Humanity is one race. As Sa’adi said in his famous poem, people are parts of one body. When one body part is in pain, the other body parts are in agony. The hardworking people in every grouping in our world have the same human needs, aspirations and hopes as others. The Arab people have the same pains and sufferings and hardships as the Iranians, the Jewish people, the Germans, the Turks, the Slavs or the Latins. They all want food, shelter, clothing, peace and prosperity for themselves, their families, their neighbors and their peers.
The fascists on the other hand, whether they are Islamic fascists, Jewish fascists, Aryan fascists, Turkish fascists, Armenian fascists or Serbian fascists want to stir up people’s emotions and create divisions. They don’t want people to live in peace and harmony. They don’t want people to unite and fight disease, hunger and natural calamities and create better living conditions for the entire humankind. They want people to fight among each other so that the fascists can come to power and create super wealth for themselves on the back of the ordinary people.
The best example of the destructive and inhumane nature of fascism in recent years was the Serbian fascists in Yugoslavia. For decades the Serbs, the Croats, the Bosnians and all other ethnic groups in Yugoslavia were living in a super-secular society in peace and harmony. People were not religious or ethnocentrists. Inter-ethnic and inter-religious marriages were widely common. The fascists changed everything. They created divisions among people who had the same blue eyes and blond hair (as well as other shades of color) and spoke the same language (Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian are the same language). People were massacred and the country was torn into pieces by the fascists.
Arabs and Jews are the same people. They share the same ancestors. Their languages belong to the same family of languages. Their alphabets are very closely related to each other. They are both written from right to left. They both have the same vowel-consonant rules and modern-era deficiencies. They share the same fictional stories in their holy books.
The Aryan fascists in Germany massacred the poor Jewish people. When it was necessary they had no problem uniting with Islamo-Arab fascists (who were “non-Aryan” Semites as well) against the Jews. On the other hand the Aryan fascists in Iran unite with right-wing Jewish fascists (and any other variations of fascists) against poor and disenchanted Arab people.
This just shows that all of these supremacist ideologies have no substance at all but rather a cover for the oppressive groups to divide the people, come to power and create super wealth for themselves and their cohorts and keep the common people in misery. They preach their “own” people that the causes of their miseries are the poor Arabs, Turks or Kurds and everybody else who lives under the same miserable conditions as they live. Of course, the fascists themselves become the comrades-in-arms of their “own” disenchanted people.
One of the means for the fascists and supremacists to keep their “own” people rally behind them is the revival of their past glories. None of them come short in discovering such glories and their glories are always unique and one of kind. The Assyrians, the Egyptians, the Indians, the Chinese, the Armenians as well as the Iranians, the Jews and the Arabs all have thousands of years of glories. According to fascists these glories do not belong to the entire humanity but rather to their own specific groupings. They engage in never-ending arguments that, in various stages of history, on who had more artists, mathematicians, astronomers, chemists, musicians, etc and who was a savage.
Iranian fascists claim that Cyrus and his human rights cylinder is theirs and they have exclusive rights over it. (By the way for over 2000 years, the Iranians had no idea what was written on that cylinder up until recent times when the writings were decoded by the Europeans. Without those efforts we would have been “doomed” with no “pride”.) The Arabs (Iraqis) claim that the Babylonians and Hammurabi Code (one of the most complete and orderly written code of human laws from 4000 years ago) are theirs. One might say that the two people are not the same. The Arabs and Babylonians were both Semites. The Iraqis are direct descendants of the Babylonians. Arabic is as similar to Babylonian (part of Akkadian language) as Farsi is to the language of the Achaemenids (named Old Persian by linguists). It is easier for a Persian to understand Swahili than to understand the language spoken by Cyrus.
Have you ever seen rational people fight over Louis Pasteur? Is there a country in the world where there is no street, institution or some kind of establishment named after him? He belongs to the entire humanity.
The Iranian fascists want us to believe that the cream of the crop of all the physicians, mathematicians, chemists and scientists in the middle ages were Persian and there were not too many Arabs or Jews or other ethnic denominations among them. The pharse “honar zâne Iraniyan ast o bas” (“arts and skills belong exclusively to Persians”) has simply no substance and is a tool for Persian fascists to stupefy the masses.
Don’t blame the Arabs for the religion presently practised in Iran! The Shia sect with self-flagellations and other ceremonies and far-fetched super-human stories about Ali were basically the creation of the Iranians. Without Iranians, most probably there would have not been the Shia sect (as hundreds of other sects, throughout ages, have disappeared from our history).
What if Iraqi and Lebanese secular Shia youth cuss and blame Iranians for their religion and savage ceremonies of self-flagellations and self-mutilations. They are Iraqis of 4000 years of Babylonian history and culture living in a country designated as the cradle of the civilization bogged down by savage Shia practices created by “fire-worshipping” “Majoos” (supposedly reflected in Charshanbe-Suri) “Ajams” (mute barbarians). You think Arab fascists don’t make such references and only Iranian fascists make divisive and ethnocentrist remarks? Have you ever seen such savage Shia practices in Arab countries that are free of Shias? In Iraq, it started only when the Shias, under the guidance of Iranian-born reglious figures (Sistani, Khoyi, et al) came to the power scene in recent years. The overwhelming majority of the Shia leaders in Iraq are either Iranian-born or are of Iranian-descent.
Now, one might want to pick on Iranian Turks and the Safavid dynasty who made Shia the official religion of Iran as a political move to stop the expansion of the Sunni Ottoman Turks. If it wasn’t for the Safavids, Iran would have turned into a satellite state of the Ottoman Empire and our modern Persian fascists would have been living in a Turkish country and would have turned into Turkish fascists instead.
The historian Kasravi quotes poetry in old extinct Azari language (supposedly an offshoot of Persian and Tati) written by Sheykh Safi Ardabili, the patriarch of the Safavid dynasty. According to Ibn Bazzaz in a book called “Safwat as-Safa” (dated pre-1500’s), Sheykh Safi, was a descendant of a noble Kurdish man named Firuz Shah Zarin-kolah of Sanjan. Well, the mountain-dwelling Kurds are supposedly the descendants of Medes. Their language and blood supposedly have less “impurity” than the ones for the Persians.
Now are Azari Turks off the hook of blame game? Are we going to blame the Kurds or are they one of us? Just imagine one quotation on the ancestors of an individual changes the blame game of an entire people of over 35 million Azari people who live in Iran and the Caucasus. Can Azari and other Turkic-speaking Iranian peasants go back to tending their livestock and tilling their land without being hated by Iranian fascists for supposedly ruling Iran for 900 years?
What if Yazidi (a variation of the word Yazata or Yazdani) Kurds who are a non-Islamic sect would have imposed their religion on Iranians. Would that have made Iran economically more advanced, modern and prosperous? Religion is only strong when backward economic conditions are imposed on people in the third world. As the economic conditions change, old ideas lose ground, backward ideas are put aside and new and modern views gain strength.
The only reason the religious-right does not have much ground in the U.S., is that the economic conditions have changed drastically from what they were couple of hundred years ago. As a result, people’s views have changed accordingly. If the economy of a backward country was imposed in the U.S., you would have had Christian courts and tribunals hanging people for blasphemy, immorality, infidelity, adultery and pre-marital sex among other rigid laws.
There are all kinds of savage directives in the Bible (the old and the new testaments) on stoning to death a son who drinks and disobeys his parents and a girl who is discovered not to a be a virgin after she marries a man. The Bible says that, since a slave is the property of his master, a person has the right to beat his slave to the verge of death so long as the slave doesn’t die. Moslems only borrowed or copied those directives word by word from the Bible. You can find lot of those directives in the Bible by visiting giivideo (screen name) at youtube.
They still have kept written obsolete laws in some of the states in the U.S. in imprisonment of people who, for instance, commit adultery, that are not carried out in modern times anymore. (In fact, several years ago in one of those states with the adutery laws still kept in their books but not implemented, a woman, who was aware of the written laws, had her estranged husband arrested when she discovered that he was with his mistress in a hotel room.) Why has religious-right lost so much ground? Obviously people owe that to changes in the economic structure of their country and the women’s participation in the socio-economic life of their society.
