions of the nations of my empire,” proclaimed Cyrus upon entering the gates of Babylon on the first day of spring in 539 B.C.E., “and never let any of my governors and subordinates look down on or insult them.”
Cyrus’s reign is warmly remembered as the Persian equivalent of Camelot, the mythical English court ruled by King Arthur. “Iranians take a lot of pride in the old civilization started by Cyrus,” says Sam Kermanian, secretary general of the Iranian-American Jewish Federation in Los Angeles. “He was extremely tolerant of other beliefs and ideologies; that, too, is an added measure of pride.”

Cyrus is also sometimes referred to as the world’s first Zionist. He righted the wrong done by King Nebuchadnezzar II 58 years earlier when he captured Jerusalem and Judah, and exiled thousands of Jews. “All the kingdoms of the earth the Lord, the God of heaven, has given to me and he has also charged me to build him a house in Jerusalem, which is in Judah,” Cyrus declared. He offered the Jews the opportunity to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple at Persian taxpayer expense. Many accepted, while others remained in Persia.

Typically depicted as a bearded warrior-king with broad shoulders in a military tunic and helmet, Cyrus was killed in 529 B.C.E. in a battle in northern Persia. The Jews fared less well under his son, Cambyses II, who suspended construction of the Temple. But a few years later, work was resumed under King Darius. According to the Bible, Esther was the beloved wife of Darius’s son. Xerxes, also known as Ahasuerus.

Overall, life was good for the Jewish community under the early Persian kings. “From what we know, the Jews were well trusted and tolerated,” says Houman Sarshar, a scholar with the Center for Iranian Jewish Oral History who edited an anthology called Esther’s Children: A Portrait of Iranian Jews. He points to the prominence of Jewish prophets in the Persian Empire and notes that Ezra held the respected job of scribe in the royal court. “The Jews weren’t seen as a threat to anyone else’s way of life,” Sarshar says. But with the advent of Islam their world would change.

A battle in 642 C.E., which Arabs hail as the “victory of victories,” brought an end to the golden age of Persian Jews. Some 30,000 battle-hardened Arab Muslims assembled at Nehavend, along the western Persian border, and defeated the 150,000-man Persian army, ending 2,000 years of Persian independence. The caliphate was then controlled from Damascus and Baghdad.

Although Muslims revered Jews as “the people of the Book,” the imposition of Islam led to second-class citizenship for Persia’s minorities—Jews, Zoroastrians, and Armenian and Assyrian Christians. “After the rapid expansion of the Muslim dominion, Muslim leaders were required to find a way of handling non-Muslims, who remained in the majority in many areas,” says Nahid Pirnazar, who teaches Iranian studies at the University of Southern California at Los Angeles and is founder and director of the House of Judeo-Persian Manuscripts Foundation. As a way of both protecting and discriminating against minorities, Islamic leaders came up with the notion of dhimma, or protected minorities. “The dhimmi were required to pay an extra tax but usually were unmolested,” says Pirnazar. “This compares well to the treatment meted out to non-Christians in Christian Europe.”

Over time, the list of hardships and humiliations grew. The Pact of Umar, named after the reigning leader from 634 to 644 C.E., established harsher laws for non-Muslims. Jews were barred from government office and the military, and forbidden to ride on white donkeys, which were seen as symbols of cleanliness. They were forced to wear yellow armbands, while Christians had to don blue ones.
After the Mongols invaded Persia in the second half of the 13th century, the standing of the country’s Jews improved dramatically. “This period was the highlight of the life of Jews in Islamic Iran,” says Pirnazar. “The Mongol rulers at the time were secular, not yet converted to Islam, so Jews had a chance to penetrate into socio-political and cultural levels.”

This didn’t last. Treatment of minorities deteriorated after the Safavids took power in the 1500s, imposing their hard-line brand of Shia Islam and ushering in “the worst era of Persian-Jewish relations,” says political scientist Eliz Sanasarian of the University of Southern California, author of Religious Minorities in Iran.

The Safavids forcibly converted Iran’s Sunni Muslims to Shia Islam and introduced the concept of “ritual pollution,” which further segregated minorities from their neighbors. Because nonbelievers were deemed spiritually and physically contagious, Jews were barred from leaving their houses when it rained, for fear the water would transmit their impurities. A Jew who entered a Muslim home had to sit on a special rug and could not be offered tea, food or a water pipe, since any object touched by a Jew could no longer be used by a Muslim.

