Tonight (OK, so by the ‘clock convention’, it was ‘last night’ – but the sun has not yet risen when I write this, so, to my ‘regimented mind’, this is ‘tonight’) was awesome!
The Neeje Foundation put on an excellent ‘do’!
And, while I would usually avoid (like the plague) an organization whose name and mission statement appears to be as misandristic as this one appears to be. Yet, the ‘panel’ – as well as the moderator – were irresistable!
While I knew one ‘ought to’ expect brilliance from Tarek Fatah (he is one of my heroes!!!) – and Barbara Kay is no lightweight (metaphorically speaking), either – the whole panel was most awesome!!!
And, I must admit, the topics on which they spoke (and what the panelists said about it) were very relevant: both in the realms of freedom of speech, freedom of religion and the separation of the mosque (church) and state, but also in the fact that both the female panelists addressed (and lamented) the denigration and disenfranchisement of males in our society!
Since so many awesome and brilliant bloggers (and journalists, too) were there (I sat with Kathy Shaidle – she, too, is one of my heroes!!!), I fully expect that there will be most awesome accounts of what was said tonight, written by people more focused and better at actually writing than I could ever aspire to, very, very soon!
Let me just make some simple observations of my own…not necessarily of what was said, but also of what I made of some of the ‘connections’. Please, note that the following is my construct – I am not quoting the panelists and I do not want to pretend they said the following ‘stuff’ – this is just my interpretation and musings which are the results of my thoughts in response to what was said tonight… In other words, my conjecture, this should not reflect negatively on anyone else but me….
We are all aware that in many Islamic countries, women have the legal worth or 1/2 that of a man: from legal testimony to other aspects of life. Some of the most Islamist countries legally regard women as 1/2-human: on par with a boy-child, as far as the legal system is concerned.
Now, this is a very contentious issue: back in the time of Muhammad – in the region of the world where he lived – to be recognized as 1/2-human was a MAJOR step forward in women’s rights! And, while I have met Muslims who have ‘frozen’ this interpretation of the status of women in Islam at 1/2 that of a man’s status, I have also met Muslim men who have shown that the eventual ‘goal’ of Muhammad was ‘full equality’ of the sexes – he just had to start somewhere! And, these Muslims insist that the message of Muhammad was NOT to ‘freeze’ the status of women at 1/2-a-human status, but that by ‘taking the first step’, Muhammad was ordering all Muslims to work towards an eventual equality of the sexes.
OK – so this is NOT the interpretation many Islamists are atuned to. Granted. But…
Now, I would like to jump to the ‘other part’ of tonight’s presentation: the minimization and denigration of the importance of the role of ‘father’ and ‘husband-for-life’…. We all know the popular culture is guilty of this – and the panelists provided some very thought-provoking examples, too.
So, this got me thinking….
What happens if a young man is exposed to BOTH messages???
What happens if he is bombarded with the very palpable social message that he is ‘not necessary’ and that he is ‘weighing down’ his beloved and preventing her from achieving ‘true happiness’ through her own denial for the need of his companionship…..AND he is ALSO bombarded by the message that in the most radicalized forms of Islam, the male (husband, father) is not only an integral part of the family – he RULES it?
Would this combination of ‘denial’ on the one hand, and the exaggeration on the other, have a profound impact on Muslim youths??? Could it not be the very vehicle through which their radicalization could be achieved?
I don’t pretend to have the answers…
In fact, it is rather late at night – following a busy and thought provoking evening. Yet, if you have ideas of how this combination of social pressures might affect our young people, I would love to hear from you!
Xanthippa's Chamberpot 
March 21, 2009 at 08:53
Hello Xan,
Great to meet you last night. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I will post some picture this morning.
Blessings
Deborah
Xanthippa says:
Thank you! It was a pleasure to meet you, too!
March 21, 2009 at 17:12
Sounds cool!
March 22, 2009 at 06:13
“back in the time of Muhammad – in the region of the world where he lived – to be recognized as 1/2-human was a MAJOR step forward in women’s rights!” : doesn’t concord with the simple fact that his first wife owned a complete trading company. Also not in accord with the described discussion he had with woman of his family who came over to lament about the fact that he was downgrading them to the level of dogs (when he described that during prayer no woman, dog etc. should between the muslim and mekka).
