Jonathan Cook's excellent article on Iran's Jews.
As Cook writes:
"There is an interesting problem with selling the "Iran as Nazi Germany" line. If Ahmadinejad really is Hitler, ready to commit genocide against Israel's Jews as soon as he can get his hands on a nuclear weapon, why are some 25,000 Jews living peacefully in Iran and more than reluctant to leave, despite repeated enticements from Israel and American Jews?"
Neil Clark remarks:
"Jonathan's observations remind me of the war lobby's ludicrous attempts to portray President Milosevic's rump Yugoslavia as the 'new Nazi Germany' in the 1990s. The weak point in the argument- aside from the fact that Yugoslavia was a thriving multi-party democracy led by a life-long anti-fascist whose parents were Partisans, was that thousands of non-Serb refugees from the wars in Bosnia and Croatia headed to guess where...? Yup, Milosevic's rump Yugoslavia. I might be wrong, but I can't recall any Jews emigrating to Nazi Germany in the 1940s, can you?"
Quite.
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Cook's article is largely nonsense.
ReplyDeleteAmong other things, Cooke asserts that Ahmadinejad's speech about eliminating Israel was mistranslated. Evidently, he does not know that the Iranian government website disagrees with him and continues to post the alleged mistranslation - and such is posted notwithstanding the bad publicity it has brought Iran and its leader. Presumably, if the government thought otherwise about the content of the speech, the translation would have been corrected - and long ago. It has not and, most likely, it will not be "corrected."
Moreover, such statement represents the actual thinking of the government, as stated not in one odd speech but in hundreds of speeches by not only Ahmadinejad but by a plethora of others - including by the governments that preceded Ahmadinejad's government.
As for the desire of Jews to maintain their presence in Iran, that may be true - up to a point. It may also be the case that were Jews in Iran to express reservations, such would be treated by the government as a form of treason or as consorting with forces hostile to the Islam, which would have severe consequences.
A more reliable understanding of the views of Jews in Iran is their mass exodus. 100,000 lived in Iran in 1948 and probably less than 20,000 today. It would be best to inquire why some remained behind and not to wax elegant about things Mr. Cook has not bothered to investigate.
As for the view that there is no analogy to Nazi Germany because, at present, Jews are not fleeing Iran in droves, Mr. Cook has obviously never read a book about Jews living under Hitler. Large numbers remained and remained for many, many years. Large numbers desired to remain. That Jews remain in Iran, frankly, tells me or any other person with a brain, nothing about what the Iranian government is doing.
I also do not think that Jews and others contend that Iran seeks to exterminate its own Jewish population. What is contended is that Iran has hostile intention against Israel and Western countries and that the ideology of the regime, if it were to follow through on its own logic, calls for wiping Israel off the map and re-instituting the institution of Jihad in order to resume the fight over Europe. The regime's hostility toward Israel, etc., it is argued, goes back to the very beginnings of the Iranian revolution, as argued by historian Benny Morris, among others.
It's all academic. Absolutely nothing would persuade Britain into a war against Iran after the Iraq fiasco. And I suspect that that goes for America as well.
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