Safavid rule came to an end in 1736, but the Muslim perception of Jews as impure remained. Occasional violent outbreaks, reminiscent of the blood libels and pogroms carried out in Europe, punctuated the next two centuries of Qajar Dynasty rule. In one incident in the northeastern town of Mashhad in 1839, an ailing Jewish woman was told to use dogs’ blood to cure a certain malady. A rumor quickly spread that she had tried the cure on a Shia holiday, deliberately insulting the sect. Jews were attacked and some three dozen killed, while the rest of the Jewish community was given the choice of conversion to Islam or death. Such bloody outbreaks persisted until the 20th century, when a new breed of shah came to power.

Born in the isolated northern Persian village of Alasht in 1878, Reza Pahlavi was the son of a military officer. Pahlavi was a man of powerful military bearing, most often portrayed with a thick handlebar mustache and a curved knife hanging from his scabbard. In 1925, he deposed the last shah of the Qajar Dynasty, giving himself the title Reza Shah.

For the first time in 1,400 years, an Iranian ruler reached out to his country’s Jews, bowing to the Torah to show his respect during a visit to the Jewish community of Isfahan, banning mass conversions and discouraging the idea that non-Muslims were unclean.

While respectful of Iran’s Jews, Reza Shah was fascinated by Nazi Germany. With German encouragement—and to emphasize that Persians are Aryan, not Arab—he changed the country’s name to Iran—from the old Persian “Arynam” or “of the Aryans.”

Iran, sitting of vast pools of oil, became of great strategic importance during World War II. Hitler coveted the oil, sparking fears of an Iranian-German alliance. As a result, Britain and the Soviet Union invaded and occupied Iran in 1941, forcing the Shah to abdicate in favor of his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Though the younger Pahlavi was seen as a playboy more interested in fast cars than in governing, he had a bold vision for his nation.

A man of grandiose self-image, the new Shah viewed himself as heir to Cyrus the Great and as such was a friend of the Jews. Under his rule, the community “enjoyed almost total cultural and religious autonomy, experienced unprecedented economic progress and had more or less the same political rights as their Muslim compatriots,” says David Menashri, a Tel Aviv University expert on Iran.
To protect them from the Nazis, Iran assured the Germans that its Jews were fully assimilated Iranians called kalimis—a term derived from the accolade for Moses in Koran. The Nazis, still more interested in Iran’s oil, acquiesced, and also turned a blind eye to the fact that the Shah was providing an escape route for thousands of European Jewish refugees.

Rachel Meer, a Jewish Iranian expatriate who lives on the upper west side of Manhattan, remembers her father telling her the story of how, during World War II, he helped Jews pass through Iran. “He purchased a huge army tent to protect these refugees,” she says. “When he married my mother, the Jews traveling through were invited to the wedding.” Later, when great numbers of Iraqi Jews left their homes for the newly born state of Israel, they too were granted passage, says Shaul Bakhash, a veteran Mideast analyst at George Mason University in Virginia. “Iran was one of the few countries that did not charge the Zionist organization for this permission.”

At first Iran had opposed the partition of Palestine, says Trita Parsi, author of the forthcoming book Treacherous Triangle—The Secret Dealings of Iran, Israel and the United States. “But once it was done, Iran and Israel realized they had common interests and common enemies.” In the 1960s, Iran developed a military relationship with Israel and Israeli technicians assisted Iran with agricultural projects. Both nations, wary of Arab domination of the Middle East, saw value in creating a non-Arab “outer ring,” consisting of Iran, Israel, Turkey and Ethiopia.
With the exception of Turkey, Iran stood virtually alone in the Middle East in its acceptance of the state of Israel. But in doing so, the Shah walked a fine line. As Iran’s covert ties with Israel became public, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser launched a campaign against the Shah. At home, his efforts to westernize Iran faced opposition from mullahs—Iran’s Islamic clerics—on the right and intellectuals on the left, all of whom condemned his government as repressive.