March 22, 2009 at 11:26
I think I’m going to throw up.
All you freedom of speech fanatics should spend as much time educating yourselves as you do talking. You all sound painfully vacuous.
March 24, 2009 at 23:32
Allan:
Pardon us for being so vague as to appear vacuous. Had we been less distracted by general principles, we would naturally have expressed ourselves more clearly:
Everyone EXCEPT YOU should be free to say what they want.
March 24, 2009 at 23:35
Xanthippa:
You could not be more right about this.
We are watching the strategic use of Feminism as a weapon of cultural destruction, just as it was used to bring down Western culture. The method was outlined by cultural Marxism, as perfected by the Frankfurt School:
“Man’s specific hostility is to overpower; woman’s is to undermine.”
— Erich Fromm, 1943, “Sex and Character”, Psychiatry, 6(1):21-31; p. 28.
The results in the West were bad enough — just look around you. But, as with everything else in Islam, the roles of the sexes are exaggerated to the point of caricature and far more rigidly enforced than they ever were in Western culture. Thus the forces unleashed by the dissolution of these traditions will be of unprecedented violence and destructive power. It will make the implosion of Western culture look like a Sunday picnic.
Muslims are aware that this cultural cataclysm is being forced on them by the West, and their defensive reaction is proving to be just as violent and destructive as what is being done to them. In consequence, they are stepping willingly into the role vacated by the collapse of the Soviet Union: the “evil empire” that threatens imminent ruin of the free world. And that is just what is required to keep Western populations panicked and clamouring for the serfdom they would otherwise reject with all their might.
These kinds of machinations go far beyond anything that could be called “marketing” or “positioning.” The flames of Jihad had died away to nothing and lain dormant for centuries before Western oil companies went into the Islamic heartland and it was seen that the globalist agenda would be served by stirring up those embers.
But now the djinn is out of the bottle, and there will be hell to pay.
Xanthippa says:
Very thought-provoking: man overpowers, woman undermines!
It makes a lot of sense – I will have to think about this.
As far as its effect on the Islamist world: very thought provoking. I was only wondering how a young man (say, 1st generation immigrant) would react when exposed to the two contrasting images: one which says he is a burden to his wife, and the other that tells him he is her master and rightful ruler/guardian…. Would the contrast between the messages not help to turn him into a radicalized Islamist, if he saw his ‘only’ other option as being a burden – and a worthless one, at that. Add to that the (even more extreme) search for one’s identity which many 1st generation immigrant kids go through – and you have a recipe for trouble!
Of course, your take on the growth of radicalization as a response to the exposure to ‘the West’ is very, very intriguing. Yet, there were – especially among the Wahabis – extreme sexual apartheid practices, even before ‘the West’ entered the picture. Still, it was the oil money which allowed the export of this philosophy: perhaps the exposure to ‘the West’ and its message helped radicalize the other Muslim countries, much as it does the 1st generation immigrant kids.
P.S. – George Jonas claims the ‘flames of jihad’ had only lain dormant for some 60 years… http://www.georgejonas.ca/recent_writing.cfm?id=748
March 25, 2009 at 17:54
Xanthippa:
Firstly, I have to disagree with Jonas’ assessment of the Ottoman Empire. And I disagree with him about Toynbee, too. Reading Toynbee taught me that the world (historically speaking) can be understood as a nonlinear system, with subsystems called civilizations, which have subsystems called states, and so on, and the general principles of systems theory apply. That’s more than I can say for any other historian I’ve ever read…
Anyway… as far as I can tell, the Ottoman Turks were losing more ground than they were gaining from about the mid 1500’s onwards. If it hadn’t been for constant fighting with the French, and infighting with the Hungarians, Ferdinand would have kicked Suleiman’s butt right after the failure of the first siege of Vienna in 1529. Even as it was, the Ottoman victories got smaller and smaller, and their defeats got bigger and bigger, as time went on. Then Ivan the Terrible crashed the party by levelling Kazan in 1552, and Suleiman died in 1566, and after that it was all downhill for the Turks. The second attack on Vienna in 1683 was the last death spasm of a dying empire.
What followed was a slow loss of momentum and disintegration, like a huge gutted warship that keeps on coasting forward even as it takes on water and sinks. The empire still existed, and it still fought border wars with Habsburgs and Persians and Mongols and Russians, but its Jihad days were over, I think. So I still say the flame has been effectively dormant for perhaps as much as 300 years, maybe as little as 200, but certainly much more than 60!
Secondly, you are quite right, of course, that some Muslims have pretty barbaric laws and customs, and not just regarding women (they also have, for instance, laws that specify what a man may do and what he may not do with a camel or a sheep, after having sex with it…), but these are not radical.
In Islam, these are the traditionalists — the conservatives.
Letting women vote… now that is radical!
And that was part of the agenda introduced by Shah Pahlavi (put in power by the CIA to turn Iran into a client state and protect the interests of Anglo-Iranian Oil Co., now called BP), in his White Revolution of 1963. For the majority of the Iranian people, this was the last straw — proof positive of the corrupting influence of the Shah’s American masters — and it was opposition to this left-wing Western cultural-political-economic agenda, which catapulted the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to such prominence that he could rewrite the Iranian constitution and declare himself Supreme Leader of Iran.
It was Khomeini who decreed a return to sharia and hijab and other Muslim traditions which had already been largely swept aside under the Shah’s father. Khomeini quickly progressed to instituting some highly repressive measures, like abolishing equal rights for non-Muslims and eliminating freedom of speech for everyone, and eventually supporting Jihad — much to the approval of the Iranian people. And the Muslim world more or less follows where Iran leads.
All this is clearly an extremization of Islam, but to call it radicalization is to accept the obviously false proposition that the Shah’s White Revolution was the main stream in Iran. Nothing could be further from the truth. It may be overstating the case to say that Khomeini was loved by all, but the fact is, two million people attended his funeral.
My point is that we see Khomeini — and Islam in general — becoming increasingly reactionary, which is the opposite of radical. And what are they reacting against? In Khomeini’s own words, from a speech given in Qom in 1979, they oppose “those who are trying to bring corruption and destruction to our country in the name of democracy.”
And this brings me to the great irony of it all: Islam is reaching for extreme measures in defence against the exact same influence that is destroying the West: cultural Marxism. Even the Shah — after he was deposed and no longer beholden to those who had kept him in power — had the following to say about the role of women’s issues in the larger political context:
“What do these feminists want? What do you want? You say equality. Oh! I don’t want to seem rude, but… you’ve produced nothing great, nothing!… You’re schemers; you are evil. All of you.”
— Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, quoted by Oriana Fallaci, 1976, Interview with History, p. 270.
The same forces are at the root of the upsurge of Christian fundamentalism in the West. It is a defensive reaction to the cultural Marxist attack on schooling, the family, and other traditional values that have been the cornerstones of Western civilization. In fact, everywhere in the world, conservatives are being driven to extremes by the onslaught of cultural Marxism. And the cultural Marxists are calling this radicalization, when in fact they themselves are the subversive radicals.
Remember, the cultural Marxist method is to attack while playing the victim, to confuse and conflate concepts in order to make themselves appear morally superior to their enemies, and to rewrite history until the resulting fiction serves their agenda.
None of this denies that Muslim extremists pose a serious danger to the West (and vice versa). But things will only get worse until we recognize the true roots of the conflict:
We are being goaded into confrontation by the hidden hand of cultural Marxism.
Xanthippa says:
Thanks for educating me.
I must admit, I am not nearly as well knowledgable in history as I really ought to be: I know some basics, but have serious ‘holes’ in between!
Also, I am a little stuck in the pre-desret-death-cult religious archetype study, then how the death-cult-trinity arose and evolved, and their displacement of European religions (and the merging of a branch of Christianity with the old pre-Christian mysticism-based religions). That, I ‘get’ – though perhaps not from the ‘standard’ POV… I also ‘get’ other bits, here and there…but, this bit, I know way too little about.
