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since Wed, 26 Dec 2007 20:04:17.
I was already irritated that broadcast and print news almost certainly as a result of Jewish social networking had designated Iranian American Jews disproportionately as the favored interpreters of Iranian events. Yet the combination of Jewish American NPR radio journalist Terry Gross and Iranian Jewish American Roya Hakakian stood out for dishonesty.
I lost count of the number of times Gross used the word anti-Semitism while she was speaking with Hakakian, and the emphasis suggested an effort to refute the reports from Roger Cohen about Iranian Jews in the NY Times.
Hakakian started out with a good deal of misdirection in her discussion of her father's experiences while he was growing up in Iran.
While some Shiites do worry that non-Shiites can transmit ritual impurity, the belief is not specifically anti-Jewish, and a lot of Jews have the same belief about non-Jews: Touch Non-Jew, Wash Hands.
While Mr. Hakakian's life may have been harsh in the 20s or 30s, I doubt it was worse than that of the average Iranian Muslim of the time period, and as I point out in the short excerpt below from David Shasha: Holocaust, Mean-Spirit, Fraudsters, Iranian Jews made tremendous economic progress in the 50s, 60s, and 70s as a result of Jewish social networking, which was able to take advantage of some of the Shah's economic and political goals.
Joachim's note: I am not sure that I can do justice to the history in a short paragraph, for I consider the interactions of Iran with the USA far more complex than usually depicted, but the US overthrew Mossadegh (or assisted the British in overthrowing him or let the Iranian regime collapse in the face of British intransigence over nationalization of the Iranian petroleum industry) in part because he planned to apply developmentalist models to the Iranian economy and to use Iranian oil wealth to modernize. The Shah and the Shah’s associates cut a deal to partner with Western interests to loot Iranian wealth while relatively little was spent on improving the lot of Iranians -- something like the later scenario in Chile. Eventually the Shah invested a lot in strengthening Iran militarily sometimes at cross purposes with American or Zionist goals, but on the whole certain wealthy, politically powerful and non-Zionist Americans have been quite happy when Arabs, Iranians or Turks buy US weapons. In the process of the Shah’s military buildup many Iranian Jews became involved in profiteering associated with the looting of Iranian wealth especially when Western Jews were on the American or British side of the equation. The younger generation of Iranian Jews generally does not understand the ambivalent role that some of their parents and grandparents played in the Iranian economy and society under the Shah.
[The enmeshment of Iranian Jews in Ashkenazi social networking has followed the similar evolutionary pattern of the Algerian Jewish community albeit with much more explicit Zionization.]After finishing the discussion of Hakakian's family issues without any genuine discussion of the ambivalent relationship of the Iranian Jewish community with the Shah, Gross made sure to go through some of the main points of Jewish Zionist propaganda.
Because Khomeini was no political fool and probably began to understand the nature of Jewish Zionist politics during his exile in France where the Jewish community was very much ethnically split, he had no problem in distinguishing between Ashkenazi-dominated Zionism and Jewish Arabs or Persians. Yet Gross tried to make it seem outrageous and anti-Semitic that he would reject hegemonic Zionist identity discourse by distinguishing ethnic Arab and ethnic Persian Jews from Jewish Zionists that have seized control of Palestine.
Gross then tried to equate suggesting that the Zionist regime would vanish from the pages of history with genocide incitement and wound up the interview by accusing Ahmedinejad of the ultimate sin of Holocaust denial even though he did nothing of the sort and even though revising American understanding of the Holocaust is long overdue
- because of information that has become available since the collapse of the Soviet Union and
- because of the excessive importance assigned to the Holocaust in contemporary American politics:
At that point in the interview, Gross began to recite a portion of the Zionist credo while Hakakian dutifully affirmed whenever Gross paused.
Because Hakakian lived only 18 years in Iran and then 25 years in the USA, the thoroughness of the Hakakian's enmeshment in the ethnic Ashkenazi Zionist worldview is not surprising and probably assured her annointment as a pundit specializing in Iran issues.
According to the Roya's events section of her website, Hakakian is a regular speaker at synagogues or Jewish organizations and is apparently quite aware who is buttering her bread.
Not only does the Roya's essays section of her website include lots of discussions about Neda and the required Holocaust denial article, but there is nothing about Marwa, Rachel, Suraideh, or Abir, and Hakakian has never addressed why the vast majority of Iranians despise Zionism and consider the question of Palestine to be of supreme importance.
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