After Israel seized and occupied the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights and East Jerusalem during the 1967 Six-Day War, the Iranian clergy’s antipathy toward Israel increased sharply. “1967 changed many minds,” says Menashri. He recounts the story of the 200-rial banknote to illustrate the Shah’s precarious position.
It was 1974, a time of great tension: Arab oil-producing nations had imposed an oil embargo on the West, but the Shah, wishing to maintain his strategic alliance with Washington and Jerusalem, refused to stop supplying them with oil. The Arabs were incensed. What seemed like routine government business—the replenishment of currency by issuing 10 million new 200-rial notes—quickly grew into a crisis. On the day the new currency was to be distributed to banks, attention fell on a six-pointed star on the back of the bill. Though the star was of a traditional Iranian design, rumors spread that the currency had been printed in Israel. Fearing rebellion, the government withdrew the notes that same day.

Protests against the Shah continued to escalate and the storm clouds of revolution gathered. “The revolution did not have Islamic overtones at first—it was a revolution of the intelligentsia and it was pro-democracy,” recalls Esther’s Children author Sarshar. “But, very quickly, in about two or three months, all the craziness started.” While many Jews were sympathetic to the protestors, the community was seen as an ally to the Shah and part of the ruling establishment—thus an enemy of the revolution.

The most influential of the revolutionaries was a religious leader with a flowing beard who sat brooding in exile in a Parisian suburb: Ayatollah Rohollah Mousavi Khomeini. Born in 1902 near the holy city of Qom, Khomeini had been exiled from Iran in 1964 for condemning the Shah’s modernization policies. After 13 years in Iraq, he moved to France, where he continued to challenge the regime. Via smuggled audiotapes of his sermons, he fanned the swelling protests against the Shah’s regime from afar and inspired Iran’s Islamic Revolution.

By 1978, widespread strikes had led to the collapse of the economy and, on December 12, two million protestors gathered on Tehran’s Azadi Square. On January 16, 1979, the Shah fled Iran into exile. Two weeks later, enormous crowds greeted Khomeini’s triumphant return to Tehran on a chartered Air France airliner. That November 4, a mob of angry students, spurred on by his denouncement of the United States as an enemy of Islam stormed the American Embassy, taking 66 Americans hostage. The demonstrators included a young rabble-rouser named Ahmadinejad who also advocated seizing the Soviet Embassy. A new age of Islamic fundamentalism for Iran had begun, spelling great uncertainty for its 80,000 Jews.

As a skinny, brainy Tehran teenager in the 1970s, Roya Hakakian was one of many young Jews who supported the Islamic Revolution despite the nervous admonitions of their parents. For them, participation was not only an adventure but affirmation they were fully assimilated Iranians. Hakakian, now a 39-year-old mother in Connecticut, has written a memoir, Journey From the Land of No, that provides a glimpse into the turmoil that followed the Revolution.

Initially, the Islamists were too busy imposing their rules on society at large to worry about the Jews. “People weren’t permitted to laugh on the streets on certain national mourning days; it was a crime to be with a boy you weren’t related to; we had to cover our heads and we couldn’t hold hands,” Hakakian recalls. Women couldn’t appear in public without a veil and garments like the chador that revealed not a clue of femininity. Women also lost the right to divorce, and most engineering and law schools began refusing them admission. People could be arrested—and sometimes executed—for possession of books such as The Communist Manifesto, or music cassettes. “Those were the Khmer Rouge days,” Hakakian says.

Hakakian’s first brush with the new order came when she and a few friends went for a hike in a public park in the Alborz, part of a mountain range outside Tehran. Encountering a sign that said the mountain was “closed,” they giggled and ignored it. As they ascended, some of the girls loosened their mandatory head scarves. Soon, they were stopped by a teenager in army fatigues toting a Kalashnikov, who demanded to know what they were doing. Three other uniformed men joined him and took the group to a detention center. There, a policeman found a Jewish prayerbook in Hakakian’s pocketbook; ironically, that broke the tension. “Jews are cowards,” one of the uniformed men said. “They never get mixed up in politics. And we thought we’d got ourselves a pack of leftists or royalists.” The girls were sent home.

“For once in Jewish history,” says Hakakian wryly, “Jewish stereotypes came to our aid.”

In the evenings, she and her friends would watch the show trials on television. Former leaders of the Shah’s government, stripped of their dignity and wearing cardboard signs with their names around their necks, were charged with offenses like “corruption on earth,” and taken to be shot. In March 1979, the spectacle hit close to home. Habib Elghanian, an industrialist who led the Jewish community council, was accused of corruption, contacts with Israel and Zionism, “friendship with the enemies of God,” “warring with God and his emissaries” and “economic imperialism.” He was tried by an Islamic revolutionary tribunal whose members kept their backs to him, refusing to look a traitor in the face.

