Iran Vice President Rahimi on the Jews

Mohammad-Reza Rahimi, the Vice President of Iran and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's number two, gave a speech in Tehran on June 26 at the UN-sponsored International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking 2012 annual event. It was disfigured all over by anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and is a fine specimen of the form.  Rahimi is not as well known as Ahmadinejad, but he surpassed his President by explicitly indicting Jews and Judaism rather than precision-targeting "Zionists".

It is frustrating and regrettable that so far no verbatim transcript of the speech has emerged in English.  I have worked hard over the last couple of days to find one or anything close -- an English-language summary or a verbatim transcript in Farsi.  All I can find are assorted quotes in several English-language news reports.

On a tip by Golnaz Esfandiari, I was able to disinter from the Google Cache a now-unavailable Farsi-language report on the speech that appears to be an eyewitness paraphrase of Rahimi's remarks.  It provides a clear and lengthy summary of what he actually said and serves as a better record than anything out there now.  Therefore I've labored to translate the document into English and present it here.

Notes:

Unlike Juan Cole, who if Rahimi's remarks become more infamous will arise to tell us they are merely whimsical references to a medieval Persian poem, I do not "command" Farsi. Therefore, my translation has been an interesting travail whose product is imperfect. It is made up of five sources: 1) Google Translate; 2) the Babylon English-to-Persian Translation tool; 3) Google Web and Images (for when dictionary lookups failed or produced confusing results); 4) Rahimi's quotes reported in English-language media, which I correlated to their referents in the Farsi transcript which I then replaced (in blue); and most of all, 5) the considerably gracious help of a tehrooni Farsi-speaker, who fought through her annoyance and embarrassment to sort out the most difficult passages. Let me say again that the Farsi transcript is a paraphrase, not verbatim.

Each paragraph is followed by the original Farsi text. Reader edits are most welcome. Based on them or my own efforts, I may be able to improve the translation in the coming days or weeks. I'll make my own changes inline without notification, as that seems most efficient and ethically unproblematic. However, if a reader helps out and I can confirm the new text I'll update this post with an acknowledgement.

Annoyingly, Blogger's GUI won't allow you to format text right-to-left, which one must when writing Farsi, unless you change your whole blog to be an Arabic, Hebrew or Persian-language blog.  (American global arrogance!)  Because I shudder to imagine the effect that might have on the rest of my posts, which incorporate a lot of custom HTML, I'm not going to bother. So my apologies for the ill-formatted Persian text.

There are two significant, if not precisely crucial, differences between the Rahimi quotes circulating and the Farsi transcript. First, Rahimi was quoted claiming the Talmud teaches Jews "how to destroy non-Jews so as to protect an embryo in the womb of a Jewish mother."  According to the transcript, he didn't use a Farsi verb meaning "protect".  I felt the closest English interpretation of the verb he was reported to have used -- پرورش داده -- which might unite the means (destroying non-Jews) with the ends (conferring some benefit on Jewish fetuses), was "nourish". But yeah, it's still batshit crazy.

Second, Rahimi was reported to have said Jews kill "black babies" on the orders of "the Zionists". The transcript says Rahimi claimed that in order to control the population of Native Americans, Jewish doctors sterilized Native American women. The Farsi phrase used is "red-skinned" and as it once was here in rougher times, Iranians use it to refer to Native Americans. They do not use it to refer to black people.

Thomas Erdbrink, whose New York Times report on the speech (linked above) is the most heavily cited, told me he witnessed the event and ran quotes that were rendered into English by an official Iranian government translator.  The transcript I translated was made by the Iranian Students' News Agency.

Though the ISNA transcript appears to be an eyewitness rendering, it's been secreted away and I'll never find "Journalist 71199" to ask after the methods he or she used.

I've made requests of Ahmadinejad's office and relevant departments of the United Nations to obtain a verbatim transcript in any language of Rahimi's speech.  I'll update if I receive fruitful responses.

Labels: anti-semitsm, conspiracism, iran, juan cole, mohammad-reza rahimi, mullahcracy, united nations

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Netanyahu Goes to Washington

Assessing a nuclear Iran

The polyphony of punditry about Netanyahu’s visit to the White House shows that the debate about a nuclear Iran remains flawed. I’ll try to correct what I think are the two main problems with it, but even after calibrating our instruments the problem stays out of focus. Perhaps that’s because the exigency of Iranian nukes is underscored by our lack of good military options to prevent them.

The case against using force to prevent a nuclear Iran settles on the alternative policy of containment. For reasons that will become clear, I think doves conjure the "containment" of today’s illiberal regimes with the same carelessness as hawks speak of "appeasement". We know what they mean. In a "don’t take my word for it" rhetorical tic, war opponents adduce Ehud Barak’s opinion that, "[the Iranians] are radical but not totally crazy. They have a quite sophisticated decision-making process, and they understand reality." We find these critics confident in the rationality of the Mullahcracy, which they think is comparable to that of the Soviets, the original nuclear bête noire. Robert Wright says Iran simply won’t attack, because "Iranian leaders have no desire to be annihilated along with their families, friends, and Persian civilization."

Here’s the first flaw in the debate. The Iranian government is not a uniform and single -- rational or irrational -- actor. It doesn't work that way. All organizations have what Thucydides called a "war party" and a "peace party". Complex factors, including historical and economic context, culture and national values, and systems of law and politics, decide the relative power and influence of each group. Iraq war opponents, who have monitored the fates of war and peace parties in Muslim states in relation to Bush and Obama, understand this. Iran’s government has both rational actors, like Khatami, the reformist, and irrational actors, like Ahmadinejad, the Jew-hating millenarian conspiracy theorist. I don't have to spell out why a nuclear Iran is a worse place than a non-nuclear Iran for the war party to find itself in the ascendant.

