A Holocaust tale, 1

Hey there, Andrew Sullivan readers. This story is turning out to be bogus. Read to the end of this post. And check out the main page while you’re here.

Iran is running a TV series about the Iranian ambassadors in France who helped save 500 Jews during the Holocaust.

It is Iran’s version of “Schindler’s List,” a miniseries telling the tale of an Iranian diplomat in Paris who helps Jews escape the Holocaust — and people around the country are riveted, tuning in every week to catch the latest episode.

That’s surprising enough in a country where hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has questioned whether the Holocaust even took place. What’s even more surprising is that government media produced the series, and is airing it on state-run television.

Even without Ahmadinejad’s past comments, the series would be a surprise. The Holocaust is rarely mentioned in state media in Iran, school textbooks don’t discuss it and Iranians have little information about it.

Yet the series, titled “Zero Degree Turn,” is clearly sympathetic to the Jews’ plight during World War II. Scenes show men, women and children with yellow stars on their clothes being taken forcibly out of their homes and loaded into trucks by Nazi soldiers.

The series could not have aired without being condoned by Iran’s clerical leadership. The state broadcaster is under the control of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khomenei, who has final say in all matters inside Iran.

[…] The show’s appearance now may reflect an attempt by Iran’s leadership to moderate its image as anti-Semitic and to underline a distinction that Iranian officials often make — that their conflict is with Israel, not with the Jewish people.

I can’t quite figure out why the mullahs did this, either. If they’re doing it to prove that Iran is not anti-Semitic, they’ve unwittingly done just about the best thing they could possibly have done to make Jews more sympathetic in Israel. And that seems to be how the series is affecting Iranians.

“Once, I wept when I learned through the film what a dreadful destiny the small nation had during the World War, in the heart of so-called civilized Europe,” said Mahboubeh Rahamati, a Tehran bank teller.

Kazem Gharibi said he watches the series every Monday on a TV in his grocery store.

“Through this film, I understood that Jews had a hard time in the war — helpless and desperate, as we were when Iraq imposed war on us,” he said, referring to the 8-year Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s.

The series began in April with a love story between Parsa, the Embassy employee, and a French Jew, Sara Stroke, in the early 1940s — and many viewers say the love story pulls them as much as any history.

This is great. An Iranian “Roots” moment. Please allow me to step into Snoopy the Goon mode and thank our Zionist agents in Iranian state TV for making this happen.

Apparently, the AP got everything wrong. A Hot Air reader updates us:

* the major point of the series is that it was allegedly the German Jews themselves who collaborated with Hitler to kill those Jews who opposed the re-settlement of Palestine
* for example, a plot line shows that a Jewish researcher is in possession of documents that prove the connection between Hitler and Zionists
* the credits of each episode feature the work of anti-Semite Roger Garaudy as a “historical source”
* “historical adviser” to the series is Holocaust denier Abdollah Shahbazi who openly admits in his blog that he’s a denier
* director and screenwriter Hassan Fatthi alleged to SPIEGEL that according to “historical evidence” a majority of Hitler’s victims were those who opposed the re-settlement of Palestine

Well, that solves the mystery. The AP probably bought the Iranian propaganda line and didn’t have a Farsi translator check out the show.

Effing morons.