Shrine of the Báb in Haifa, Israel

The benighted Iranian regime

and the benighted ethos of the UNHRC


Ahmadinejad's, through his rhetorical antics, "focuses all attention on Jews... while the world remains perfectly oblivious his main assault the Bahais."

I. Remember Ahmadinejad's letter to German Chancellor Merkel?
I am sorry to remind you that today the perpetual claimants against the great people of Germany are the bullying powers and the Zionists that founded the Al-Qods Occupying Regime with the force of bayonets in the Middle East....

Iran and Germany can play a more important role together in the international arena by relying on the noble and high values.

This cooperative relationship can also enhance the role of Europe on the global scene and serve as a model of cooperation between two governments and nations.

It is a rather extraordinary attempt to create an alliance of culture, history and persecution between Iran and Germany. Iran, seems Ahmadinejad to aspire, is the new Germany... The Germany of Hitler, a victim of Zionist and American conspiring.

II. That Ahmad and his crazy entourage of ayatollahs are pre-inclined to share Hitler's sentiments and practices against not only the obvious Jews but other "alien" people is all too clear, for anyone who bothers to dig a little deeper into the ways the Iranian rgime treats its minorities. Very few want to know about it. To know about it is to understand that when Ahmadinjad calls for Israel to be wiped off the face of the earth, he means exactly what he is saying. And to understand this elementary principle we need look no further than more recent history:

In a 1979 meeting with five of the Iranian Jewish community leaders, Khomeini summarized his position on the local Jews in one of his quintessentially coarse one-liners: “We recognize our Jews as separate from those godless Zionists.” The line has served as the regime’s position on the Jewish minority ever since. So important were these words that they were painted on the walls of nearly every synagogue and Jewish establishment the day after the ayatollah spoke them.

It did not prevent Jews from being relegated to second-class citizenry, nor did it enable them to thrive in post-revolutionary Iran. But it recognized the legitimacy of the Jewish existence in Iran and allowed the community to live on, albeit extremely restrictedly.

III. However, "it is the Bahai community that has been suffering the bleak fate assumed to be that of the Jews. It is the Bahais who are not recognized by the Iranian constitution. Decades ago, Khomeini branded them, among other unsavory terms, a political sect and not a religion, circuitously defining them as plotters against the regime. Iranian Bahais have been accused of espionage for every major power save the Chinese, and simultaneously so. They are not allowed to worship. Their properties are vandalized. Even their dead know no peace, as their cemeteries are systematically destroyed.

Their children cannot attend schools, nor can Bahai academics teach. That is why in 1987, unemployed professors, in an act reminiscent of the Middle Ages, established underground universities to educate the Bahai youth.

Last month, six Bahai leaders were arrested. They had already been accustomed to routine weekly harassments and interrogations, which is why some of their wives have taken up sewing blindfolds to keep the guards from forcing dirty ones onto their husbands’ eyes. What is most alarming about this particular arrest is that they have not returned home and are being kept incommunicado."

Read the rest, here.

UN Human Rights Council, to the rescue of the Iranian Bahais?

Don't hold your breath. Here is the latest scandal from that benighted body:

The UN Human Rights Council is not allowed to
judge religions, according to president Doru Romulus Costea of Romania. Criticism of Sharia law or fatwas is now forbidden.

The representative of the Association for World Education, in a joint statement with the International Humanist and Ethical Union, had denounced the stoning to death of women accused of adultery and of girls being married at the age of nine years old in countries where Sharia law applies.

The speaker, David Littman, was interrupted by no fewer than 16 points of order and the proceedings of the Council were suspended for forty minutes when the Egyptian delegate said that “Islam will not be crucified in this Council” and attempted to force a vote on whether the speaker should be allowed to continue.

On giving his ruling after the break Council President Costea said that the Council "is not prepared to discuss religious questions and we don’t have to do so". "Declarations must avoid judgments or evaluation about religion. … I promise that next time a speaker judges a religion or a religious law or document, I will interrupt him and pass on to the next speaker".

The entire article, well documented with footnotes, here