WASHINGTON - A story authored by a
prominent US neo-conservative regarding new
legislation in Iran allegedly requiring Jews and
other religious minorities to wear distinctive
colored badges circulated around the world last
weekend before it was exposed as extremely
dubious.
The article by a frequent
contributor to the Wall Street Journal,
Iranian-American Amir Taheri, was initially
published in last Friday's edition of Canada's
National Post, which ran alongside the story a
1935 photograph of a Jewish businessman in Berlin
with a yellow six-pointed star sewn on his
overcoat, as required by Nazi legislation at the
time. The Post subsequently noted
denials of the story.
Taheri's story, however, was reprinted by
the New York Post, which is owned by media baron
Rupert Murdoch, and picked up by the Jerusalem
Post, which also featured a photo of a yellow star
from the Nazi era over a photo of Iranian
President Mahmud Ahmadinejad.
Another neo-conservative
publication, the New York Sun, also noted the
story on Monday, claiming that the specific report
that special badges were required by the
legislation had been "incorrect". At the same
time, however, the Sun quoted two Iranian-American
foes of the Islamic Republic as suggesting that
dress requirements for religious minorities were
still being
considered by Iran's
ruling circles. It offered no evidence to support
that assertion.
The story, which was also
noted in the Australian press, comes at a moment
of rising tensions between Iran and both Israel
and the United States over Tehran's nuclear
program, which, according to the latter two, is
designed to produce nuclear weapons. Both the US
and Israel have suggested that they may take
military action against nuclear-related targets in
Iran unless ongoing diplomatic efforts to freeze
Tehran's program bear fruit.
Juan Cole,
president of the US Middle East Studies
Association (MESA), described the Taheri article
and its appearance first in Canada's Post as
"typical of black psychological operations
campaigns", particularly in its origin in an
"out-of-the-way newspaper that is then picked up
by the mainstream press" - in this case, the
Jerusalem Post and the New York Post. A former US
intelligence official described the article's
relatively obscure provenance as a "real sign of
[a] disinformation operation".
Taheri's
original article, "A color code for Iran's
'infidels'", dealt primarily with new legislation
that it said was designed to ensure that Iranians
wear "standard Islamic garments" that removed
ethnic and class distinctions and that eliminated
"the influence of the infidel" - presumably
meaning the West - "on the way Iranians,
especially the young, dress".
But it also
noted in passing that it would "envisage" separate
dress codes for religious minorities - Christians,
Jews and Zoroastrians - who would be required to
adopt distinct color schemes to make them
identifiable in public "so that [Muslims] can
avoid shaking hands with them by mistake, and thus
[become] najis" (unclean).
In
particular, he explained, religious minorities
will "have to wear special insignia, known as
zonnar, to indicate their non-Islamic
faiths. Jews will be marked out with a yellow
strip of cloth sewn in front of their clothes,
while Christians will be assigned the color red.
Zoroastrians end up with Persian blue as the color
of their zonnar," he wrote.
While
Taheri did not evoke the Nazi precedent in his
column, the National Post asked its readers at the
end of the piece, "Is Iran turning into the new
Nazi Germany? Share your opinion online at
national post.com."
That was compounded by
the Post's publication of a front-page article by
Chris Wattie that quoted unidentified
"human-rights groups" as "raising alarms over a
new law passed by the Iranian parliament that
would require the country's Jews and Christians to
wear colored badges to identify them and other
religious minorities as non-Muslims".
"This is reminiscent of the Holocaust,"
Wattie quoted Rabbi Marvin Heir, the dean of the
Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, as telling
him. "Iran is moving closer and closer to the
ideology of the Nazis."
The story also
quoted one Iranian exile living in Toronto as
confirming the story, as well as Canadian Jewish
leaders and Prime Minister Stephen Harper as
denouncing the legislation and suggesting that it
was consistent with other recent moves made by
Tehran.
Similarly, US State Department
spokesman Sean McCormack, who, however, denied any
specific knowledge about the alleged measure,
called it "despicable" and reminiscent of "Germany
under Hitler".
In fact, however, the
legislation contained "absolutely no mention of
religious minorities", according to Hadi Ghaemi,
the chief Iran researcher for Human Rights Watch,
who said it included "only generalities with
regard to promoting a national dress code and
fashion industry that should be subsidized and
supported by the government".
The article
- and especially its attribution to "human-rights
groups" - was particularly unfortunate, he said,
because "it plays into the hands of the Iranian
government that wants to discredit human-rights
issues that are raised at the international
level".
The actual legislation was indeed
"a troubling development", but not for the reasons
cited by the Post, he said, because "its main
target is most probably Iranian women".
Other denunciations were quick to follow.
One Jewish representative in the Iranian
parliament, Maurice Motamed, insisted that color
requirements for ethnic minorities had "never been
proposed or discussed in parliament", let alone
approved. "Such news," he told the Associated
Press, "is an insult to religious minorities here.
"This report is a complete fabrication and
is totally false," he told The Australian
newspaper. "It is a lie ..."
Two
Israel-based Iran experts, Menashe Amir and Meir
Javedanfar, also denounced the original reports
about the legislation, suggesting in a follow-up
article in the Jerusalem Post on Monday that they
were based on outdated speculation about the
impact on non-Muslims of the adoption of Islamic
dress standards.
Nonetheless, the Sun,
without endorsing the specific contents of the
National Post articles, refused to drop the story,
quoting "a leading spokesman for Iranian Jews",
the secretary general of the Iranian American
Jewish Federation in Los Angeles, Sam Kermanian,
as thanking "the world for its outcry" over the
original reports and praising Taheri as "someone
with fantastic credibility". Taheri
is a member of Benador Associates, a
public relations firm that lists a large number
of leading neo-conservatives, including
American Enterprise Institute associates Richard Perle,
David Frum, Michael Ledeen and Joshua
Muravchik, among its clients.
Major
boosters of the war with Iraq, Benador clients,
who also include former Central Intelligence
Agency chief James Woolsey and former Israeli
minister Natan Sharansky, have also called for the
US administration to take a hard line against
Iran.
The newspapers that so far have run
the story are similarly identified with a hard
line against Tehran. The National Post, which was
bought by CanWest Global Communications from
Conrad Black, a close associate of Perle's, is
controlled by David and Leonard Asper, who have
accused the Canadian Broadcasting Corp of being
anti-Israel, according to Marsha Cohen of Florida
International University, who has closely followed
the badges story.
Similarly, the Sun has
taken positions consistent with the right-wing
Likud Party in Israel on Middle East issues, while
Murdoch owns the strongly pro-Israel Weekly
Standard and Fox News, in addition to the New York
Post.
"I think the way these stories
played - particularly the references to the
Holocaust - was designed to arouse and play upon
concerns and accusations that Ahmadinejad is
another Hitler who needs to be dealt with
accordingly," noted Cohen, who added that the
Iranian president's questioning of the Holocaust
and aggressive statements about Israel had made
such stories more credible.
considered by Iran's
ruling circles. It offered no evidence to support
that assertion. 