So, please, take this as an honest question (I know my tone does not always come across accurately): the CIA put the Shah Pahlavi onto the throne – why did they do this if he was a Marxist? Were not Marxists still distrusted by the US at this time? And why did a Marxist play ball with the CIA? Why would he not get backing from the USSR? A lot of Arab countries did – the USSR was very pro-Arab, anti-Jew (can’t say anti-Semitic, because both Jews and Arabs are Semites). And why would the CIA put the Shah into power if it was Britain (BP) which was the beneficiary?
As for the ‘displacement’ of ‘traditional family values’ by Marxism – I’m still having trouble coming to terms with the destruction of the true traditional family values which Christian colonization wreaked in Europe!
March 29, 2009 at 11:13
Xanthippa:
Isn’t that interesting… you’ve studied both physics and ancient religions. Me, too. Oh… and we both talk to animals (as it were). And we’ve come to similar conclusions about how the world works. Coincidence? (~eerie music~) I think not!
Actually, it’s been a quite while since I’ve given any thought to all the variations on the theme of the dying fresh-water sun-god husband/son and his fertile salt-water moon-goddess wife/mother — or the profusion of trinities, from (Brahma / Shiva / Vishnu) to (Father / Son / Holy Ghost), with several scenic stops along the way — or the fact that all the Avestan gods are Vedic devils, and vice versa…
I would be interested in hearing your take on all that, if for no other reason than to refresh my memory and glean some novel perspectives. I think these considerations correlate with the earliest glimpses of that cooperative-competitive dynamic I mentioned, right about the time at which its traces disappear into the mists of prehistory. And, from a completely different point of view, one obtains profound insight into human nature by contemplating how the aforementioned trinities map onto some that are found in philosophy, like (eros / philos / agapé) and in psychology, like (id / ego / superego).
But, before indulging in such diversions, I have a lot of ground to cover, just to answer the questions you asked in response to my last post. I guess I should start by clarifying the term, cultural Marxism. First and foremost, let me say what is isn’t.
Cultural Marxism is not Marxism-Leninism (which we usually just call Communism).
Marxism-Leninism is a system of political economics, which results from applying the so-called Marxist dialectic, developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in a process called critical analysis, which uses it to deconstruct Western democracy and capitalism, and to rewrite history in terms of economic class struggle (and we all saw how that turned out).
In the 1920’s, Antonio Gramsci and György Lukács adapted the methods of the Marxist dialectic and critical analysis to the cultural sphere and applied it to the task of undermining Western science, philosophy, religion, art, education, and so on. The result is called the quiet revolution, the revolution from within, the revolution that cannot be resisted by force. This is cultural Marxism.
Now, that was quite bad enough, but then along came a group of sociologists and psychologists — chief among whom being Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, and Jürgen Habermas — and they combined the Marxist dialectic with Freudian psychology to produce an exceptionally corrosive concoction called Critical Theory, which they use to deconstruct Western culture and values, and to rewrite history in terms of sexual and racial power struggles (and we can all see how that is turning out).
Collectively, these guys are called the Frankfurt School, because they originally got together under Horkheimer at the Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung), which was domiciled in a little brick building belonging to the University of Frankfurt am Main in the early 1930’s. They all published their work in the Journal for Social Research (Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung), edited by none other than Horkheimer himself.
Then Hitler consolidated his control of Nazi Germany, so, seeing as they were all Jewish, they fled to the USA, more or less as a group, in 1934. In America, they affiliated themselves with Columbia and Princeton Universities. The Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung was renamed Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, and they really got down to business.
Horkheimer’s key idea was that Critical Theory could be used actively, to change society, in contrast to the traditionally passive role of sociology, which had been merely to understand society. These guys were not your typical academics, whose main interest is the pursuit of knowledge. On the contrary, these guys pursued an agenda: they wanted to find out why the Marxist revolution had failed in the West, and they wanted to remedy that situation. To that end, the group’s research addressed what to attack, how to structure the attack, how to deliver the attack, and how to measure the results of the attack.
