Once again the world has let Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad use the propaganda
platform he loves most: the speaker’s desk in front of the UN General Assembly
in New York. As Frank Sinatra put it: “If I can make it there, I’ll make it
anywhere.”
American progressives had a dinner party with the
self-appointed Iranian president and there was a long queue for interviews with
him. Years of the same procedure have still not tired Western leaders and media
from detecting “signals for dialogue” somehow hidden in Ahmadinejad’s rambling
conspiracy theories and well-known anti- Semitic slanders against the State of
Israel.
Iranians living under the mullahs’ dictatorship or in exile are
wondering if any insult or threat from the mouths of Ahmadinejad or Supreme
Leader Ali Khamenei will ever convince the West to abandon its fantasies of a
dialogue with the leaders of the Islamic Republic. Israelis might have the same
questions. It is time to ask how much the two groups have in
common.
Ahmadinejad called the 9/11 attacks a plot to “to save the
Zionist regime” and accused Western countries of sacrificing freedom of speech
on the “altar of Zionism.”
While it is exactly this anti-Semitism that
gains him a global popularity other dictators can only dream of, it does not
work in Iran, where he has become the most hated political figure in the
country.
After three decades of Islamic theocracy, even some mullahs have
lost their faith in the Islamic Republic. Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri, once
the designated successor of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, died under house arrest
last year. Ayatollah Hossein Kazemeyni Boroujerdi has been imprisoned since 2006
for advocating the separation of religion and state.
The regime can’t
hope to attract domestic support on religious grounds anymore. It can only seek
to destroy all alternatives to itself by the bloody persecution of its opponents
and by dragging Iran into a war against Israel.
THE VOICE of Israel has
been present in Iran via the Persian service of Radio Israel even before the
revolution of 1979. Under the dictatorship of the mullahs, it became one of the
most important sources of information for ordinary Iranians.
But the
mortal enmity of the regime to Israel, despite or because of its omnipresence,
has been a taboo for many Iranian opponents of the regime even if they
themselves felt no resentment against the Jewish state. The events of last
summer have fundamentally changed this situation.
The turning point was
the socalled Kuds day in September 2009, when Iranians massively protested
against the regime’s hate show against Israel. They countered the regime’s
slogans “Death to America!” and “Death to Israel!” with chants against the
allies of the Islamic Republic, Russia and China, and tore down solidarity
banners for Hamas and Hizbullah. The popular rallying cry “No to Gaza, no to
Lebanon, my life is for Iran” clearly expressed the refusal of the jihadi
expansionism of the regime.
This day was an assault on the ideological
foundations of the Islamic Republic, so painful to its leaders that they are
still talking about it a year later, accusing the Islamic reformists of being
the source of the demonstrators’ slogans.
Hatred of Israel has always
been a common denominator between so-called reformist and hard-line Islamists in
Iran. And without doubt, not only among the ruling theocrats are anti-Semitic
and anti-Zionist sentiments existent in Iranian society.
But their
political expression has practically been reduced to those political factions
that shared their anti-Israel beliefs already back in 1979: the different
Islamist currents and a traditional Stalinist left, waning in
influence.
After the Mavi Marmara incident, a group of Iranian leftist
and Muslim intellectuals and artists from abroad signed a statement claiming to
find “similarities between the violence exhibited by the occupying regime of
Israel and the suppressive regime of the Islamic Republic” and supporting the
“admirable and brave struggle of the Palestinian people for freedom and
democracy.”
In a counter petition, Saeed Ghaseminejad, speaker of the
liberal students of Iran and other Iranian intellectuals and activists denounced
this equation as an insult to the peaceful protest movement in Iran and as a
tragic failure to correct the anti-Semitic past of the Iranian
Left.
Since the rigged elections of June 2009 it has become clearer every
day for Iranians that effective resistance against a totalitarian dictatorship
is only possible if its opponents are willing to challenge openly all its
ideological foundations – and besides gender apartheid, anti-Zionism is the most
important one.
Many have claimed that the anti- Israel aggressions of the
Islamic Republic should be documented separately from its human rights record to
protect the opposition against regime charges of being “agents of
Zionism.”
This has always been futile because “Zionist” has been a regime
accusation against all serious opponents from the beginning – regardless of
their relation to Israel and the Jews.
Today this warning has become
obsolete because Iranians do not let themselves become intimidated anymore by
the regime’s conspiracy theories. Hassan Dai, a journalist who has consistently
exposed the work of the Iranian regime lobby in the United States, has recently
published several articles focusing on anti-Zionism as the ideological platform
this lobby is acting on. And the political analyst Nima Rashedan urges his
readers to compare the camp of the sympathisers of Israel to that of its
enemies, concluding that “friendship to and hatred against Israel are the
criteria to tell apart civilization from primitiveness.”
In Europe and
other parts of the world, hatred of Israel is an intellectual resentment and a
tool to gain influence in the Middle East. For democratic Iranians, it is a
vital matter of self-interest to renounce the terrorist foreign policy of the
regime, which at the end of the day is exerted against them. Iranian society
today is questioning everything the Islamic Republic stands for.
The
writers are founding members of the German chapter of the European coalition
Stop the Bomb.