Rooyesh

Even as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denies or questions the Holocaust, Iranians have been glued to their TV sets watching the concluding episodes of a 22-part, government-financed docu-drama

 in which an Iranian saves his Jewish sweetheart from the Nazi death camps. Not only is the Holocaust not denied or questioned, its Jewish victims are treated with unambiguous sympathy.

In Zero Degree Turn, a half-Iranian, half-Palestinian named Habib Parsa falls in love with a French Jewish girl while studying in Paris. Later, as an official at the Iranian embassy, he arranges to issue Iranian passports to the girl and her mother and send them to safety in Tehran.

Director Hassan Fathi says the story is based on Abdol Hussein Sardari, a real-life charge d’affaires at the Iranian embassy in Paris, who saved some 1,000 European Jews by forging Iranian passports so they could exit the country in an exodus of Iranian Jews back to Iran.

That’s fine, but why would Iranian TV air such a series–Ramadan is the prime month for television viewing–if Ahmadinejad is so hostile to Jews and denies the Holocaust? State television in Iran is entirely controlled by the highest authority in the land, Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei.

No doubt Ahmadinejad finds questioning of the Holocaust a convenient way to stir up support for his anti-Israel campaign. In one swoop, he can suggest that Jews made up or exaggerated the Holocaust, that the Holocaust unjustifiably led to the expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland, and that Europeans, not Muslims, are responsible for any harm done to Jews. Simple messages like these play well to Ahmadinejad’s domestic base of religious and poor Iranians and to an audience of Israel-hating Muslims around the world that he seeks to mobilize for international stature.

But in the next breath, Ahmadinejad himself will point out that he has no problem with Jews, only with Zionists. As the Wall Street Journal’s Farnaz Fassihi wrote, one of the aims of the series was “to draw a clear distinction between the government’s views about Judaism — which is accepted across Iranian society — and its stance on Israel.”

Nonetheless, it is interesting that Iranian TV would give such prominence to a Holocaust series so soon after Ahmadinejad created a storm of controversy with his remarks denying the Holocaust. Knowing how Khamenei strives to keep balance in Iran’s policies, and how upset he reportedly was that Ahmadinejad’s inflammatory statements needlessly heightened the West’s confrontation with Iran, it’s possible that the Leader sought to demonstrate Iran’s other face. When it comes to Iran, it pays to take a closer look at the country’s intricate politics before rushing to conclusions.

Source: Time Magazine, Scott MacLeod/Cairo

Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian lawyer and human-rights activist, says rights abuses have worsened in Iran in the past year, but that military action is not the solution to Iran’s domestic problems.

Nobel laureate Ebadi was in Prague this week for the Forum 2000 conference, an annual gathering of figures from politics, academia, and business, where Toumaj Tahbaz of Radio Farda caught up with her.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Thursday accused Iran of “lying” about the aim of its nuclear program, saying there’s no doubt Tehran wants the capability to produce nuclear weapons and has deceived the U.N.’s atomic watchdog about its intentions.

“There is an Iranian history of obfuscation and, indeed, lying to the IAEA,” she said, referring to the International Atomic Energy Agency. “There is a history of Iran not answering important questions about what is going on and there is Iran pursuing nuclear technologies that can lead to nuclear weapons-grade material,” Rice told reporters aboard her plane as she headed to Moscow. U.S. officials have long accused Iran of trying to develop nuclear weapons behind the facade of a civil atomic energy program, charges that Tehran denies. But Rice’s strong words, including the blunt reference to Iranian “lying,” come at a critical time in dealing with the matter.

The United States is trying to win Russian support for new U.N. sanctions against Iran but has faced sharp resistance from Moscow, which has nuclear cooperation agreements with Tehran and argues the country should be given more time to come clean on its programs. Russian President Vladimir Putin said this week there is no proof Tehran is trying to build the bomb. Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates are scheduled to see him in Moscow on Friday.

Washington has been pressing for more sanctions since earlier this year. But last month, the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council — Britain, China, France the United States and Russia — and Germany agreed with the support of the European Union to hold off on a new sanctions resolution until November to allow negotiations with Iran to continue. If no progress is made on two separate tracks — talks with E.U. foreign policy chief Javier Solana on an offer of assistance in exchange for a suspension in Iran’s nuclear program and discussions with IAEA on its past activities — they are to bring the resolution to a vote. It remains unclear, though, if Russia and China, which also opposes sanctions, will support it. Even as work on the proposed resolution is to continue at an Oct. 17 meeting of senior diplomats in Europe, Putin said Wednesday that Russia was not convinced Iran is trying to create nuclear weapons. His comments came after talks with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, whose government is firmly behind the U.S. sanctions drive, and appeared to deal a new blow to efforts to forge a consensus. “We have no objective data that Iran is seeking to make atomic weapons,” Putin said.

“Therefore, we proceed from the assumption that Iran has no such plans.” Rice, however, stressed that Russia had signed on to the Sept. 28 agreement to consider new sanctions in November and said she did not “expect that there is any deviation from that course at this point” from the Russian side. She also noted that Russia had in the past demonstrated its concern about Iran’s program by limiting its cooperation to prevent Tehran from acquiring a full nuclear fuel cycle that could be used to produce weapons-grade material. “That concern was seen very clearly in Russia’s offer to Iran to enrich and reprocess in a joint venture and to bring back any spent fuel so that the fuel cycle wouldn’t be available to Iran,” she said. “I think there is a reason for that and that is suspicion about Iran’s intentions.”

Source: The Associated Press

A coalition spearheaded by an Iranian-American group Thursday urged Congress to cut 75 million dollars in funding for democracy promotion in Iran, saying it did more harm than good. A total of 26 organizations, including the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) and human rights groups, argued there was overwhelming opposition to the program among activists within Iran.

“The money has made all Iranian NGOs targets and put them at great risk,” said Trita Parsi, president of NIAC, which bills itself as the largest Iranian American group in the United States. “While the Iranian government has not needed a pretext to harass its own population, it would behoove Congress not to provide it with one.” The activists said that the Iranian government sees the US funding, in a program launched in 2006, as designed to enforce regime change, and conservative leadership elements had used it as a pretext for a crackdown.

In a letter to lawmakers who will merge Senate and House of Representatives appropriations bills containing the funding, the group said the money would be better spent on activities outside Iran to promote civil society. “We believe this program, intended to aid the cause of democracy in Iran, has failed and has instead invigorated a campaign by conservative regime elements to harass and intimidate those seeking reform and greater openness.” “Iranian reformers believe democracy cannot be imported,” they wrote.

The group said Iranian authorities arrested four Americans of Iranian descent this year, accusing them of accepting US government grants to promote regime change in Iran. The State Department said it was not aware of letter to the lawmakers but defended the pro-democracy programs. “Congress authorized this funding for us to be able to do things like expand radio and television broadcasting into Iran … to be able to allow (Iranians) to hear subversive things like the truth,” said State Department deputy spokesman Tom Casey. “I don’t think anyone would likely suggest that is a bad idea or something that we should stop,” he said. The coalition said that an expansion in funding of radio and television broadcasting into Iran was useful. But it said that further budget increases should await a boost an evaluation of past steps, including an expansion of the Voice of America Farsi service last year. The letter to the lawmakers was also signed by groups including the United Methodist Church, the Center for Arms Control and Proliferation and the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.

Source: AFP