Untitled Document
"Separate Dress Codes for Religious Minorities"
Now that Canada's National Post has apologized for the disinformational
article about Iran it published on its front page last Friday, one should inquire
as to how this happened in the first place. The Post had reported that on May
15, the Iranian Parliament had passed a law establishing "separate dress
codes for religious minorities, Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians, who will
have to adopt distinct colour schemes to make them identifiable in public. 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)."
This was absurd. The one Jewish member of the 190-member Iranian Majlis, Moris
Motamed, among others refuted it noting that Iranians would never put up with
such a law. He added, "Our enemies seek to create tension among the religious
minorities with such news and to exploit the situation to their benefit."
The legislator must surely count Iranian-American journalist Amir Taheri, author
of the nonsense, among these enemies. But what led Taheri to produce a sensationalistic
piece, drawing immediate damning comment from Canadian Prime Minister Stephen
Harper, U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormick, and Rabbi Marvin Hier,
dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles? Taheri is after all a man
of apparently impeccable journalistic credentials. He's been Middle East editor
for the London Sunday Times, has written for The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian,
The Daily Mail, Arab Times, International Herald Tribune, Wall Street Journal,
New York Times, Newsday, The Washington Post, Die Welt, Der Spiegel, Der Zeit,
La Repubblica, L'Express, Le Nouvel Observateur, El Mundo, and others. He regularly
comments on CNN. Quite a range of editors apparently consider him competent.
So I think it unlikely his piece resulted from mere journalistic sloppiness.
Taheri was also between 1972 and 1979 executive editor-in-chief of Kayhan,
Iran's main daily newspaper under the Shah's regime. He contributes to the neocon
National Review and his speaking engagements are handled by the warmongering
neocon Benador Associates PR firm. He and these colleagues have repeatedly urged
a U.S. attack to produce regime change in Iran. The neocons, of course, have
shown themselves more than willing to employ deceit in building the case for
military action; it is part of their Straussian modus operandi. However much
their "intelligence" about Iraq, disseminated through Douglas Feith's
Office of Special Plans and media sycophants like Judith Miller, has been discredited,
they're plodding on with their strategy of vilifying yet another regime to build
popular support for its overthrow.
Looking at the big picture, what they've done so far is to persuade much of
the American public that Iran is doing something illegal in enriching uranium
and insisting on its right under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to do so; that
Iran is definitely trying to build nuclear weapons; and that Iran has declared
its intention of "wiping Israel off the map." The first of these is
untrue. The NPT expressly allows all signatory nations to master the nuclear
cycle under IAEA monitoring. The second is unproven. The IAEA has stated repeatedly
that there is no evidence for an Iranian nuclear weapons program. The third
is a distortion. Iran's President Ahmadinejad has quoted the late Ayatollah
Khomeini as having stated that the "regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish
from from the page of time." But this same Ahmadinejad was of course immediately
identified in the U.S. press after his election last June as one of those who
seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979, taking U.S. diplomats and CIA agents
hostage. The deception was soon exposed, but the strategy here is to vilify
and have faith that the vilification will linger after the specific charge has
been dropped.
In 1990, after Iraq invaded Kuwait, the "Citizens for a Free Kuwait,"
a front group established by the Hill & Knowlton PR firm to promote war
on Iraq, used its ties to California Democrat Tom Lantos and Illinois Republican
John Porter to stage the appearance of a teenage Kuwaiti girl at a Congressional
hearing on the invasion. She testified that as a volunteer at al-Addan Hospital
in Kuwait City she "saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with
guns, and go into the room where . . . babies were in incubators. They took
the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on
the cold floor to die." Some of us wondered at the time whether it was
likely that Iraqi boys would wantonly slaughter Arab babies in this Kuwaiti
hospital. It was later revealed that the girl testifying was a daughter of the
Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S., and that she was lying through her teeth. But
the lie worked very, very well, validated by Colin Powell and others in the
first Bush administration, and by reputable press organs. Many months later
it was shown to be a farce, but of course then the damage had been done.
A routine, unremarkable, invasion of one Arab nation by another justified by
reasons much more persuasive than the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 (an invasion
that had actually met with much sympathy among the Emirate's population, most
of whom did not hold Kuwaiti citizenship) had been persuasively depicted as
act of utter evil. Saddam was the "new Hitler," a wanton premature
baby-killer, to be followed by the Serbian Milosovic (architect of Nazi-style
Bosnian concentration camps), and now this horrid Iranian Ahmadinejad who wants
to use his nukes to annihilate the Jews.
But the Jewish rep in the Iranian parliament (who has been outspoken before)
is surely on-target when he suggests that some seek to "exploit the situation
to their benefit." They do so by exploiting ignorance, prejudice, fear,
and gullibility. They churn out so much disinformation one has the sinking sense
that however one tries to expose it, their plans in the short term will prevail.
But those paying attention have to try, and keep raising the slogan: Stop the
Attack on Iran!
Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University,
and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion. He is the author of Servants,
Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male
Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and
Interracial
Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is
also a contributor to CounterPunch's merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq,
Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial
Crusades.
He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu