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.

The Catholic Church has offended Jews and Judaism (again). This time it seems that interfaith dialogue is seen as a means to convert Jews to the Catholic faith.

The Jewish leaders said they “pose no objection” to Christians sharing their faith, but said dialogue with Jews becomes “untenable” if the goal is to persuade Jews to accept Christ as their savior.

Oy. Granted, it’s not another Inquisition, but still…enough already Church. We Jews aren’t going anywhere. Stop it.

And in other delightful news, “President” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran has nominated former Quds Force commander Ahmad Vahidi to be his defense minister. Vahidi is wanted in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires, and, his nomination has caused a reasonably fury from Argentina and from Jewish groups.

The Quds Force is involved in operations abroad, including working with Lebanon’s Hezbollah militant group, which is accused to carrying out the Buenos Aires attack.

Stay classy Iranian Regime. Stay classy. In good news, the people of Iran have screwed their courage to the sticking place and continue to protest the government’s usurpation of power and brutal crackdown on dissent. Even the Ayatollah’s are calling out the regime’s offenses.

At a conference of Iranian Jews in Jerusalem on Monday, leaders of the Mashadi Jewish community said that despite Ahmadinejad’s blustery rhetoric against Israel, Iran is a safe place for Jews to practice their religion.

Not much of a surprise there, really. Jews have lived peacefully in Iran/Persia for thousands of years under all kinds of rulers, from the benevolent Cyrus to the anti-Jewish Sassanids to the dictatorial Shah right through to the complex Islamic theocracy that is now Iran.

“Ahmadinejad speaks badly about Jews, but he is preferable to Mousavi,” said Shlomo Zabihi, a Mashadi rabbi. The current government is relatively stable and provides a safe environment for Jews, he said.

This is what I certainly noticed during my visit to Iran in the spring of 2008, during Israel’s 60th Anniversary celebrations. Jews worshiped quite openly, lived as freely as any other Iranian (which is to say, with severe limitations), and took care not to run afoul of the authorities. In exchange, they recieved support for the institutions and initiatives. There is even a rumor, not spread as a compliment, however, that Ahmadinejad has Jewish ancestry (a blogger who has made those “accusations” has, it appears, been arrested).

It is worth noting that some of those in whom we now place our hopes for a more moderate Iran, might not be so eager to protect the Jews. Rafsanjani has been implicated in the bombing of the Jewish Community Center in Argentina and Mousavi has some hardline roots, though they say he’s mellowed over the years. The old ‘devil you know’ saying comes to mind, but one thing is certain: The Jews of Iran, in Iran, are Iranian citizens, and, like all Iranian citizens, their government is in the process of destroying itself, ruining any legitimacy it had, and attacking its own people.

Good or bad for the Jews is not the question here, not now. Right now the question is good or bad for Iranians, Jewish or not. And to that end, it is quite clear, Ahmadinejad does not have their best interests at heart.

The generation of Iranians born after the 1979 Revolution are the vanguard of the current protests, which have gone far beyond the questionable results of a presidential election, and become an expression of a people’s desire to cast off the stifling political environment controlled by the mullahs.

Roger Cohen has posed the problem in his piece today, The End of the Beginning:

Thirty years from the revolution, the core question of this election was: Must Iran stand apart from the forces of economic and political globalization in order to preserve its Islamic theocracy?

Or is it confident enough of its Islamic identity, and its now firmly established independence from America, to trash the nest-of-spies vitriol and an ultimately self-defeating isolation?

The answer has been devastating.

So now we must wait. The Iranian government under the “leadership” of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has decided to go the route of Myanmar and try to silence the people with violent repression, but the effort seems doomed to failure. His government has lost all its legitimacy as a “guardian of human rights” as its leadership has long claimed, or as a democracy. It now functions in opposition to its own people, and, as in Myanmar, only its own brave people can change it.

The US has some real security concerns to address with whatever government Iran has in place, and dealing with the nuclear program and Khamenei and Ahmadinejad’s support for terrorism around the globe must be addressed. Cutting off the government’s gas imports is one option the internation community has to respond to the current crackdown, and further sanctions are another, but neither of these will go very far in addressing the international community’s issues with the regime. Using these sticks before entering into dialogue, precludes their use later. The system has shown it doesn’t care about international isolation or its own people.  The United States’ security concern is with the ruthless government of Iran and sadly, they are the ones with which we must engage for now.

As we do, however, we can also pray for the courage of Iran’s civilains to continue to stand up against the thugs, and pray that members of Iran’s security forces find their moral voices and refuse to attack their fellow countrymen, who want only to be a nation like any other, with its failings and opportunities and self-interests. We can continue to speak out against the violence, and we can continue to provide whatever technological aid we can to help Iranians get their messages out to the world and to communicate freely with each other. But the current crisis is an Iranian problem, two visions comepeting.

