Friday, May 19, 2006

Unfair to Iran

The National Post reports that the Iranian parliament has just passed a law requiring Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians to wear distinctive badges:

Iran's roughly 25,000 Jews would have to sew a yellow strip of cloth on the front of their clothes, while Christians would wear red badges and Zoroastrians would be forced to wear blue cloth. 

So what's the "unfair to Iran" part?

This:

"This is reminiscent of the Holocaust," said Rabbi Marvin Hier, the dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. "Iran is moving closer and closer to the ideology of the Nazis."

But wait a minute - it is unjust to accuse the mullahs of getting the idea of badges for Jews from the Nazis. The truth is: the Nazis got the idea from the mullahs!

The first world leader to require Jews to wear distinctive badges (a yellow belt and a yellow conical "dunce" cap) was Haroun al-Rashid, the Abbasid caliph, who ruled in Baghdad in the era of Charlemagne, the late 700s and early 800s.

Haroun's idea was later copied by the popes, but long after it vanished from the Christian world it endured in Islamic countries. Even in our own time, one of the final acts of the Taliban in Afghanistan was to attempt to enforce a distinctive badge on that country's Hindu minority.

Everything old is new again, I suppose.

But it does remind that when groups like CAIR propose that "Islamophobia" explains the bad press Muslim regimes receive in the West - and call for the US government to act against this supposed menace - well, it may be time to ask (as one of Islam's great prophets put it),

"And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?"

05/19 06:09 AM