Zero Degree Turn – Iran and the Jews

Ahmadinejad (whose peasant’s eyes are like Berlusconi’s) sponsored a conference last year which questioned the historical truth of the Jewish holocaust. But … Or Does It Explode? pointed out the irony that

“Iran rescued hundreds of Polish Jews (mostly children) from the Holocaust and then helped them immigrate to Palestine. The online Center for Iranian Jewish Oral History [based in LA] has a brief report [as far as I can see no longer there] on these ‘Children of Tehran’ who in 1942 were housed in a refugee tent camp in Dustan Tappeh, outside Tehran (not too far from today’s conference location). In 1942, Iranian authorities not only acknowledged the Holocaust – they bravely saved over 1,000 people from Hitler’s wrath. In 2006, the spirit of that noble deed has been abandoned, perhaps even inverted.

“As for the status of the 20,000 Jews who remain in Iran today (the second largest community in the Middle East), check out the new documentary from Ramin Farahani, an Iranian-Dutch filmmaker [Dutch genes make trouble in the Islamic world] whose Jews of Iran has recently been released. Farahani, a Muslim, spent weeks inside Iran’s Jewish community, yet found most Jews too afraid to open up. [The quotation that follows in this extract is from Haaretz.]

“ ‘The Jews’ fear of freely expressing themselves in front of the camera, and, incidentally, in front of others who may see the film, is apparent throughout the film. One scene shows an elderly Jewish woman lying in her hospital bed. She says she is alone, that her children live abroad and that there is no one to look after her. When the director asks her where they live, she answers that she believes they live in Israel, but then quickly adds: “God is my witness that I don’t have their address.” She later relates that they tried to take her with them when they left, “but then something happened.” She refuses to elaborate and bursts into tears …

“ ‘Farahani says Iranian citizens in general – and not just Jews – are unaccustomed to speaking freely about their problems. “If they’re already talking, they usually censor what they say,” he says. The Jews, however, are much more careful than others, he says. “They were very careful regarding every aspect of the movie. The community leaders permitted me to attend events and talk to people, but they were constantly watching over me. When I visited the Jewish youth organization in Tehran, for example, I sat with the members and tried to start a discussion about the problems they face as Jews at school or when trying to find a job, but I saw some people had decided in advance not to discuss these things. I was very disappointed.”

“ ‘… In the film, the only person who dares to speak directly about anti-Semitism is a girl named Farandis. Once, when she still attended public school, she left class for a drink of water, she relates. When she returned, she felt the students were looking at her strangely. Later, a friend told her that when she had stepped out, the teacher told the other students that because it was raining outside, Farandis had gotten wet and had therefore been contaminated. The teacher told them that anyone who touched her would also be infected, because the girl was now impure. As a result of this incident, Farandis transferred to a Jewish school and eventually left Iran. This, of course, made it easier for her to tell her story.

“ ‘Farahani says he met other Jews who described problems, insults and discrimination at the hands of Muslims, but says they were unwilling to repeat their stories for the camera. He says he realized there was no point in pressuring them to talk.’ [End of Haaretz quotation.]

“It’s hard to imagine the Iranian regime ever holding a conference to address this contemporary social discrimination. Better to corrupt the past than to face the corrupt present.”

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Part of the reason I have not done much on Iran in this blog yet is that I lost a long draft analysing (in my words, not Toynbee’s) the history of Iran’s relations with Britain and America, but especially Britain. I managed to delete it while trying to do something clever and I haven’t had the heart to return to it. I wanted to understand why Iran has the resentment of Britain which it has, and I discovered clear answers. Like most British people, I had had a hazy understanding of the reality of historical Anglo-Iranian relations. Iran had never been a colony, so what was the problem?

It is interesting to note that the three countries, apart from Ireland, which had perhaps the worst experience with the British – Egypt, Iran and Palestine – were never officially colonies. The British imperial conscience is better than it should be because Iran does not weigh on it. Iran’s official loathing of America is really a transferred emotion.

So what were the Iranians doing rescuing Polish Jews during the war? Weren’t they, along with many Arabs, officially Axis sympathisers? Anything to do with modern Jewish history on a site you don’t know is suspect until proven to be reliable. As far as I can tell, Iran did not “rescue” the children from Poland, but a group of Jewish children left Poland, passed through Russia, and arrived in Iran, before moving to Israel. I am referring to an account here. Summarising and occasionally correcting/augmenting it:

Perhaps 300,000 refugees escaped from Poland to Russia after Germany conquered it in September 1939, or lived in regions annexed to the Soviet Union following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, which divided Poland between the two powers. At the beginning of 1940 the Soviet authorities began to expel Polish citizens to gulags in Siberia. When Germany invaded Russia in the following year, the Russians declared an amnesty for these refugees. A mass emigration started, towards Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. Hungry and sick Jews wearing torn rags flooded Tashkent and Samarkand. At the same time, General Władysław Anders was freed from prison in Moscow. He founded the Polish Armies in Exile, which would attack Germany in Italy, passing through the Middle East.

