When not calling for “Death to Israel” and “Death to America” (the Little Satan and the Great Satan, respectively) or declaring off-limits certain of its nuclear facilities to the IAEA inspectors, or making a mickey-mockery of the on-again off-again negotiations in Vienna, or encouraging its network of proxies and allies all over the Middle East – the Houthis in Yemen, the Kata’ib Hezbollah in Iraq, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and now Hamas in Gaza as well — to make murderous mischief wherever they can, the Iranian regime puts on a little charade, every now and then, showing what a big-hearted outreaching moderate regime it can be. A report on this intermittent farce is here: “Don’t Be Hoodwinked by Iran’s Human Rights ‘Overtures,’” by Sharon Nazarian and Marjan Keypour Greenblatt, Algemeiner, December 17, 2021:
As negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program continue, the Iranian regime is once again oscillating between blackmail and seemingly benevolent gestures. This is a common regime tactic that has played itself out in the past, and the Biden administration needs to be careful not to be hoodwinked by Iran’s misleading ploys.
On Nov. 3, a new Iranian Supreme Court ruling negated the regime’s decades-old policy of jailing converts to Christianity and participants of underground churches. According to Iran’s Penal Code, proselytizing and conversion out of Islam are a violation of Sharia law and punishable with jail time and even execution. In reality though, this ruling is nothing more than lip service to Iran’s Christian community, as twenty Iranian Christians remain in prison for practicing their faith, and Farsi-language churches are barred from publicly opening their doors. More importantly, it is merely a fig leaf to the nuclear negotiators in Vienna and the regime’s attempt to show its humanity….
A new ruling by the Iranian Supreme Court in early November may have seemed to the intended audience of Westerners to put an end to the regime’s long-established policy of jailing both converts to Christianity, and Christians who belong to “underground churches” whose denominations have not been officially recognized by the state. The Iranian government made sure to publicize this Court decision in the West, but there is less here than meets the eye. For despite that ruling, there are still twenty Christians imprisoned in Iranian jails, not for being converts – they aren’t – but merely for daring to practice their non-Muslim faith. And Farsi-language churches – the kind whose liturgy, prayers, and sermons Iranian would-be converts could understand — are forbidden to be open to the public, and remain accessible only to those who have been longstanding members of the congregation. This is another way to stymie those Muslims wanting to find out more about Islam by attending a church where Farsi is spoken.
Christian churches are forbidden to hold services in Farsi, which cuts the churches off from the Iranian people, and makes it pointless for Farsi speakers who wish to attend church in order to find out more about the religion, to do so, given the linguistic barrier enforced by the regime. Sure, go to church, the regime says, as long as it is one where the services are completely incomprehensible, conducted in a language you don’t understand.
Stare decisis – the common law doctrine that ordinarily requires judges to follow precedent – is not part of Iranian law. Judges can follow or ignore previous cases, and the authors believe it likely that the Supreme Court decision striking down the punishment of people who convert from Islam to Christianity, will soon be overturned. And even if it were to continue to be valid for converts to Christianity, they don’t think it will be extended to apply to other non-Muslim religions; Muslims who want to convert to the Baha’I religion or to Judaism or to Zoroastrianism will still be forbidden from doing so.
This tactic by Iran dates back to the period of President Hassan Rouhani and his promise of moderation, when a new era of charm-driven diplomacy led to an easing of tensions with the US, a departure from former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s erratic and overt tyrannical posture. Yet, while Rouhani’s administration was busy engaging in diplomatic outreach, the Iranian regime was continuing to pursue terrorist activities around the world, crushing the human rights of its own citizens, and holding American hostages in its prisons.
Hassan Rouhani was all smiles-and-guile, when he presented the “kinder, gentler face” of the Iranian regime as the country’s president from 2013 to 2021. While he was ingratiating himself with the West, the regime was cracking down on dissent at home, and continuing to support terrorist groups, above all Hezbollah, with money and weapons. During Rouhani’s time as President, several American citizens, including the journalist Jason Rezaian, a former Marine, Amir Hekmati, an Iranian American Christian pastor, Saeed Abedini, and private investigator Robert Levinson, were held in its prisons as bargaining chips, all but the last – Levinson died while imprisoned in Iran – being eventually traded for Iranians held in American jails.
