Far From Zion

Iran’s 1st Jewish President

image via Gawker.com

The story is just hitting the mainstream media that Iranian “President” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appears to have Jewish roots, and may even have been born into a Jewish family. The story has been floating around for a while, and the Iranian blogger who brought it up during the recent campaign (and did not intend the Jewish revelation it as a compliment) was detained. Some blogs are claiming the diminutive dictator is a classic self-hating Jew. The Guardian newspaper has offered a pretty thorough refutation of the Ahmadinejad-is-a-Jew-theory. I agree with Jeffrey Goldberg when he writes: “I have no idea if Moody’s roots are Jewish, but it’s immaterial in any case.” Jewish roots or a lack thereof have nothing at all to do with his anti-Israel rhetoric, which relies on every old anti-Semitic canard. The entire debate says more about the world’s view of Jews than it does about Ahmadinejad.

First of all, Ahmadinejad is, religiously, a Shiite Muslim. That cannot be denied. He believes firmly in the coming of the Mahdi-the messianic 12th Imam-and he is devout in his way. That his parents or other relatives may have been practicing Jews and changed their names and religious affiliations has no bearing here. Not only because he is unarguably, proudly, Muslim, but because I don’t see any evidence that he’s a “self-hating Jew.” He is a Muslim chauvinist, but all religious fanatics are religious chauvinists. They believe their faith is better than all the others. In that way, Ahmadinejad is the equivalent of Pat Robertson. His anti-Israel and poorly veiled anti-Semitic language is a political ploy, a deeply cynical one, because, as the recent elections in Iran show, his main love, is power.

As for being an anti-Semite, I don’t believe he’s that either. He has treated the Jewish community in Iran relatively well. Some Persian Jews in and out of Iran say they have done better and been more secure in Iran under Ahmadinejad than under his reformist predecessor. Ahmadinejad even made a symbolic donation to the Jewish hospital in South Tehran (an area of the city where he draws most of his political support). Of course, the Jews in Iran suffer limitations as a religious minority, some outright discrimination, and they suffer the same lack of basic freedoms and the threat of arrest and torture as every other Iranian. Their problems in Iran stem from a combination of public ignorance about Jews (hardly a problem unique to Iran and hardly a problem that arrived with Ahmadinejad) and the systematic problems faced by all Iranians under the thumb of the corrupt theocracy. They do not suffer under the thumb of Ahamdinejad for being Jews. This isn’t to say I’d want to invite Mahmoud Ahmadinejad nee Sabourjian to my Passover seder. You don’t have to be an anti-Semite to be a delusional zealot fascist.

As for the messianic midget and his anti-Israel bombast as well as his embarrassing and delusional Holocaust denial, these are calculated moves to curry favor on the “Arab street” to keep countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt from aligning too closely with the US and Israel against Iran, and to keep himself squarely in the isolated, anti-Western, fight-the-power camp. He rails against Israel because it gives him street cred and keeps anyone from looking too closely at his own corruption. As the recent Al-Quds day protests by reformists shows, this isn’t working all that well anymore. He uses the old anti-Semitic accusations about Jewish conspiracies because throughout Arab culture (and I believe, not Persian culture) they do still get a lot of traction, a situation Ahmadinejad is exploiting, not creating. He’s not nearly that clever. He is recycling old conspiracy theories dreamed up in Europe and Russia and using them to his political advantage. The Holocaust denial is an extension of that. There are plenty of Holocaust deniers around the world, and if they can be his allies, then so be it. I believe that his insanity is a cynical political choice, not a manifestation of self-hatred.

He doesn’t hate the Jews (or even Israel for that matter). He just doesn’t particularly care about them.

He does, however, care about power. By taking his ranting too seriously, we grant him that power. As Fareed Zakaria notes:

…we must stop exaggerating the Iranian threat. By hyping it, we only provide Iran with “free power,” in Leslie Gelb’s apt phrase. This is an insecure Third World country with a GDP that is one 40th the size of America’s, a dysfunctional economy, a divided political class, and a government facing mass unrest at home. It has alienated most of its neighboring states and cuts a sorry figure on the world stage, with an international embarrassment for a president.

I also agree that containing Iran until Iranians make the changes in their system for which most of them long is the best solution. As “revelations” about secret Jewish pasts and secret nuclear sites come forward, the rest of us must do our best to contain ourselves.