I couldn’t believe my eyes for a while, reading this (via Mick Hartley).
Human rights groups are raising alarms over a new law passed by the Iranian parliament that would require the country’s Jews and Christians to wear coloured badges to identify them and other religious minorities as non-Muslims.
Iranian expatriates living in Canada yesterday confirmed reports that the Iranian parliament, called the Islamic Majlis, passed a law this week setting a dress code for all Iranians, requiring them to wear almost identical “standard Islamic garments.”
The law, which must still be approved by Iran’s “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenehi before being put into effect, also establishes special insignia to be worn by non-Muslims.
Iran’s roughly 25,000 Jews would have to sew a yellow strip of cloth on the front of their clothes, while Christians would wear red badges and Zoroastrians would be forced to wear blue cloth.
The new law was drafted two years ago, but was stuck in the Iranian parliament until recently when it was revived at the behest of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
When a completely mad person gets to all kinds of shenanigans in public, it could be quite embarrassing for the people who elected him to a high office. But when the parliament becomes a willing toy in the hands of a maniac, the world should take heed. Knowing the ways of the world, I do not expect much. But a few interested parties might want to sort out the situation.
I am not a prophet, but my advice to all Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, gays and any other minorities: get out of there while there is time. And the time is getting short.
Update by Meryl: Another source says the story is untrue. However, it has been picked up and expanded on by Ynet and other news sources. And while I believe the current Iranian regime is perfectly capable of this, the jury is still out on whether or not this story is true.
Update by SnoopyTheGoon: I hope that source is right, and the whole story is a hoax. There is a report in the London-based Arabic-language newspaper al-Sharq al-Awsat that talks about the new dress code law in Iran, without going into specific details. We should wait.
Update by Meryl, 5/20: The reports are being denied by the Canadian Iranian ambassador and a Jewish member of the Iranian parliament, and the MP who proposed the law in the first place.
But I see an interesting omission here. Funny, but you’d think that this would be the kind of thing that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would want to deny to prove that he’s not anti-Semitic. He’s the one who insists, over and over again, that it isn’t Jews he’s against. It’s Zionism. The silence here is very telling.
Everyone together with me:
“When Ahmanidejhad says we are the master race, we heil, heil, right in Ahmanidejhad’s face…”
What is this “Fourth Reich” and “master race” stuff? Judaism, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism aren’t races, and Hitler didn’t make Christians wear distinctive garb. This has nothing whatsoever to do with Hitler; it is the sort of “dhimma” legislation has deep roots in Islam, and by deep I mean more than 1,000 years old.
It’s looking like the dhimmi identification part of the story is probably untrue. That’s good. But it still bears noting that Iran did pass a law making it a crime to wear anything other than “standard Islamic garb” (details pending). Ordinarily, this in itself would (justifiably) have been cause for outrage. Instead, there will just be a huge sigh of relief if that turns out to be “all” it is? Hmmm.
Ben, do you honestly believe that in today’s Iran there would be no difference between the effect of requiring Christians to wear distinctive clothing vs. Jews? And do you honestly think the significance of the color yellow was lost on whoever proposed this law or concocted this story?
It is just way too easy to classify and compare world leaders that the Western countries does not like to Hitler. There are some vile leaders in the Middle East today without a doubt but they are also vile leaders in the West, in Africa, in all of the world. What is happening in Guantanamo Bay is disgraceful for a civilised nation to condone, and nobody can say that Hiroshima was a more gallant act than the Holocaust. All war is evil and all states do the most evil acts to win: afteralll, war is about destroying your enemy at any cost. In WW2, the US/UK/USSR alliance committed all types of attrocities to win, and so did the German/Italian/Japanese alliance. The only difference was that the losers lost and the winners won!
