by HAMID DABASHI
At a time when the entire world is aghast at Israel’s savagery in Gaza, the Zionist regime has decided to adapt an Iranian novel once promoted by American neoconservatives into a film
These days, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu takes time from his busy schedule slaughtering Palestinian women, their children, and the rest of their families to send messages of love and solidarity to Iranian women.
The beleaguered war criminal kindly assures them how much he and his entire settler colony support their struggles for liberation.
The messages sound surreal. But they are real.
The international fugitive charged with the crime of genocide – wanted for war crimes and crimes against humanity – has even learnt a few words in Persian.
He sports the slogan of “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi” (Woman, Life, Freedom) to assure Iranian women he wishes for nothing more than to see them liberated from the yokes of their mandatory hijabs, wearing their jeans and t-shirts and waving the Israeli flag in Azadi square.
But why, at a time when, according to Oxfam, “more women and children are killed in Gaza by Israeli military than any other recent conflict in a single year”, should Israel suddenly care about the fate of Iranian women?
As I write these words, outgoing US President Joe Biden and President-elect Donald Trump are cockfighting over credit for an alleged “ceasefire” they say they brokered between Israel and Hamas, even as Israeli forces continue to slaughter more Palestinians without pause.
Netanyahu, once again, appears to be collaborating with his American allies to stage a false disagreement, using it as a cover for further mass atrocities against innocent Palestinians. What “ceasefire” are they talking about exactly?
And amid this ongoing carnage, Israelis are expressing concern about women’s rights in Iran?
The mere assumption is beyond absurd.
Why would a garrison state, a settler colony, a proxy military base advancing the American and European imperial designs and war machine suddenly care about the fate of Iranian women and whether or not they like to wear their headscarves?
Bizarre – or is it?
‘Hasbara-modelled propaganda’
In his broadcast messages to Iranian women, the mass murdering Israeli chieftain is now actively aided and abetted by the one and only Azar Nafisi, the author of the fake and fictitious memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran.
In 2003, the book became a global sensation thanks to the concerted efforts of her friend Paul Wolfowitz, the US deputy secretary of defence under President George W Bush and to whom the book was dedicated, and other infamous neoconservative operatives.
Nafisi and her memoir became the Iranian version of the Nayirah testimony, which helped instigate the US invasion of Iraq
It was promoted as part of an active Iranophobic and Islamophobic propaganda campaign to demonise Iran and Iranians to justify all military operations against them.
This was the singular achievement of Nafisi: vilifying her own country at a time that would have aided and abetted US and Israeli plots against an entire nation.
She did against Iran what the Iraqi Kanan Makiya and the Lebanese Fouad Ajami did against Iraq and the entire Arab world put together.
Nafisi and her memoir became the Iranian version of the Nayirah testimony, the infamous case of Nayirah al-Sabah, the 15-year-old daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US, who in October 1990 gave false testimony in US Congress to instigate the US war against Iraq.
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