To help placate negative sentiments in the West, and perhaps also to dispel the regime’s antisemitic image, the regime promoted two symbolic gestures at home: In 2011, it invested around $400,000 in Iran’s only Jewish hospital, the iconic Dr. Sapir Hospital and Charity Center in Tehran. It is an institution that, with the mass exodus of the country’s Jewish community, remains Jewish in name only — and one that, like many of Iran’s establishments, was suffering financially.
That $400,000 given to the Dr. Sapir Hospital – really, a most modest sum – by the government of Iran, was meant to show that the regime was not antisemitic, as some in the West had charged. Since the hospital had no Jewish medical personnel and likely no Jewish patients either, it was Jewish “in name only.” But at least Tehran could misleadingly announce to the world that it had contributed to the well-known “Jewish hospital” named after the Jewish Iranian Dr. Rouhollah Sapir, “Dr. Sapir Hospital and Charity Center,” as a way to semaphore that far from being antisemitic, it was positively friendly to Iranian, and to world, Jewry.
Later in 2014, the regime unveiled a unique monument honoring the Jewish soldiers who had lost their lives in the Iran-Iraq war during the 1980s.
This monument was another transparent attempt to signal to the outside world that Iran was not antisemitic. But what, really, did such a monument mean If there were no changes to the wretched condition of Jews in Iran, and if the regime continued to wallow in its antisemitic attitudes and practices? And why has there been no monument to the Christian or Baha’i Iranians who died in the eight-year war with Iraq? Why were the Jews singled out for this gesture? In the calculation of the Iranians, they wanted to win support among American Jews who, the Iranians had been taught to believe, were extremely influential in the corridors of American power, and it made sense to wean them away from the anti-Iranian views that they had imbibed both from Israel and from the Sunni Arab states of the Gulf.
These token gestures had absolutely no impact on the lives of Iran’s minorities, including its Jewish citizens, who are routinely forced to publicly demonstrate against Israel with chants of “death to Israel,” or Baha’i citizens forced to practice their religion in an underground network of schools and houses of worship.
The government’s decision to donate money to a famed “Jewish” hospital took place only after Iranian Jews, eager to leave, had been talking to Jewish resettlement services in Israel. Tehran apparently thought its paltry donation of $400,000 to a “Jewish” hospital — without Jewish personnel or patients — would be enough to slow down that exodus. That donation may have convinced some credulous Jews in the West that Iran’s leaders were not antisemitic, but it did not persuade the Jews of Israel, who over the past 40 years have seen how deeply antisemitic are the leaders, military and civilian, in the Islamic Republic. The statue to Iranian Jews who had died fighting in the Iran-Iraq War similarly was understood by Iranian and other Jews as a propaganda ploy, designed to make the West forget that the Iranian Jews endured persecution, seizure of assets, and execution by the regime, and to overlook as well the endless series of “Death To Israel” rallies in cities throughout Iran.
And even while the negotiations proceeded, Iran continued to arrest and jail dual national citizens, perhaps in anticipation of a day when they would be needed as bargaining chips, a tactic commonly referred to as “hostage diplomacy.”
Today, as the US and Iran are engaged in another crucial round of negotiations, American-Iranian dual nationals Emad Shargi, Morad Tahbaz, and Bagher and Siamak Namazi are all being held in an Iranian prison (Tahbaz also is a citizen of the United Kingdom). Other countries are also struggling to secure the release of their citizens imprisoned in Iranian jails….
These three are being held not for anything they’ve done — the trumped-up charges against them of espionage are comical – but because, as American-Iranian dual nationals, they have value, for they can be used in a prisoner swap with the Americans.