As regards Mahmoud Ahamdinejad: this man is much maligned in the West for many reasons mainly to do with convenience. Iran has oil. Loads of oil. And gas. It happens to oppose US dominance in the Gulf. Iran is not perfect but to hear the American view it is the only sinner in the Middle East (apart from, well, Saddam’s Iraq and Syria). In reality, Iran is (by Middle East standards) a lot more free than its neighbours. Its people are educated and have the potential to peacefully transform their government and country: well, that’s precisely what they were doing in 2001 .. until Bush called them “Axis of Evil”. Iran will someday be a very stable, rich and secular country. But, it should be remembered, it is nationalist. Very proud. Ahmadinejad and others are often dismissed as religious fanatics BUT their education and background make them less religious and more nationalist. They can play the religious card, as Iran’s poor are religious. BUT, if Ahmadinejad is a representative of the poor and makes them richer, guess what? Iran is no longer a religious country (at present, some 40% of Iran are atheist/nonpracticing, some 40% are devout Shiites, and the remaining 20% are either Christian, Jewish, Bahaii, Sunni, other Muslim, Zoroastrian, Marxist and animist). Even at present, Iran is the least religious state in the Middle East other than Turkey.
Compare it with its neighbours: Saudi Arabia treats its women and minorities in a way that even the most extremist Iranian religious administrators wouldn’t dream of! Its anti-Israel rhetoric would make Iran’s tame. Its support for terrorism is real: Iran supports Hezbollah directly and Hamas indirectly. Saudi supports Hamas and Islamic Jihad and other Palestinians directly but much more worryingly has some government officials who actively support al Qaeda. Iraq is a mess, Yemen is a failed state, as is Somalia. Sudan, Kenya, Eritrea, Ethiopia and so on are also messes. And so on.
So, as the West has its eye on Iran, it may be taking their eye off much more dangerous enemies. I predict the poverty of East Africa (the above mentioned countries) coupled with the proximity and influence of extremist Saudi Arabian businessmen is where the real dangers lie. Sudan was a host to bin Laden, and Somalia was the first al Qaeda attack on the US. The next 9/11 is largely coming from neglect of Africa and once the Islamic third world rises under the banner of Islam, and then the rest of the third world follows, the West has a lot of angry people to deal with. And, Iran will not even be a front player!
You ought to study WWII history some more before spouting off Johnno. The nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the quickest and most humane way to end the war in the Pacific. The Japanese leadership knew, by their own criteria, that the war was lost from the summer of 1944 onward. Yet they lacked the moral courage to surrender and prepared the country for a resistance to an American invasion that would have meant, in essentials, the deaths of one-fourth to one-half the Japanese population. Only the shock of the nuclear bombings allowed the logja, of suicidal idiocy to be broken, and the Japanese to escape the disaster planned for them by their own government. A good book to read on the subject is “Marching Orders” by Bruce Lee, which looks at what the American decision makers knew from their intel as a basis for their decision.
One of the things they knew was that the Japanese government suppressed many atempts by Japanese officials in Europe to communicate with the US officials there, all of which the American officials responded to then saw the connection dry up. Another thing they knew was Japan’s idea for a postwar peace. They wanted to keep what was left of their Empire (ask a Korean his reaction to that; be sure to duck) and were attempting to get a reversal of alliances by the USSR with the intention of recovering from the war and beginning a new one in 20 years or so. This came out in the decrypts of Japanese diplomatic cables to their Ambassador in Moscow. There was no way the US could permit that. We had just had a lesson, in Germany, of letting such a nation stew in its own juice with an unreformed and dysfunctional political culture aiming at a war of revenge. Occupation was a necessity. An invasion probably would have killed 50-100 times as many Japanese as the nuke bombings, for the Japanese were determined to fight suicidally, and the experience of islands like Saipan showed that many Japanese civilians would kill themselves rather than endure surrender.