Shot by firing squad on May 8, Elghanian was the first private citizen in Iran to be executed by the tribunal. His real crime was that he had failed to follow established custom for Jews and maintain a low profile. He had become a prominent figure under the Shah: While most well-off Iranian Jews were merchants with small businesses, Elghanian, owner of a huge conglomerate with interests in plastics, tile and aluminum, was a mogul. He even built a huge skyscraper in Tehran’s business district.

Within days of his execution, leaders of the Iranian Jewish community selected a delegation to meet with Khomeini. They chose two rabbis and four intellectuals, some of whom had joined the early street demonstrations against the Shah. Early one morning, the six men climbed into a station wagon and drove to Qom, one of them later told Hakakian’s father.

When they arrived, they were surprised to find that Khomeini, still not accustomed to the trappings of power, had cleared his calendar for their visit. As they seated themselves on folded blankets in a reception room, the Ayatollah entered. “Bism Allah al-Rahman al-Rahim,” one of the rabbis addressed him, invoking the name of God in Arabic in deference.

Khomeini began a long, roundabout discourse on subjects ranging from monotheism to how a man should choose a wife, to how to properly copulate, puzzling his Jewish audience. But when the Ayatollah completed his talk, his meaning became clear. “Moses would have nothing to do with these Pharaoh-like Zionists who run Israel,” he said. “And our Jews, the descendants of Moses, have nothing to do with them, either. We recognize our Jews as separate from those godless Zionists.”

When the Jewish delegation returned to Tehran, they spread the word: The Ayatollah had made Iran’s Jews kosher in the eyes of the Revolution. Soon all synagogues were painted with Khomeini’s decree and the Jews of Iran renounced Zionism.

True to its rhetoric, the Islamic Republic severed all official ties with Israel, but a clandestine relationship continued. Though Yasser Arafat was invited to Tehran and spoke of the plight of the mostly Sunni Palestinians, the Shia-Sunni divide and the fact that the Palestine Liberation Organization was largely secular meant that Iran’s support for the Palestinians was always lukewarm. Privately, Iran and Israel shared a common fear of the Arab states, especially Iraq. Israel sold Iran arms throughout the eight-year Iraq-Iran war.

In 1985, in the middle of that war, then-Prime Minister Shimon Peres helped broker a deal between the Reagan Administration and Iran. The agreement allowed the sale of American arms, including anti-tank missiles, to the Islamic Republic. In exchange, the United States sought Iranian influence to free Western hostages held by Hezbollah, the militant Lebanese group supported by Iran. (It also used the Iranian money to fund the anti-Communist Contra rebels in Nicaragua.) When news of the deal surfaced, the Reagan Administration was embarrassed and politically damaged—both the United States and Israel had previously denied selling arms to the Islamic Republic.

At the end of the Cold War, Israel had a change of heart and concluded that Iran had become a major threat to its security. With Iraq severely weakened by its defeat in the Gulf War, Israeli strategists focused on Iran’s quest for long-range missiles and nuclear weapons as well as Iranian funding of Hezbollah. At press conferences in Jerusalem and during many visits to Washington in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Yitzhak Rabin began emphasizing his desire to make peace with the Palestinians and with Syria because an even greater danger loomed: a nuclear Iran.


In 1977, Abbas Milani, then a political scientist at Tehran University, was arrested by the Shah’s police and thrown in jail. Considered a dangerous leftist academic, Milani shared a cell with some of the men who would become the leaders of the Islamic Revolution, including one of Ahmadinejad’s predecessors, Rafsanjani. Recalling his incarceration with the Islamists, he says bluntly, “I couldn’t stand them and they couldn’t stand me.”

Milani, who is not Jewish, left Iran for the United States in 1986, after the first waves of Iranian Jews fled the Revolution. He remembers that he first came to understand the special penalties that Iranian Jews faced under the mullahs when an Iranian friend, a prominent astrophysicist at Cambridge University, was invited to attend a conference in Tehran in 1982. The Iranian authorities had assured the young man he would have no problem returning to Britain, but because he was Jewish, they seized his passport upon his arrival and refused to return it.

“The poor guy had a wife and baby in England and they wouldn’t let him leave,” recalls Milani, who later discovered that the Islamic Republic had an unofficial policy of denying passports to young Iranian Jews to coerce their families into returning home after traveling abroad. They were in effect held hostage. “You can’t be a human being without feeling offended that this is happening in your name in your country,” says Milani.

