It's That Magical Place, Far Far Away, The One I Call "Iran"

I'm a progressive guy, at least I like to think I am. This whole Iranian thing, them being crazy and them building missles and them wanting to kill everybody, I of course take it all with a grain of skepticism. I'm the first to jump on the "but look at their Western loving students!" bandwagon. "Look at them! They wear blue jeans and listen to Britney Spears!" I'm the first to recognize that they have their own complex and proud Persian (not Arab) history that colors their actions and their existence. I'm the first to want to believe that despite everything Ahmadinejad says, despite what the Ayatollah spouts to chanting masses, that Iranians are a people who can see past the rhetoric of lunatics and war-mongers. But at the same time, I'm a realist, and you can write all the lovey-dovey articles you want about the place - the fact is still that for all that Iran has which is hopeful, for everything that makes me pray that some sort of student-led revolution against the Islamic Revolution is brewing in some illegal bar circuit somewhere in Tehran, I remain relatively uneasy about what is going down in Iran.

I have a confession to make - I have a subscription string on the "New York Times" website which connects me to articles that reference "Jew," "Jewish" (although I guess that one ends up being redundant), and "Israel." This is a relatively new thing I started doing about 2 years ago when I became totally obsessed with Jewish/Israel news because, sometimes, it seems that's all the world wants to talk about anyway. Yes, sometimes I'm a follower. This morning I get a link to Roger Cohen's article on Iranian Jews. According to Cohen - and this is me simplifying - everything is just peachy for the crew of 30-40 thousand Jews that remain in Islamicized Iran. Cohen goes ahead and interviews a couple of shop keepers, cites the basic fact that the Jews who remain in Iran have been relatively unharassed since 1979, and just shows us that Iran's not all that bad when it comes to their Jewish citizens - in stark contract to how it feels about the Zionist scourge of Israel.

And so it seems Cohen is very willing to accept his seemingly obvious conclusion - Iran can hate Israel, but it doesn't have to hate it's Jews. Well, of course not. I mean, consider some of the facts he also mentions - "I know, if many Jews left Iran, it was for a reason. Hostility exists. The trumped-up charges of spying for Israel against a group of Shiraz Jews in 1999 showed the regime at its worst. Jews elect one representative to Parliament, but can vote for a Muslim if they prefer. A Muslim, however, cannot vote for a Jew."

Jews, in an Islamicized society that is not democratic, are a marginal, ineffectual group of nobodies who the Iranian regime doesn't even bother with (except to the extent they need to toss a few on trial for spying for Israel every now and then, just to keep them in check). Consider the pre-Iranian population of 100,000 Jews, most of which left. The ones that left were the ones who had money, who were, for the most part, the educated, the elite, the successful. The ones who stayed were, for the most part, the day laborers, the poor, the ones who couldn't get out or didn't have the wherewithal to get out in the face of a country that was turning from a Western-backed Shah (granted, not the nicest of men in his own right) to an ass-backwards fundamentalist regime. I don't disown these Jews, I don't discount the tranquility with which most have probably led their lives in otherwise domestically peaceful Iran. But this, by no means, shows me that Iran means no harm to the Jews or to the West, that it is not as much fire and brimstone as Iran's leaders, themselves, seem to project.

Like I said, I'm a progressive, and so I know that Iranian society is filled with cosmopolitan people who don't like the regime, who don't like the Ayatollah or Ahmadinejad or any of this "we need nuclear fuel because we really need nuclear power plants" bullshit that any of them is spouting, who love the West and everything the West still continues to mean to dark parts of the world - freedom of expression and freedom of existence. But this does not discount the fact that the place is run by people who, whether we like it or not, are the ones that are still in power and who still control the country's direction and who still have it on a collision course with the West and with Israel and, yes, even with "Jews."

Even if you take a very brief step back from the obvious Jewish-Israel association and simply say "well, they don't like Israel, but they don't mind Jews," a quick visit to a site like MemriTV shows you what a nice selection of anti-Semitic propoganda still appears on primetime Iranian TV. I mean, books like the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" is still a top seller in Iran, "Mein Kampf" is freaking mainstream reading. The fact that some no-name, limited-rights Jews who don't talk too loudly, aren't bothered too badly, and are left alone so they can sell their dusty antiques in narrow alleys and go pray in their little synagogues, doesn't say anything about Iran's regime and the regime's intentions for the future. The chants of "Death to Israel," the claims of wiping Israel off the map, all of these are excused and forgotten because, well, Iran is good to its Jews! There we have the true face!

It's BS and we all know it. I give Iran's Jews a total of 30 seconds of safety if Iran ever gets into a real war with Israel and you have to be a fool to think otherwise. I'm all about saying that you're criticizing Israel and that your separating your political criticism of a political entity from the hatred of the people who make up a vast majority of that entity. That's all well and good. But then maybe we should be fair about this, right? Iran is just out to protect the world's Muslims, right? Which explains why there's so much animosity towards Israel because, shit, I mean if you look at how awful they are and what they did in Gaza, then you know that we have to hate Israel for that. So let's stage rallies and call for jihad and hate them because they deserved to be hated. But wait, so what happened to the rallies against deaths in Iraq? Where are the anti-Taliban rallies? Where is the cry of injustice against the Serbs and the Russians for their military actions? When will Iran stop supplying weapons to the terrorists around the world who kill the more Muslims than anybody else?

Sorry, maybe I just spoke out of turn, but I still find it a little odd, this seemingly "justifiable" rhetoric that is downplayed by people as not such a big deal, as just some silly displeasure with all things West. The point is that Iran's regime doesn't just criticize Israel - it calls for its annihilation. This to me is a step in the genocidal direction, the same way that if I said I wanted to wipe Iran off the map, that would be me saying "I want to kill most of the world's Persians." But hey, no one would tolerate that, would they? But hey, there are no double-standards in this world, are there?

As an oft-quoted Holocaust survivor once said - "One thing I've learned is that if someone tells you they want to kill you, you should believe them."