Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Stinkin' yellow badges lies and Israel's Nuremberg Race Law

You have to wonder what the National Post was up to, when it published its amazing lying articles on alleged Iranian sumptuary laws involving identification of minority groups. By publishing the original front-page article with a huge picture from Nazi Germany (front page reprinted here and here, but the article itself appears to have disappeared; by the way, is there an uglier front page design in the world?), it explicitly connected the current Iranian government with Nazi Germany. Since the entire story was an outright lie, a fact which you could easily see from the preposterousness of the story as well as a fact which an editor at the Post could have instantly discovered with one phone call to the Iranian embassy in Ottawa, a Holocaust revisionist might use this incident as evidence that the entire story of German treatment of the Jews is also a lie. Two similar lies on the same front page! You would think the Zionists who run the Post would be a little more careful with the legacy of the Holocaust.

The original article by Amir Taheri (the article with the front page picture was by Chris Wattie, who also wrote the clean-up article – note another deceitful picture beside it!), which attempted to be a little more circumspect (but is still factually untrue), is obvious anti-Iranian propaganda, a fact made even clearer by the fact that the writer is associated with Benador Associates, the extreme right-wing political PR spinners. But why did the Post run it so ridiculously prominently, above-the-fold front page with a huge headline and a huge picture? My guess is that the fake racism-in-Iran story was intended to deflect attention from the real racism-in-Israel story. David Frum even apologized for the story on Iran by stating that the original idea for Nazi sumptuary laws came from Baghdad in the era of Charlemagne, so it is not unfair to Iran (wtf? – is David Frum on drugs?). The massage is that Islam, and in particular this Iranian government, is racist.

Just before the National Post story came out, the Israeli Supreme court approved the Israeli laws barring family reunification for Israelis married to Palestinians from the Occupied Territories. Since it is only Arab Israeli citizens who marry Palestinians, it forces Israeli citizens to leave the country based entirely on their racial origin. It is an expressly racist law, and has an exact parallel in the first Nuremberg Race Law of 1935, in which Nazi Germany prohibited marriage between ‘Germans’ and Jews (see here with a handy German chart which the Israelis should translate into Hebrew and post in public places). This law is apparently deeply troubling for North American Jews, and it is impossible to explain how its approval by the Israeli Supreme Court can be consistent with the stories we hear of how Israel is a ‘democracy’ which supports human rights. This little lyin’ story about Iran may be a clumsy attempt to hide real Zionist racism behind phony Islamic racism.