Since the Islamic Revolution, approximately 75 percent of Iran’s Jews have fled the country. Estimates of the number that remain vary from 13,000 (the U.S. State Department’s 2005 International Religious Freedom Report, based on the most recent Iranian census) to the 25,000 to 30,000 claimed by the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, a non-profit group based in New Haven, Connecticut. The difference, the Center says, stems from the fact that many Jews in Iran do not wish to call attention to their heritage.

Whatever their number, Jews make up a tiny and vulnerable fraction of Iran’s population of nearly 70 million. “Personally, I am very much concerned about attacks on Iranian Jews,” says George Haroonian, former president of the Council of Iranian American Jewish Organizations (CIAJO), a group of outspoken Iranian expatriates that advocates for the rights of Iran’s remaining Jews. “It’s my viewpoint that Iranian Jews are in a very precarious situation.”

CIAJO reports that since 1979, 10 Jews in addition to Elghanian have been executed, six have been assassinated by the regime, two have died as a result of being held in custody, eight have died under suspicious circumstances and 12 have disappeared.

The situation has become increasingly worse, says Haroonian. He points to the trial in 2000 of 13 Jews from Shiraz and Isfahan accused of illegal contact with Israel, conspiracy to form an illegal organization and recruiting agents, which provoked vandalism and boycotts of Jewish businesses. “This was the largest wholesale attack against the Jewish community,” Haroonian says. Ten of those charged were found guilty, although espionage charges were dropped and an appeals court overturned all the convictions but those for illegal contacts with Israel. By 2003 all had been released from prison; 10 remain on probation.
Iran has seen a recent wave of anti-Semitic propaganda masquerading as anti-Zionism in print, on television and within the educational system, heavily influencing what Iranians—a quarter of them under 15—learn about their Jewish neighbors. Last February, Iran’s largest newspaper Hamshahri sponsored an international Holocaust cartoon contest that solicited sinister anti-Semitic entries that were widely displayed. In 2000, the Al-Manar television station aired a claymation special in which Jews were turned into apes and pigs. In 2004, the station Sahar 1 aired a weekly series Zahra’s Blue Eyes, also called For You, Palestine, in which the Israeli government is depicted as removing the blue eyes of Palestinian children for implantation into Jewish children. The claymation program “doesn’t say ‘all Jews are cursed,’” notes Yehudit Barsky, director of the Middle East and International Terrorism section of the American Jewish Committee. “It doesn’t say the Jewish person next door is evil. But still, the selection of this story is saying there were Jews who were evil and were punished. It’s a message of an insidious nature, not a direct nature.”
As the line between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism becomes increasingly blurred, the Jews who remain in Iran continue to stick to the Khomeini formula. “The Iranian Jewish community has gone out of its way to condemn the state of Israel, including the recent war with Hezbollah,” says Nahid Pirnazar. Catholic University law professor Marshall Breger, who visited Tehran and Shiraz in 2003, says that the Iranian Jews he met expressed regard and affection for the people of Israel, but were not political Zionists. “They were creating what I would call Judaism without Israel,” he explains. “It’s not unknown. People would say, ‘it’s no problem to be a Jew’ but the more observant wouldn’t wear a kippah outside because people in Iran know kippahs as a symbol of the Israel Defense Forces.”

While Iranian Jews are loath to speak out in defense of Israel, they do occasionally draw attention to other matters, such as anti-Jewish stereotypes in the media and the government’s campaign denying the Holocaust. Earlier this year, Haroun Yashayaei, chair of the Tehran Jewish community, sent an extremely rare letter of protest to Ahmadinejad, expressing concern about the president’s statements about the Holocaust. His objections were seconded by Maurice Motamed, who holds the one seat allotted to Jews in the country’s 290-member parliament.
“When our president spoke about the Holocaust, I considered it my duty as a Jew to speak about this issue,” Motamed told the British newspaper The Guardian in a June 2006 interview. “The biggest disaster in human history is based on tens of thousands of films and documents. I said these remarks are a big insult to the whole Jewish society in Iran and the whole world.”

