Note: The following commentary was written in reaction to the cartoon published in the Columbus Dispatch [1] last week.  I sent it to the paper on Friday 7 September, 2007.  Many members of the Iranian community in Ohio contacted me about this disturbing cartoon and asked for an immediate reaction. 

I had been telling them that I would wait for the due process, hoping that the Columbus Dispatch would be responsive to a community of approximately 2,500 Iranians in the greater Columbus area and publish the piece.

Since the paper did not publish the piece after 5 days, nor offered any indication of publishing it in near future, I decided to publish in Iranian.com.  It should be mentioned that so far the paper has published the statement by the NIAC and a very brief protest by an American reader.
-- Ali Akbar Mahdi [2]
Professor at the Department of Sociology
and Anthropology in Ohio Wesleyan University.

Research has shown that in most cases Americans’ attitude toward other nations is a reflection of our government’s foreign policy.  This is ever more the case when there are hostilities between two countries and the lives of ordinary people are affected by such hostility. 

Media frenzy and sensationalism can further reinforce such hostilities and adds fire to the flames of stereotyping, stigmatizing, dehumanizing, and even war-mongering. Unfortunately, this has been the case for the United States and Iran since Nov. 4, 1979, when Iranian students took American diplomats as hostages and held them for 444 days. 

The profound impact of that event has prevented the two governments from making a genuine effort for rapprochement in the past 28 years.  The failure of subsequent Iranian and American governments to resolve their conflict and normalize their relationship has solidified public antagonism generated by grievances held by the two nations.

Sadly, the categorization of Iran as a part of the Axis of Evil by President Bush, in his State of the Union Address in 2002, led to further deterioration of the relationship between the two governments, adding more fuel to the public misunderstanding and distrust. 

Recently, the mayhem caused by the invasion of Iraq, the mismanagement of the occupation, and the difficulties in establishing a viable national government in that country have led the U.S. government to see Iran as the source of her problems – a charge that has reinforced the widely held negative public attitudes toward Iran.  Inflammatory rhetoric from the radical conservative faction in the Iranian leadership has further alienated the American public.

This kind of hostility underlies the lack of understanding demonstrated in public discussion about the two countries. One result of such hostility is the deepening animosity and hatred demonstrated in editorial writings, letters to editors, and art works referencing national symbols and cultural markers on both sides – a hatred fed by lack of adequate knowledge and understanding of distant people and countries. 

A sad, but revealing, example of this misunderstanding is a cartoon published in the Columbus Dispatch [3] on Sept. 4, 2007.  This cartoon depicted the entire county of Iran as sewage from which cockroaches were crawling into neighboring countries.  The drawing implicated Iran as a scum pot infested by cockroaches.

What are the implications of this kind of wild characterization of a country and its entire people, not just its government or certain political groups?  Surely, the foreign policies of both revolutionary Iran in the past three decades and the United States during the current administration have been “extreme” by regional and international standards. 

But does such extremism justify the characterization of an entire country on the map as infested ground full of “cockroaches”?  On the one hand, in an environment of real Al-Qaeda terrorism, hyper politics of fear and security, and categorical suspicion of Muslims and people of Middle Eastern origin, the real victims are the Iranian people whose humanity is reduced by an American newspaper to dirty, grotesque creatures worthy of elimination. 

On the other hand, fearful of being surrounded by American forces from all sides, and threatened with military attack, the Iranian people are left with the view Americans are indifferent to dehumanization of others, invasion of foreign lands, and tragic consequences of war.  

Do such characterizations help us to bridge the divide between America and the Muslim world?  Or do they inflame an already tense situation and reinforce people’s stereotypes and prejudices against one another?  Doesn’t the dehumanization of an entire people make us more susceptible to accept false justification for an attack on Iran?  Are we aware of unintended consequences of this type of categorical characterization of our adversaries? 

By now, we should have learned more from what we had said about Iraq before invasion, what we did, what happened, and what still is going on in Iraq.

Sept. 7, 2007