That Iranian Supreme Court decision – prohibiting punishment of those Iranians who have converted to Christianity — looks ever less significant in the light of how religious minorities in Iran continue to be mistreated. They are discriminated against as non-Muslims, both by the government and by devout Muslims who are taught to regard them as“the most vile of created beings.” They are subject to arrest, imprisonment, a confiscation of their assets, and even death, if convicted of blasphemy, a charge sometimes made by neighbors wanting to settle scores with, or take property from, non-Muslims, and who accuse innocent Infidels of cursing Muhammad or of defacing a Qur’an.
The Iranian police routinely crack down violently on protests, busting heads, beating up protesters, even killing them, whether they be farmers angered at the miserable conditions in which they are forced to live because of government mismanagement of the historic drought, or human-rights activists only asking that the government stop suppressing the exercise of freedom of expression.
While conciliatory steps such as those towards Iran’s Christian minorities are always welcome in a repressive country like the Islamic Republic, the Iranian people know that these moments of detente are temporary, if not artificial, and a possible prelude to even worse circumstances….
The single Iranian Supreme Court decision to end the prohibition on Muslims converting to Christianity may at any point be challenged by other courts in Iran, where judges, not needing to follow precedent, may decide at any point to reimpose that prohibition on Iranians converting to Christianity. The Supreme Court itself can choose to overturn its previous ruling, if it deems the situation warrants reimposing that prohibition. That might happen, for example, if there were a sudden steep rise in converts to Christianity, enough to alarm the rulers and leading them to reimpose that ban on such conversions.
Iranian media are full of attacks not only on the Jewish state as the Little Satan, but on Jews worldwide. Iran has not changed its malevolent spots. As a violator of human rights, it is on a level with China and Russia. It holds Iranian dual citizens hostage, hoping to use them in prisoner swaps with the U.S. It repeatedly threatens to “obliterate” the Jewish state. It continues to prevent the IAEA access to nuclear sites. It drags out the talks in Vienna, even as it rushes pell-mell to continue enriching uranium to 60% purity, one step away from reaching the weapons-grade level of 90% purity. It continues to supply Hezbollah with money and weapons, including precision-guided missiles to add to its armory of 150,000 rockets and missiles in Lebanon. It continues to support the Houthi rebels in Yemen, who have been lobbing missiles at Riyadh. It continues to crush dissent on the streets of Iranian cities, whether by farmers protesting the mishandling of water resources at a time of extreme drought, or by human-rights campaigners demanding to be allowed the right of free speech. Evin Prison is full of those Iranians who have dared to publicly challenge the state’s authority.
Iran is a police state, armed to the teeth, with a network of proxies and allies (Hezbollah, Houthis, Kata’ib Hezbollah, and now Hamas) throughout the Middle East. It is determined to become a nuclear power, so that it can remove the “cancer” of the Jewish state from the face of the earth and subsequently, become the leader of the Muslim world. And then it hopes to take the fight to the Great Satan, and then to the rest of the world’s Infidels! Let’s hope the Innocents Abroad now negotiating for the U.S. In Vienna, remember at all times whom they are dealing with, the very people who invented religiously-sanctioned dissimulation, or Taqiyya.
Kesselman says
The so-called CIC, Sleepy Joe isn’t capable of dealing with Islamofascists of the mullah kind. Tehran has long ago sensed the US administration’s decline. They play their cards in a way that’s taking the wind out of Biden’s handlers’ sail. They go forth and back and leave the bewildered tandem, Biden, and Blinken lost with empty hands.
somehistory says
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/german-university-ends-program-with-iran-uni-calling-to-destroy-israel/ar-AAS3ViN?ocid=msedgntp
“German university ends program with Iran uni. calling to destroy Israel”
gravenimage says
*Good*. Thanks for that link, Somehistory, Of course, any Western university partnering with Iran is crazy to begin with.
gravenimage says
Iran’s Good-Guy Charade
…………….
Anyone who buys this blatant Taqiyya from the bloody Mullahs is a fool.