Motamed, an engineer, made clear to The Guardian that although he took issue with Ahmadinejad over the Holocaust, he supports the president on other issues, including the standoff with the United States, Europe and Israel over Iran’s nuclear program. “I am an Iranian first and a Jew second,” he stressed. Although he acknowledged that Jews in Iran face problems, he assured readers that “there is no pressure on synagogues, no problems of desecration. I think the problem in Europe is worse than here. There is a lot of anti-Semitism in other countries.”
Similar sentiments can be found on the Jewish Central Committee of Iran’s website, iranjewish.com. “Iran’s Jewish community congratulates the achievement of nuclear fuel to the supreme leader, the Islamic Republic officials and all Iranians,” a May 2006 entry reads. “We celebrate the coincident of this victory with the New Year and the unforgettable days of Passover.”

Generally, Jews who have chosen to stay in Iran say that they are content and have no wish to leave their homeland. Tehran has more than a dozen active synagogues, and large groups of Jews also live in Shiraz and Isfahan. “Jews stay in Iran because they have their jobs, their lives and they love it,” says Shirin Taleh, a family therapist who left Iran in 2001 with her children to join the rest of her family in California and has visited twice since then, including a stay earlier this year.
Taleh believes her children will have more opportunities in the United States but dearly misses the country of her birth. She balks at the notion that Iran discriminates against Jews. “I would say ‘limitation’ rather than ‘discrimination.’ Two words, two meanings. Limitations for everyone, not just the Jewish community. We have some freedoms that the Muslims don’t have. Men and women mix. We are allowed to use alcohol for religious purposes. I don’t claim everything is OK. Everybody in the world abuses the name of the Jews. It’s an old problem between Muslims and Jews.” But, she makes clear, “I don’t know anything about political issues. I don’t want to go there.”

The decision to remain in Iran may not be measurable in rational ways. In 1998, when Manochehr Eliasi, Motamed’s predecessor as the Jewish member of parliament, was asked by a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter why Jews don’t leave, he burst into tears. “This is my birthplace,” Eliasi said. “I love its smell.”


In many ways, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the sixth president of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the first non-cleric president in 24 years, is an exemplary product of modern Iran. Born to a modest family in a small village, he capitalized on high test scores to enter the civil engineering program at the Iran University of Science and Technology during the reign of the Shah. Later, he received his doctorate in a program funded by the Revolutionary Guards. With 12 percent of voters participating, he won the mayor’s office in 2003.

This 50-year-old newcomer to the world stage shocked analysts during his recent visit to the United Nations, not only by his hardline address to the General Assembly but by his seeming enjoyment of the limelight. He parried questions at a press conference, deftly handled CNN’s Anderson Cooper during a televised interview and spent 90 minutes jousting with two dozen members of the Council on Foreign Relations. He stayed on message: The New York Times reported that Ahmadinejad spent 40 minutes of the session challenging evidence that the Holocaust took place. “I think we should allow more impartial studies to be done on this,” he said after hearing the account of a Jewish member of the Council who saw the Dachau concentration camp at the end of World War II. After the meeting, former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft described Ahmadinejad to The New York Times as “a master of counterpunch, deception, circumlocution.”
Milani, who has followed Ahmadinejad’s rise to power, believes the Iranian president is truly anti-Semitic and is playing the Israel card to gain international attention and enhance his stature. “Had he not said those comments about the Holocaust and Israel, he would have come to the UN as a two-bit president of a despotic regime. Instead, they gave him a rock star treatment here, and it all translated into more power for him back home.”

“Not even a second-tier player” in Iran before the furor arose over his remarks, now he is world-renowned, says Milani. “The last month and a half, every time I have traveled and taken a cab, if the cab driver is Muslim and they get a whiff that I’m Iranian, they begin talking about Ahmadinejad as the man who is standing up to the Jews, to Israel and to America. It is working for him.”

Still, for all its bombastic rhetoric, Milani says he doesn’t believe the regime poses a direct threat to Iran’s Jews. “Is there a specific danger that Jews face? I don’t think so,” he says. “That kind of eliminationist anti-Semitism has never been part of Iranian history. Iranian anti-Semitism has been more or less limited to verbal pressure, verbal anti-Semitism, forcing Jews to live in ghettos, occasionally forcing them to wear the Star of David. Killings, pogroms—that’s European, not Iranian.”
Ahmadinejad’s statements about Israel and the Holocaust may have more to do with political pragmatism than anything else. A man of a secular background, he must show the mullahs that he is as staunch an Islamist as they are; to mix religious metaphors, he has to be more Catholic than the Pope.