At the end of 1941, Sikorski, prime minister of the Polish government-in-exile in London, convinced Stalin to send 25,000 Polish soldiers of the Anders armies to Iran, where they would be protected by Britain and would strengthen the British armies in the Middle East. 33,000 soldiers left, and 11,000 citizens with them, 3000 children among them, of which there were around 1,000 orphaned Jewish children.

The “Tehran Children” left in trains from Samarkand in Uzbekistan to Krasnovodsk in Turkmenistan, and from there crossed the Caspian Sea to the Iranian port of Pahlevi. “In Pahlevi, refugee tent camps were immediately erected. The Jewish children suffered from heat, starvation, sicknesses and also abuses by their fellow Poles. The situation changed once the Jewish Agency learned about the [...] camps and opened its Eretz Israel Office in Tehran.” They moved to Tehran.

In January 1943, they were moved from their tents in Tehran to Afhaz and then to the Iranian port of Bandar Shahpur (now Bandar Imam Khomeini), where they embarked on SS Dunera, bound for Karachi. This route was chosen because the Iraqis refused to grant them transit visas to pass through Iraq. From Karachi they boarded another ship, the Neurolia, bound for Suez. Then they crossed the Sinai Desert by train, were held in quarantine in El Arish for two days, and finally disembarked from the train in Atlit in Palestine on February 18 1943.

If I understand it correctly, a group of around 110 children may have arrived earlier, via Iraq, after the British suppressed Rashid Ali’s nationalist revolt in that officially-independent country in 1941.

Some of the children must still be alive. Some will have died in Israel’s wars.

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I have been in Iran only once and it told me that most of what you read about the country is false. I have been in the house of an Iranian Jew in Tehran. There are synagogues in Iran, and about 25,000 Jews. They have had a continuous and often insecure history there ever since Cyrus conquered the Babylonians: they had been in captivity in Iraq, but the Persians treated them well. They have constitutional rights in modern Iran. Most Muslims are above-averagely good at separating political from personal hatreds, and none more than the Palestinians. Even Khatami’s appalling successor wants to destroy Israel, not kill Jews. On the other hand, official attitudes, including that one, cause Iranian Jews to feel oppressed, as Farahani makes clear. And of course there is antisemitism in the wider population.

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… Or Does It Explode? quoted an article published in the Wall Street Journal on September 7. Here is a direct link to the article.

“Every Monday night at 10 o’clock, Iranians by the millions tune into Channel One to watch the most expensive show ever aired on the Islamic republic’s state-owned television. Its elaborate 1940s costumes and European locations are a far cry from the typical Iranian TV fare of scarf-clad women and gray-suited men.

“But the most surprising thing about the wildly popular show is that it is a heart-wrenching tale of European Jews during World War II.

“The hour-long drama, Zero Degree Turn, centers on a love story between an Iranian-Palestinian Muslim man and a French Jewish woman. Over the course of the 22 episodes, the hero saves his love from Nazi detention camps, and Iranian diplomats in France forge passports for the woman and her family to sneak on to airplanes carrying Iranian Jews to their homeland.

“On the surface, the message of the lavish, state-funded production appears sharply at odds with that sent out by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has repeatedly called the Holocaust a myth.

“In fact, the government’s spending on the show underscores the subtle and often sophisticated way in which the Iranian state uses its TV empire to send out political messages. The aim of the show, according to many inside and outside the country, is to draw a clear distinction between the government’s views about Judaism – which is accepted across Iranian society – and its stance on Israel – which the leadership denounces every chance it gets.

“ ‘Iranians have always differentiated between ordinary Jews and a minority of Zionists,’ says Hassan Fatthi, the show’s writer and director. ‘The murder of innocent Jews during World War II is just as despicable, sad and shocking as the killing of innocent Palestinian women and children by racist Zionist soldiers,’ he says.

“Mr. Fatthi, 48 years old, is a well-known director of historical fiction for television. In the past, his work has focused on Iranian history. But he also dabbles in comedy, winning international critical acclaim two years ago for a hit feature, Marriage, Iranian Style.

“He says he came up with the idea for Zero Degree Turn four years ago as he was reading books about World War II and stumbled across literature about [a] chargé d’affaires at the Iranian embassy in Paris. Abdol Hussein Sardari saved over a thousand European Jews by forging Iranian passports and claiming they belonged to an Iranian tribe.

