Israel's Jewish Problem in Tehran

There's an excellent article an AntiWar.com by Jonathan Cook which questions the logic of the current Israeli obsession with Ahmadinejad as the "new Hitler", an obsession that has been picked up by both Bush and Cheney as a possible reason to justify attacking that country.

This obsession has been fuelled by the infamous Bibi, the man who marched in front of a coffin bearing the inscription, "Rabin is murdering Zionism" at the time of the Oslo Peace Accords, shortly before Yitzhak Rabin was murdered by an Israeli student for the "crime" of proposing giving away "parts of Israel". So we are not dealing with reasonable people here, which makes Bush and Cheney's willingness to accept a Netanyahu script all the more suspicious.

Netanyahu has been drumming up support for attacking Iran through a series of astonishing exaggerations:

"It's 1938 and Iran is Germany. And Iran is racing to arm itself with atomic bombs." Of Ahmadinejad, he said: "He is preparing another Holocaust for the Jewish state." A few weeks ago, as Israel's military intelligence claimed – as it has been doing regularly since the early 1990s – that Iran is only a year or so away from the "point of no return" on developing a nuclear warhead, Netanyahu was at it again.

"Iran could be the first undeterrable nuclear power," he warned, adding: "This is a Jewish problem like Hitler was a Jewish problem … The future of the Jewish people depends on the future of Israel."

Nor is Bibi alone in making these astonishing claims:

Israel's new president, Shimon Peres, has compared an Iranian nuclear bomb to a "flying concentration camp." And the prime minister, Ehud Olmert, told a German newspaper last year: "[Ahmadinejad] speaks as Hitler did in his time of the extermination of the entire Jewish nation."

All of these claims are based on a speech Ahmadinjad made when he supposedly stated that he wished to "wipe Israel off the map", a comment that has been repeated so often that it has been taken to be true. Of course, the truth is that Ahmadinejad made no such comment. Ahmadinejad was actually quoting the late Ayatollah Khomeini who said that Zionism would "vanish from the page of time" in much the same way as the Shah of Iran, Apartheid South Africa, the Soviet Union and other illegitimate systems of rule whose time had passed, had eventually fallen. But it suits the purposes of some people to cling to this false translation and claim that Ahmadinejad is the new Hitler seeking to "wipe Israel off the map". Despite the fact that Ahmadinejad never even used the word "Israel" or the word "map" or even the western phrase "wipe out".

However, the Cook article raises a very interesting point which undermines this entire theory regarding Ahmadinejad's supposedly entrenched anti-Semitism:

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?

The Iranian Jewish leaders have been adamant that they are not under threat and have, so far, fought against all Israeli enticements to emigrate to Israel.

As Ciamak Moresadegh, an Iranian Jewish leader, observed: "If you think Judaism and Zionism are one, it is like thinking Islam and the Taliban are the same, and they are not."

Iran's leaders denounce Zionism, which they blame for fueling discrimination against the Palestinians, but they have also repeatedly avowed that they have no problem with Jews, Judaism or even the state of Israel.

The state of Israel have offered all kinds of financial incentives in an attempt to dislodge Iran's Jewish population, but they have discovered "a lack of desire on the part of thousands of Iranian Jews to leave."

To step up these efforts – and presumably to avoid the embarrassing incongruence of claiming an imminent second Holocaust while thousands of Jews live happily in Tehran – Israel is now backing a move by Jewish donors to guarantee every Iranian Jewish family $60,000 to settle in Israel, in addition to a host of existing financial incentives that are offered to Jewish immigrants, including loans and cheap mortgages.

The announcement was met with scorn by the Society of Iranian Jews, which issued a statement that their national identity was not for sale. "The identity of Iranian Jews is not tradeable for any amount of money. Iranian Jews are among the most ancient Iranians. Iran's Jews love their Iranian identity and their culture, so threats and this immature political enticement will not achieve their aim of wiping out the identity of Iranian Jews."

It really does provide the Holocaust predictors with a little bit of a problem that Iran's Jewish population are not only happy to remain in Iran but that they are refusing rather large cash incentives in order to do so.

However, as the article also touches upon, sometimes this kind of Israeli pressure can become a self fulfilling prophecy. By implying that Iran's Jewish population have some kind of dual loyalty or that they are really Israelis rather than Iranians, the Israeli propagandists run the real risk that other Iranians might take them at their word. Which would have a devastating effect on Iran's Jews.

It's an excellent article. Click the title to read the whole thing.

Tags: Iran, Israel, Ahmadinejad, Netanyahu, Holocaust, wipe Israel off the map, Bush, Cheney, Zionism, Judaism