Iran Going Further Over the Edge

Each new story out of Iran paints an ever more detailed picture of a regime of the unhinged totally at odds with the rest of the world. Reports of a New Iranian law to require Jews to wear yellow band completes the unhinged image.

A new dress-code law reportedly passed in Iran this past week mandates the government to make sure that religious minorities – Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians – will have to adopt distinct colour schemes to make them identifiable in public, the Canadian National Post reported on Friday.

Under the new law, which still awaits final approval from Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Jews will have to wear a yellow band on their exterior in public, while Christians will be required to don red ones.

To call this disturbing would be resorting to gross understatement. However, one source is calling the story untrue.

[I]ndependent reporter Meir Javedanfar, an Israeli Middle East expert who was born and raised in Tehran, says the report is false. “It’s absolutely factually incorrect,” he told The New 940 Montreal. “Nowhere in the law is there any talk of Jews and Christians having to wear different colours. I’ve checked it with sources both inside Iran and outside.” “The Iranian people would never stand for it. The Iranian government wouldn’t be stupid enough to do it.” (h/t Outside The Beltway)

I would chalenge anyone with any knowledge of history to NOT make the connection to the gold stars of Nazi Germany. Yet as the Confederate Yankee points out, quoting Michael Rubin at NRO’s The Corner,

The Nazi practice of forcing Jews to wear a yellow star had its origins in what is now Iran and Iraq when a ninth century caliph forced his Jewish subjects to wear yellow patches. From time to time, subsequent rulers revived the practice. Shiite clerics long deemed any food touched by Jews to be unclean. While blood libel only took root in Iranian society after the sixteenth-century arrival of European ambassadors, as Iranian society wrestled with modernity, violent anti-Semitism grew. Pogroms wiped out the Jewish community in some towns and villages in Iranian Azerbaijan in the mid-nineteenth century, and serious pogroms also swept through Mashhad, a Shiite shrine city in northeastern Iran in which the current supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, was born and raised. It was also in Mashhad that, despite the oft-cited mantra that there is no compulsion in Islam, Shiite clerics forcibly converted the remaining Jews to Islam under threat of death.

And, as CY notes,

It is reasonable, based upon history, to assume that Iranian President Ahmadinejad is once again moving his country in the direction of another pogrom, another Holocaust, though one created not by sword and fire, but fission.

It becomes clearer at each turn that we must turn considerable attention on Iran. To ignore the threat they present would be very foolish.

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