“Mr. Fatthi says he chose the title because the world at the time was in dire circumstances, offering few options for avoiding the terrors to come. Shot on location in Paris and Budapest, the show stars Iranian heartthrob Shahab Husseini (sic) and is so popular that its theme song – an ode to getting lost in love – is a hit, too.

“ ‘It’s captivating. No matter where I am or what I’m doing, on Monday nights I find a television set and watch the show. So does every Jewish person I know here,’ says Morris Motamed, the lone Jew in parliament.

“Mr. Fatthi enlisted the help of Iran’s Jewish Association, an independent body that safeguards the community’s culture and heritage. The association has criticized Mr. Ahmadinejad’s comments about the Holocaust but has praised Mr. Fatthi’s show.

“Iran is home to some 25,000 Jews, the largest population in the Middle East outside of Israel. Iran’s Jews – along with Christians and Zoroastrians – are guaranteed equal rights in the country’s constitution. Iran’s Jews are guaranteed one member of parliament and are free to study Hebrew in school, pray in synagogues and shop at kosher supermarkets. Despite Mr. Ahmadinejad’s statements, it isn’t government policy to question the Holocaust, and the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, hasn’t endorsed those views.

“While Iran makes it no secret that it considers Israel an enemy, it has been extremely touchy about criticism of its treatment of Jewish citizens. The show is seen as an effort by the government to erase the image that it may be anti-Semitic – both at home among Jews and non-Jews, and abroad.

“ ‘In this show, you notice that a new method of political dialogue is being promoted that is more in line with the modern world,’ says Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a reformist cleric and former Iranian vice president.

“The message appears to be grabbing the public. Sara Khatibi, a 35-year-old mother and chemist in Tehran, says she and her husband never miss an episode. ‘All we ever hear about Jews is rants from the government about Israel,’ she says. ‘This is the first time we are seeing another side of the story and learning about their plight.’

“The show also pushes Iran’s political line regarding the legitimacy of Israel: The Jewish state was conceived in modern times by Western powers rather than as part of a centuries-old desire of Jews for a return to their ancestral homeland. In one scene, a rabbi declares it a bad idea for Jews to resettle in Arab lands. In another, the French Jewish protagonist refuses a marriage offer by a cousin, who is advocating the creation of Israel.

“Iran has long used TV to shape public opinion, where newspapers and the Internet are seen as media for the elite. The state’s control over radio and television is enshrined in the constitution. Ayatollah Khamenei, the supreme leader, is not only head of the armed forces and the judiciary, but also the national broadcast authority.

“ ‘The regime appreciates the fact that to appeal to the masses, both in Iran and the Muslim world, television is the most important outlet,’ says Karim Sadjadpour, an expert on Iran at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

“On any given day, the country’s seven state-run channels broadcast a mostly drab offering of news, sports, cooking shows, soap operas and religious sermons. Political propaganda is constantly fed into the mix. Dissidents such as students or reformers are routinely paraded before cameras to read confessions after stints of solitary imprisonment.

“A slick documentary-style program recently aired long interviews with two Iranian-Americans who were detained on allegations of working to overthrow the regime. The interviews – in which the pair blandly admitted to meeting with Iranian scholars and dissidents, but not to attempting to topple the government – were intercut with provocative scenes of demonstrations in Ukraine, where the U.S. encouraged groups that eventually staged the successful Orange Revolution in late 2004.

“In July, Iran launched a 24-hour English-language satellite news channel called Press TV, joining the ranks of the BBC, CNN and Al Jazeera. Its Arabic news channel, Al Alam, has been broadcasting news with an Iranian slant in the Arab world for several years.

“Episodes of Zero Degree Turn, broadcast in Farsi, can be seen outside of Iran on the Internet, either streaming live or downloaded at http://tv1.irib.ir/barnameha/sharhefilm.asp?code=0011109036106. It is also broadcast with English subtitles on the state-controlled Jameh Jam satellite channel, which is available on Europe’s Hot Bird satellite network. Mr. Fatthi also says Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting has been contacted about selling the show to networks in other countries, but he doesn’t know which ones.”

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There are clips from Zero Degree Turn on YouTube. ODIE links to a gallery of stills here “which seems to include a large number of female characters inexplicably covering their hair in 1940s Europe”.

What is Iranian in Shahab Hosseini’s face (top)? Inter alia, the eyebrows. Iranians have pronounced eyebrows, and a beyond-the-global-average genetic tendency towards the monobrow. The world was introduced to plunging Iranian eyebrows in January 1979.