The older generation sees Iran as a messianic cult, the wellspring of the next Islamic age, while the younger generation largely wants to leave all that messianism behind and simply be equal members of the global community.  As President Obama said in a press conference this week, “Ultimately, this is up to the Iranian people to decide who their leadership is going to be and the structure of their government.”

Both groups with competing visions of the kind of Iran they live in are “patriots,” in the sense of being loyal to their country, but only one has a future. Getting to that future, as we are seeing, is ugly.

Khamenei and the regime in Iran are struggling to hold on to their power, and, as they have demonstrated, will stop at nothing to thwart the will of their people. He is desperately trying to blame foreign actors for the unrest, and trying, as usual to pin Iran’s problems on  “the Zionists,” ignoring the social and political factors around what is fairly obviously and popular movement against an attempted coup by Ahmadenijad and the hard-liners (pdf of the Chatham House Study on the dubious official election results). No one is fooled.

Attacking your own people does not give you legitimacy. Arresting your youth, who are attempting to realize the democratic ideals of the 1979 revolution does not support your system. Sewing divisiveness does not heal a society. I hope and pray that clearer heads will prevail, and that those protesters arrested will be released. Sorry for you Khamenei, but this is the people’s moment and you cannot blame the U.S., the MEK, or the Jews or the Zionists or anyone but yourself.

Watching video of the brave protesters in Iran, I think of this poem by Langston Hughes, and hope that the days of the forces of oppression and fear in Iran are numbered:

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Amazing. “Ahmadinejad Says Election Rivals Use Hitler Tactics“:

“Ahmadinejad was speaking at a rally in Tehran on the final day of an increasingly bitter and hard-fought election campaign, in which he faces a growing challenge from moderate former prime minister Mirhossein Mousavi…

“Such insults and accusations against the government are a return to Hitler’s methods, to repeat lies and accusations … until everyone believes those lies,” Ahmadinejad said.

What would quoting the Protocols of the Elders of Zion on a regular basis be, then?

While I don’t think Iran-Nazi/Ahmadinejad Hitler comparisons are helpful or apt, it is hysterical that Ahmadinejad would make such a comparison. The election is getting exciting, and I worry for him. His persecution complex seems to be headed toward delusional. Or was this quote his backhanded way of recognizing the Holocaust and the lies of anti-Semitism? Is he striving for an Obama moment?

So the Chinese have forged Israeli fruit, sold it to Iran, where authorities discovered it and became briefly outraged that some of their own would do business with Israel. The situation has resolved itself, but it does suggest the absurdity of both the mistrust between Israel and Iran (Zionist fruit?) and the really weird inclination for forgery and fraud in the Chinese economy. On a more scary note, Iran has apparently arrested several people for preparing terrorist attacks around the June elections, and is accusing them, as usual, of being “Zionist Agents.” Iran does tend to accuse everyone of being Zionist agents, but still, a scary development, especially considering the other prisoners they are holding at Evin Prison.

Amnesty International says that prison holds hundreds of the thousands of political prisoners in Iran. In 2003, Zahra Kazemi, a Canadian-Iranian photojournalist, was beaten to death there.

In other “fruit” controversies, the 11th Annual Tel Aviv Gay Pride Parade is coming up, and two couples (one gay men, one lesbians) will get married at the parade, even though their union will have no legal standing. Though Right-wing foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman has “come out” in favor of civil unions because they serve his main constituency, Soviet immigrants, many of whom are not considered halachically Jewish and have trouble marrying thanks to the religious authorities choke hold on marriage in Israel (Israel does recognize same-sex marriages performed outside the country), his proposal doesn’t do much to help to help the gay community, as it wouldn’t really make marriage a civil affair, and the Orhtodox rabbinate would maintain control (though perhaps they’ll come around on the gay thing one day).

The one thing we can be sure of is that Iran, which has survived stand-offs and open warfare with several nations in the 30 years since its revolution, while developing technologically and economically, is a nation that is very shrewd about self-preservation. The mullahs may be distasteful theocrats, many of whom are corrupt, many more of whom suffer from a virulent strain of religious chauvenism and, some of whom are indeed anti-Semities. Some of them are also real scholars. Some of them are thoughtful, intelligent men who genuinely want what is best for their people and for God’s creation as they understand it. I have sat down with Mullahs in Iran who are not merely tolerant of diverse religious and political views, but respectful of them (including Jews and humane supporters of Israel). The Iranian regime is not a monolith, though it tries to present itself as one. With a massive population of young people who long for more freedoms and for long lives, I don’t see the apocalyptic strain having much currency in Iranian politics, especially in an election year. I do, however, see it quite a bit in the right-wing of Israeli society. The continued settlement of the West Bank and the support of the most extreme religious settlers by some elements in the Israeli government  has endangered Israeli democracy far more than Iran. In fact, it looks a lot like Iran, with the more extreme elements of both societies providing aid and comfort to those who seek violent conflict in the Middle East. In Iran there has been more open support for Hamas and Hezbollah, the former of which does have genocide as its goal, but there is little sunlight between the ideas of Hamas and the ideas of Israel’s Kach party and its descendants.