As for Gitmo you don’t know what you are talking about there either. Prisoners who are abused and tortured don’t normally gain weight while in captivity and tend to come out in far worse health than they went in. The opposite is true for the prisoners so far released from Gitmo. In Castro’s prisons, on the other hand, you can find such cases of torture, starvation, and killing. You could find them in the “insurgent”-held parts of Fallujah for that matter. And the Gitmo prisoners are illegal combatant prisoners of war, not prisoners for criminal cases. We did not give trials to German prisoners of war during WWII, we do not need to give them to the prisoners at Gitmo.
But let us consider what might be an appropriate trial for those prisoners if we did give them. They have no standing as legal combatants under the Geneva Conventions, and their methods of fighting (terrorism) violate the international law of armed conflict. They might be considered akin to pirates. In that case the appropriate court must be found. By analogy with Admiralty Courts that have jurisdiction over crimes committed at sea, the appropriate venue would seem to be a military tribunal. Since they were caught under arms illegally under international law, the appropriate punishment would seem to be similar to the traditional one for piracy, hanging. Still want your pets tried?
THIS STORY NOT TRUE!
Iran: Lawmakers Debate Women’s Clothing
Associated Press May 20, 2006
… Emad Afroogh, the legislator who sponsored the bill and is chairman of Parliament’s Cultural Committee, said that the Canadian report was untrue and that the measure sought only to make women dress more conservatively and avoid Western fashions. Another lawmaker, Morris Motamed, a Jew, also said the Canadian report was false.
ALSO NOT TRUE Holocaust “historian” Edwin Black claimed that Iran was responsible for the Holocaust. But see Iran, Jews and the Holocaust: An answer to Mr. Black by Dr Abbas Milani of Stanford University.
More about Jews of Iran:
1- Jews in Iran Describe a Life of Freedom, Christian Science Monitor, February 03, 1998
(http://csmonitor.com/cgi-bin/durableRedirect.pl?/durable/1998/02/03/intl/intl.3.html)
2- Polish Jews were given refuge in Iran during WWII
Associated Press
Thursday, November 23, 2000
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A53268-2000Nov22?language=printer)
3- Iranian Jews PREFER Tehran to Tel-Aviv, Jerusalem Post Nov. 3, 2005
(http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1131043721479&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull)
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What is happening in Guantanamo Bay is disgraceful for a civilised nation to condone, and nobody can say that Hiroshima was a more gallant act than the Holocaust. All war is evil and all states do the most evil acts to win: afteralll, war is about destroying your enemy at any cost.
Misguided and simplistic. The world is not so black and white.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were never about genocide. I am not proud of having had to drop the bomb but to try and compare the Holocaust to that is just wrong.
They are two different beasts.
Johnno:
“It is just way too easy to classify and compare world leaders that the Western countries does not like to Hitler”
It *is* very easy, when they are threatening to murder millions of Jews as Ahmedinejad is.
Johnno, you wrote:
The only difference? You are so, so lost.
If I were to make a long list in rebutttal to your patently asinine statement, it would begin by pointing out that had the Nazis won, I would never have been born because my parents would have been gassed and cremated, and yuo would only be writing what you write as a sycophantic mouthpiece of the Nazis. Come to think of it………..
War is no good no matter where it comes from. I know my WW2 history and yes Hiroshima, etc. was the quickest way, but this argument can also apply to Iraq: the one way to stop the insurgency would be to go nuclear! WW2 of course took hold, like all wars before it and since, because of poor strategies and finishing plans in previous wars. Germany lost WW1 and was basically given a treaty that amounted to being a colony of the West. Hitler was an opportunistic politician who saw an opening. He got in, was genuinely popular with the German people, then power went to his head, he developed an ego and became the evil leader we are now familiar with. However, Hitler was a product of his times and there was (and still is) a hatred for Jews in Europe.