His outspokenness has advantages for the mullahs and the Supreme Leader they elect, who holds most of the real power. Seizing the limelight allows non-Arab Iran to pursue its goal of becoming the leader of the mostly Arab Middle East. And Ahmadinejad’s vitriol makes the mullahs seem almost moderate by comparison.
His combativeness has another upside: it serves to shift attention from economic problems at home. Despite a huge rise in oil revenues, there is grumbling in Tehran’s streets about economic conditions, reflecting the gross inefficiency of its bloated bureaucracy and centralized economy. Despite Iran’s oil wealth and bravado, the government fears Western economic sanctions that would force it to spend more to subsidize food and fuel.

Growing speculation about a nuclear showdown in the Middle East is premature, according to Milani. “I don’t see them picking on Israel militarily because they know that they will pay a very heavy price,” he says. “Even in arming Hezbollah, they’ve been very careful. They have allowed Hezbollah to become more of a nuisance, they have given them more staying power, but not any weapon that could seriously change the balance with Israel or make Hezbollah a more lethal threat. I think the war in one sense was a big loss for the Iranians. They won a publicity war but not much else.”

Scholar Trita Parsi agrees. “Israel is a means for Iran, just as Iran is a means for Israel.”

And Parsi doesn’t believe that the Iranian people would support a war against Israel. “I think the larger feeling among the population is that it’s really not Iran’s main problem. People don’t like what Israel is doing [in the occupied territories] but they don’t like Arabs, either. A poll says that 67 percent of Iranians say that Israel does not have right to exist. But does that mean that they think Iran has to do anything about this? I don’t think so.”

Nonetheless, many Iranian expatriates long for regime change. Houman Sarshar doubts the voices calling for change inside Iran will remain silent. “A population of 75 million—with approximately 50 million born after 1978—is being run by a population of mullahs 60 and 70-plus [years old]. If only 60 percent [of the population] wants a completely secular government, then it’s over,” he says.
Milani believes that without $70-per-barrel oil, the regime would not survive long. “The age of pseudo-totalitarian corrupt dictatorships has come to an end,” he says. “The majority of Iranian society doesn’t want it. But tactically this is a very nimble regime, very brutal, and it has a lot of money.”

However, Jerusalem-based Middle East analyst Meir Javedanfar, co-author of the forthcoming book The Nuclear Sphinx of Tehran: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the State of Iran, believes the chance of regime change is small. “Iranians are suffering from conflict fatigue after the Islamic Revolution, followed by one of the longest wars in modern history. They are tired. And there’s no alternative. Who are they going to revolt for? People don’t want chaos—who is going to give them hope? Who are they going to die for? Don’t expect Tiananmen.”

Iranians are upset that the government has shut down blogs as well as Shargh, the reformist newspaper. “It makes people angry. But go to the streets to revolt?” says Javedanfar. “Only two things would make a revolution overnight. One: Shoot the entire Iranian football team. Two: Ban the sale and eating of Persian rice. Then you will have a revolution on your hands. Until then, as they say in New Jersey, fuggedaboutit.”


As Mahmoud Ahmadinejad commands the world’s attention, Abdol Hossein Sardari, who died in 1981, has been all but forgotten. When the courageous diplomat returned to Iran after the war, he was imprisoned for the unauthorized distribution of passports, says George Hooranian. “After 30 days he was released by the Shah. The Shah said he did a good deed. He saved people’s lives.”
There is no memorial to Sardari in Iran, or until recently, anywhere else, says Haroonian. In 2004, Iranians living in the United States organized two Yom Hashoah events to honor the diplomat. One was at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, the other at the Nessah Educational and Cultural Center in Beverly Hills. A cut glass tablet reads: “In memory of and admiration of his humanitarian and courageous efforts that led to the saving of many innocent lives while serving as the Iranian Consul in France during World War II.”

Inspired by Sardari’s deeds, and angry that he has received so little recognition, Hooranian collected hundreds of pages of documents and personally delivered them to Yad Vashem in Israel. He would like for Sardari to be become the first Iranian bestowed with the designation of Righteous Among the Nations, a title awarded to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.
The public committee that decides who should be given this honor has discussed Sardari’s case twice, and reports that it is “very interesting.” A decision has not yet been made, pending further documentation. But the necessary information is not forthcoming; the Iranian government has refused to cooperate.

“How sad,” says Haroonian, “that Sardari—and what he represents—cannot be honored in Iran.”












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