I agree that doesn’t mean the war party is suicidal, and here let me join Wright in opposing an attack on Iran. For questionable tactical gain, it will visit destruction and humiliation on a society with a significant demographic for which Persian history and culture are paramount. Theirs is a proud, pre-Islamic, pluralist tradition that stands out regionally by not being absolutely infested by victimology, irredentism, conspiracy theories and anti-Semitism. We make a big mistake effacing these Persians -- the peace party’s constituency -- by exaggerated focus on the war party and its constituency, the hezbollahi. However, Wright makes the opposite mistake: he claims “Iranian leaders have no desire to be annihilated.. along with Persian civilization.” This is wrong: Iran’s highest leaders and its war party are committed to the Iranian Revolution, which considers “Persian civilization” to be its antagonist.

I get what Wright means, but his language shows there is a fog on the lens he is looking through. I don’t mean to say that Iranian Islamists seek to anneal the Revolution of its Persian impurities in a nuclear inferno. I mean they consider Persian civilization separate and undesirable, to be assimilated or discarded. The Mullahs have a self-preservation instinct, but that is not the same as a regard for Persian civilization. These Shia zealots are violent, paranoid conspiracists triply encircled: they are Muslims beset by Crusaders and Zionists; they are Shia beset by other Muslims; and they are revolutionaries beset by Persian reactionaries. Attached to the body, Persian civilization is both a stabilizing and destabilizing element, something to protect and fear, especially in times of duress.

Iran has a war party and a peace party, divided along these lines. Remember the images of the Green Revolution to learn what Iran’s leaders think of Persian civilization. But bombing or invading Iran would send secular Persians running into the arms of raging Shia millenarians.

Bringing focus back to us, Peter Beinart asks, "Are Palestinians worried about being nuked by Iran? In a small country, they're at much at risk as Jews. If not, why not?"

Weigh the apparent answer against your sense of the US and Israeli perspectives. A companion exercise is to consider the unconcern for Palestinian well-being among liberators who wish to visit destruction on the Zionist entity. Palestinian perspective, other than that which is projected onto them, is so often superfluous.

Beinart's question is thought-provoking, but in the confines of the debate's second flaw. It's natural for both those who support and oppose attacking Iran to dwell on the "wipe Israel off the map" scenario -- Iran firing nukes into Tel Aviv. But Iran won’t do that, except possibly, if it can, in retaliation for an invasion or first strike. Much more realistic, and challenging, is the danger of a nuclear Iran pursuing its aims via terror proxies. Bruce Hoffman, the eminent terrorism scholar and Director of the Center for Peace and Security Studies at Georgetown University, observes that the Iranian Revolution is defined in part by terrorism as foreign policy. Revolutionary Iran sired modern religious terrorism with an "Islamic terrorist campaign" seeking to spread:

This is especially salient to Iran's indirect war against Israel. It seems the logic of containment is not dispositive in the quasi-military realm of terrorism. Israel has had nukes for about four decades and Iran has supported hostilities against Israel for about half that long (and also Jews, if we join the Argentine government in blaming Iran and Hezbollah for the 1994 bombing of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association, which killed 85 people). While Hezbollah and Hamas take cues from Iran, they are also independent actors, which is to say Iran can't precisely tune their aggression. Effective missiles are much easier to obtain than nukes. If Hezbollah, Hamas, or a group like them pulls off a large-scale attack on Israel -- say, rocketing a hospital and killing ~300 doctors, staffers and patients -- the situation could devolve very quickly into a devastating exchange between Israel and Iran. Look at how we’ve reacted to the terrorist murder of ~3000 Americans, then consider what Israel has done in response to ineffectual rocket attacks and the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit. Israeli policy has a consistent flavor of machtpolitik. Wright, and many like him, say the US is confronting Iran "on Israel’s behalf," hoping to taint the hawks’ position by distilling it to a war for Israel. Do they believe a 9/11 in Israel backed by a nuclear Iran will remain a regional affair?

To get an idea what an Iranian war party under siege might do, review the following statistics, enumerated in Hoffman's Inside Terrorism.

There are three main flavors of terrorist: the national-separatist, or right-wing secular terrorist; the Marxist-Leninist, or left-wing secular terrorist; and the religious, or millenarian, terrorist. (The latter doesn't refer only to Islamic terrorists; also think Timothy McVeigh and Baruch Goldstein.) Hoffman shows that religious terrorists take a far greater toll than their secular counterparts, and that among them, Shia terrorists are the most lethal. That makes sense given the Iranian provenance of modern religious terrorism.

Hoffman also notes that in recent times, the ratio of non-religious to religious terrorists has skewed steadily in favor of the latter.

It's hard to account for the escalation in brutality, because explanatory models seek to be rational, but these phenomena are quintessentially irrational. A clue may be found in the distinct way in which each type of violent extremist seeks to stop history. As I’ve written, left-wing extremists wish to harness and drive history toward a future utopia. Right-wing extremists wish to harness and drive it back to a glorious past. And religious millenarians wish to destroy us and themselves to create paradise in place of the worldly purgatory. In this they are more dangerous than their totalitarian antecedents.

Labels: barack obama, conspiracism, iran, israel, millenarians, netanyahu, peter beinart, robert wright, terrorism, utopian thought

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