But these elements are not the mainstream of either society, and it is wrong to characterize all of Iran as mad Mullahs, just as it is wrong to characterize all of Israel by the Hebron settlers. Of course, policy and politics in both countries needs to account for those elements, but those calculations are part of their bid for survival, not their attempt to martyr themselves on a national level. Just as the courageous young Israelis who serve in the IDF (and the few who refuse to do so) are all struggling for the physical and spiritual survival of their nation and their families–their conception of the good life–so are the young people in Iran. Writing them off in favor of the “mad mullahs” theory writes off a valuable solution to this problem.

Far more accurate than Bibi’s terrifying prognastications and fear-mongering, however, is a little bit of game theory (which is also gaining currency among US officers in Afghanistan ). Have a look at this model of what Iran is likely to do vis a vis its Nuclear Program and its apocalyptic leaders from Bruce Bueno de Mesquita of NYU. Unlike knee-jerk fear and political expediency, this theory at least takes actual societal data into account and has a far better success record than PM Netanyahu. He’d do well to study it. Because it states that, by 2011, the apocalyptic trend in Iran is likley to lose major influence, the moneyed-class is likely to see an ascendency in power, and the nuclear program is extremely likely to tend toward civilian purposes. He’s not basing this on make-believe; he’s got the math to back it up. It may not be correct, but it should not be ignored.

The web exploded with angry comments, the most astute (though no less outraged) coming from the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, in which he noted that personal warmth and political hatred often live happily side by side in a society, even in individuals. Others simply called Cohen a fool, duped by the Iranian regime into thinking the Jews were doing perfectly fine. Some said he would have been fooled by the Nazis (a common comparison made between Ahamedinejad and Hitler came up too)

Cohen responded, noting that Iran was not Nazi Germany and that many Jews there dislike being used as a political hot button issue. As I found during my time in Iran, speaking with community leaders and youth, average Iranian Jews on the street, and pious worshipers at synagogues, they recognize that theirs is a complex community in a complex society, suffering from some real anti-Jewish discrimination, some cruelty resulting from ignorance, and some political point-scoring at their expense, but that reducing their 3,000 year history to the status of a cowed and oppressed entity, is insulting. They have just as broad a spectrum of beliefs as the American Jewish community here. Some are fiercly anti-Zionist, some quietly long to go to Israel (which they are allowed to do, unlike other Iranians), and some openly speak of admiration for Israel, as long as they also speak for justice for the Palestinians. The Jews of Iran are as free to express dissent as any Iranian, which is, not very, but no less so.

The current member of parliament and president of Dr. Sapir Hospital in Tehran explained to me that yes, indeed, they had problems, but that they were Iranians and that they were working “with the other religious minorities” to address the problems, including the limits on employment and the sometimes anti-Jewish programming on television. They did not regard outside interference as helpful. The young people I spoke with were emphatic that they had no real problems as Jews, but their problems were those faced by all young people in Islamic Iran, the limitations of a society controlled by religious fundamentalism.

Both Cohen and Goldberg are right. The Jews in Iran live safely and openly (unlike the B’hai), AND Iran provides political, financial, and ideological support to organizations that seek to destory Israel and the Jews. The Jews of Iran seek to work inside their system to change it, as Jews have done throughout their history (in America too!). The international community (rightly) seeks to pressure an extremist regime to change its behavior. But shrill accusations and comparisons to Nazi Germany won’t fix things. The only approach that can possibly work is dialogue, and the first step is to recognize that maybe, just maybe, all the Jews still in Iran are not fools or cowards, but actually believe what they say in public and in private–that their 3,000 year history of coexistence means something, that they, as someone told me, “speak English, pray in Hebrew, but dream in Persian.”

We can acknowledge that there have been some real troubles in Iran–for all Iranians, including Jews. Jews are often under suspicion because of the assumed connection with Israel, many have lost their homes and businesses and were separated from their families after the Revolution. There are a lot of bad experiences, which are just as valid as the good ones that Cohen and I encountered on our separate trips. But sometimes, it seems, only the bad experiences get pride of place in this discussion, and I applaud Cohen for voicing this other side.

Rabbi David Wolpe has extended an invitation to Cohen to meet with the Iranian exiles at his Congregation in Los Angeles, an invitation Cohen should certainly take up.  It is the Iranians themselves–those still in Iran and those living abroad–who are stakeholders in this, and all of us in the media can comment up a storm, but it is up to them to work it out. They have a lot more history at it than we do. Perhaps we should spend more time listening to them. If Cohen doesn’t show up in LA, I’d be happy to.