Ahmadinejad is also popular with Iranians, because Iran is treated like a child by the West. And if Iran hates Israel, and gets blamed, what about as I said the Saudi Arabians and their rhetoric. Even Israel seems to ignore their support for Hamas!! The US ignores their relationship with al Qaeda. Iran is officially an enemy of America and America dictates the world order. If Saudi is a US ally, Israel are assured that the US will control their anti-Israeli sentiment (still, the Saudis give more money to support Palestinian terrorists/freedom fighters (whatever you want to call them!) than do Iran or Saddam’s Iraq put together. When Saddam was a US ally, America ignored Saddam’s anti-Israel views too! And Israel had to go it alone to bomb Osiraq!
Let’s get real for a minute, though. The West actually takes Saddam and Ahmadinejad seriously! Like, these guys are a threat to the world! Well, if Saddam was such a threat to the world, we wouldn’t be here writing this stuff would we? He’d have us all killed with WMD. Saddam was the new Hitler and he was serious adversary material. It was proved he wasn’t. Saddam was more like Idi Amin, Pinochet or Galtieri than Hitler: a local strongman with ambitions beyond his realistic abilities. Iraq was nowhere near being a world threat (in about 200 years, maybe: but Saddam wouldn’t live that long).
Iran ain’t any more different. Ahmadinejad is more democratic than Saddam, Iran is less secular than Iraq and it is a lot bigger and is Shiite and Persian, not an Arab country and hates al Qaeda. And weren’t al Qaeda the boys who did 9/11 and aren’t caught. I think that Bush needs to go and get bin Laden and stop straying from the mission: to stop al Qaeda.
Iran, like Czech Republic/Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Latvia, etc. can sort its own way to democracy in a peaceful way. It CAN do it and interference is the only thing that will destroy this hope. In this regard, I hope Iran gets nuclear weapons (although, like Iraq, I think they are decades away from it), as Russia had them and that sorted itself out nice and peacefully.
Iran with nuclear weapons: with an educated, mostly atheist population, and Ahmadinejad wanting to make the poor richer (what kept religiousity a large minority in Iran was the successive pro-Rich policies of the Shah and most IRI Presidents to date, especially Rafsanjani and Khatami), that can mean only one thing: Iran becomes secular, loses all interest in all revolutionary activities and becomes something like Republic of Ireland (once: the poorest, most nationalist and most religious country in Europe; now: secular, moderate and prosperous). all countries go through revolutions and these settle down: some quickly (Czech Republic, Latvia, Hungary, Romania), some not so quickly (Iran, Ireland, France, USA, Russia).
I usually do not copy and paste the comments section in a blog (into my personal archive), but this is one example of where I am.
Johnno – you are absolutely amazing. It is not often that I come across a person sooo … polarized…. so homogenously … into one purely political camp of thought. Usually, most people have a few thoughts or ideas that stray from the mainstream of a belief system. But you… dude … you’re an avatar!
Further, the responses to your ideas have also been good (as well as polite). I especially like Michael Lonies response as it is well balanced, accurate, and… commonsensical. ;)
But Johnno – I do hope that you post here more often as it gives me a point of reference – kind of like a ground to an electronic circuit – from which I can get proper perspective and balance.
It is true that I disagree with almost everything you say (I am saying this so that I do not appear disingenuous to the other lurkers at Meryls place), but what you do say has _real_ value to me.
Thank you and I hope to read many … many … more posts from you in the future (and I say this … truly … from the bottom of my heart). Thank you.
jgc
Johnno, you wrote:
Your mission differs from mine in many ways, but none so clearly as this: Al Qaeda, Ahmadinejad and the mullahs of Iran, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah, among others, are part of the same disease. That this fact either eludes you or is ignored by you is why those who cherish being able to live in a world where women can drive cars, vote, and won’t have to suffer from ‘honor killings’ are very worried. The biggest threat to freedom is from those who refuse to defend it.
Johnno can’t even understand Hitler, who was an evil conviction politician from the first and not an opportunist. Nor was Germany a colony of the victors after WWI. If he cannot comprehend well establlished historical events it’s no wonder he can’t comprehend accurately current events, of which we necessarily know less while they are occurring.
