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A demonizing call - -

By Roya Hakakian

A Demonizing Call

This Time, Bashing Israel May Backfire

By Roya Hakakian

Sunday, November 20, 2005

When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called last month for Israel to be wiped off the map of the world, he displayed a disregard for the international community that proved he is a genuine disciple of the late Ayatollah Khomeini. But his proposal also showed that he hasn't learned any lessons from recent Iranian history. In a country where public opinion takes shape in direct opposition to the regime, the objects of hostile statements like Ahmadinejad's almost always win friends among young Iranians.

Take the United States. Twenty-five years of demonizing America has only sent the Great Satan's popularity skyrocketing so high that many political pundits speak of Iran as the biggest red state outside U.S. borders. Now, in similar fashion, the passion for the Palestinian cause is cooling, and the average Iranian is beginning to look at Israel with new interest.

""
"Speaking
Speaking for himself? Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's call last month for Israel to be "wiped off the map" may underscore his fundamentalist Islamic bona fides, but it could spur greater interest among Iranians in their country's Jewish history, the author argues. (Associated Press)
Outlook
The Post's opinion and commentary section runs every Sunday.
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The ailing economy has turned unemployed young Iranians into pragmatists. One popular slogan at student demonstrations in recent years has been: "Let go of Palestine; pray think of our miseries!" Bloggers are expressing their exhaustion with the regime's embrace of the Palestinian cause at the expense of Iranians' welfare. Though this year's annual anti-Israel parade reportedly drew tens of thousands, that was far fewer than the hundreds of thousands, even millions, who attended in the early 1980s.

For the first time in decades, opposition leaders, no longer afraid of taking an unpopular position, are challenging the assumption that Iran's official anti-Israel stance is sound foreign policy. There's some momentum behind the idea that in a region dominated by Sunni Arabs, Israel is Iran's most natural strategic ally. Writing about a recent trip to Iran in the New York Review of Books, historian Timothy Garton Ash pointed to developments like these as evidence of the Iranians' "friendly curiosity about Israel."

But curiosity is easier to come by than enlightenment. As religious fundamentalism becomes a universal affliction, inflammatory statements like Ahmadinejad's should blend into the thicket of radical utterances issuing from around the world. The blame for the fact that it doesn't falls chiefly on Iranian intellectuals.

Even though Iran has long had a substantial Jewish population -- before 1979, it was between 80,000 and 100,000, including my family -- there is a dearth of reliable literature in the Persian language about Israel and Jewish history. Government-sponsored institutions, to be sure, have been prolific on the subject, publishing openly anti-Semitic titles ranging from "The Jewish Lobby in America," "History of the Jewish Plutocracy" and "Israel and the Shah's Secret Police" to "An Exploration of Judaism" with chapters on "The Crimes and Murders of the Jews," "Jews: A Racist Nation" and "The Old Testament: A Pawn in Jewish Hands." But more than 2,000 years of Jewish presence in Iran has yielded no more than a handful of scholarly books and articles.

This is not because the story of Jews in Iran belongs to a bygone era. Even with the standoff between Iran and Israel, and the 1999 arrest of 13 Iranian Jews on espionage charges, Iran continues to be home to the largest community of Jews in the Mi



    
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