"Iranian embassy denies dress code"One thing that bothered me in the original National Post article (no longer online) was that it was accompanied by a colour photograph of a young child with a yellow Nazi-era patch:
Chris Wattie; with files from Allan Woods, National Post, with files from CanWest News Service
Published: Saturday, May 20, 2006
[...]
Meir Javdanfar, an Israeli expert on Iran and the Middle East who was born and raised in Tehran, said yesterday that he was unable to find any evidence that such a law had been passed.
"None of my sources in Iran have heard of this," he said. "I don't know where this comes from."
Mr. Javdanfar said that not all clauses of the law had been passed through the parliament and said the requirement that Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians wear special insignia might be part of an older version of the Islamic dress law, which was first written two years ago.
"In any case, there is no way that they could have forced Iranian Jews to wear this," he added. "The Iranian people would never stand for it." However, Mr. Kermanian added that Jews in Iran still face widespread, systematic discrimination.
The caption didn't reveal the provenance of the picture, but it was obviously not historical. If they had published a photograph of Jews wearing the patch during the Third Reich, that would have been acceptable. But to publish a child "re-constructing" or "re-enacting" tragedy without running a caption - as if to imply that this was an Iranian Jew - is ridiculous. It only harms and trivializes the memory of the Holocaust. The picture reminded me of those painful newscasts showing settler kids evacuated from Gush Qatif whose parents put yellow Magen David patches on them.
2 comments:
That picture is indeed disturbing. I wonder if we can determine its provenance somehow.
I'm pretty sure it's from Gush Katif.
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