As L’il Mamzer pointed out these are all related problems. The Iraq Campaign was and is an essential stage in the War on the Islamist Terrorists. I have made many comment posts explaining this, here nad on Tim Blair’s blog, so I am not going to explain it to you now. I am sick and tired of explaining Strategy 101 to people who cannot understand or don’t bother to understand it.
As for the Iraq WMDs, the Duelfer Report stated that Saddam was prepared to resume his nuke project as soon as the heat was off. A few years and Iraq could have had nukes, if they did not have the opportunity to buy them from NorK. Saddam is so reckless a man, so greedy for power and wealth, that he started two wars to steal other peoples’ oil even without having any nukes. What would he, or his psychotic spawn, have done once he got nukes? We will never have to worry about that now.
Here is the situation. The Pharaohs of Teheran, who run a rather nasty tyranny over Iran, have impoverished the country seeking nuke weapons. As both Ahmedinejad and Rafsanjani have said they intend to destroy Israel with them. Ahmedinejad has also said that the Iranians need to get used to ruling the world. They have ruined their country seeking nukes for purposes of genocide and imperialist aggression, and you blather about how nasty America is and how we should be chasing a washed up Osama instead of fighting militant Islamism at strategic and grand strategic levels. If you cannot understand geopolitical and military strategy at least stop yapping and biting at the ankles of those who do.
That depends on your definition of how the word “good” is applied. Yes, it is “bad” to have to fight a war. However, it is worse to refuse to fight when it is necessary. As one who probably would never have been born had the U.S. lost, I can only marvel at the depth of naivete and sheer ignorance exposed by the commenter who calls himself Johnno.
Not only would I (and my wife) never have been born had the U.S. not fought in Europe, but I would probably never have been born had the U.S. not dropped the bombs in Japan. My father (A”H) spent four years in the Pacific theater and my parents married after he got back.
Sabba HillelI have to suspect that “Johnno” is pulling our leg, here. But giving him(?) the benefit of the doubt…
Not that I’m a big fan of the Saudis, but their government hasn’t called for Israel to be “wiped off the map” lately. Or doesn’t that qualify as “anti-Israel rhetoric?”
If “war is about destroying your enemy at any cost,” then how is it the Israelis have not yet destroyed their Arab and Persian enemies (which we all know they certainly have the power to do)? Sometimes, war is about saving the lives of the innocent and defenseless. Sometimes, war is about preserving freedom and repelling tyranny. Sometimes, as Sabba Hillel points out, war is necessary.
A neighbor of mine has a big sign on his front lawn: “War is not the answer”
I keep wanting to ring the bell and ask him “to what question?” Does he even know — or care? Or, like Johnno, does he just feel righteous spouting meaningless rhetoric left over from the 60s?
Well, at least he does it on his own front lawn and not on mine.
LynnB –
I bet your neighbor thinks he knows the answer to your question. He’ll conveniently lay the blame at the feet of (in no particular order):
US foreign policy and its imperial step-child Israel, globalization, capitalism and American multi-national corporations forcing poverty on the rest of the world.
Because, in his world-view, those are the root-causes of terrorism, Islamism, Jihad, civil wars in African countries, etc. Thus, if you neuter America and Israel, the world would be home free.
Twisted, isn’t it?
You know, as I read through all the articles, it seems there is a plausible story that drives all of this. There is a law being proposed to specify a National Uniform. Presumably, this means that the law will be enforced (by wandering religious police with truncheons). Of course, Iran does actually enshrine some rights of its minorities, so perhaps some lawmakers said, “Well, what about the Jews? If they get to run around in black hats, how do we keep our Muslim men from doing so?”
It seems like there are only two choices – everyone has to wear the Uniform (and the Iranians quoted have been very clear that the law only applies to Muslims), or wear a distinguishing mark to identify them as non-Muslim.
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