Thus, for example, Adorno joined up with Paul Lazarsfeld, founder of the Bureau for Applied Social Research at Columbia, and began studying the effect of mass media on the population, and how to measure it. Starting in 1937, they collaborated on the Radio Project (bankrolled by the Rockefeller Foundation) which, among other things, produced the 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast so they could measure its effects, and the Little Annie Project, which pioneered methods that quickly evolved into the Nielsen Ratings and the Gallup Polls.
Another example is the concept of intersubjective rationality, developed by Habermas, which replaces the individual process of reaching a conclusion based on the objective criterion that it follows from valid reasoning and known facts, on the one hand, with the social process of establishing a consensus supported by the subjective criterion that the group feels good about it, on the other hand. In today’s schools, those who do the former are maligned for being judgmental and demanding, while those who do the latter are praised for being good team players.
But, rather than go into pages and pages of detail right here and now, I’ll just list the titles of some of the major works of the Frankfurt School. Given the context, this combination of titles will make the hair stand up on the back of your neck:
Authority and the Family, Horkheimer, 1936
Sex and Character, Fromm, 1943
The Authoritarian Personality, Adorno et al., 1950
Eros and Civilization, Marcuse, 1955
Repressive Tolerance, Marcuse, 1965
Communication and the Evolution of Society, Habermas, 1976
These are just a few of the core works; some are papers, some are books. The total volume of work by these guys, and their followers, is huge. The combined result, as I outlined in my very first post on this blog, is something like the following:
It includes not only censorship of various kinds, but also the erosion of privacy, the debasement of the schools and the neutralization of the church. It includes the destruction of the family by setting wives against husbands and children against parents. It includes the disarmament of the public, the invalidation of self-defence and the incitement of fear. It includes the promulgation of the culture of victimhood, the promotion of immaturity and the reduction of society to a mob of narcissistic adult children. It includes the dogmatization of the universities. It includes the concentration of wealth, the concentration of ownership of corporations and the concentration of control of the media.
In sum, your description of all this as a descent into a new dark age is exactly correct. And since you put it in those terms, I highly recommend an article by Michael J. Minnicino, called The New Dark Age: The Frankfurt School and Political Correctness. It speaks your language, and it will make the big picture very much clearer! Another good place to start is The Origins of Political Correctness, which is a transcript of a talk given by Bill Lind at the Accuracy in Academia Conference in 2000.
So. Deep breath. Pause… And…
Now that we have all that out of the way, we can see what I mean when I say that the manner in which the Pahlavi Shahs went about modernizing Iran subjected the country to the destructive effects of cultural Marxism. I’m certainly not saying the Shah of Iran was a Marxist. I’m pretty sure he was nominally Muslim, though he vigorously pursued the policy of secularization begun by his father, so what they really believed is hard to say.
But I don’t think either of them deliberately set out to harm their country, though the father was clearly the shrewder and more ruthless of the two. The sense I get from reading about them is that they meant to rule well, if at all possible, but they meant to rule in any case. The social reforms they introduced were being put into practice everywhere in the modern world at the time, but nowhere had they been in place long enough to allow the tree to be known by its fruit.
The father first appears on the stage of history as Reza Khan, commander of the Persian Cossack Brigade, which he used to seize control of Persia and put and end to the Qajar dynasty in 1923, upon which he became Reza Shah and took the surname Pahlavi. Being broke, in danger of being swallowed by the Russians, and in danger of being overthrown by the Shiite Imams, Reza Shah implemented a strongly anti-communist police state and gave carte-blanche to the British.
To weaken the Shiites, he mandated European dress for men and supported the so-called Women’s Awakening, which included allowing women to work outside the home and banning the chador (!) in 1931. Another move calculated to weaken the Imams was finalizing the release of the Jews from the ghettos and repealing restrictions on their entry into the professions. Anyone in government who seriously opposed him was killed. In the process, he became one of the richest men in Persia, became loved by the city dwellers but alienated the majority of the population, who were still country folk and devout Muslims, and got into a major confrontation with the Imams.
When he felt strong enough, he turned on the British and broke their stranglehold on the country’s infrastructure. He cancelled the Anglo-Persian Oil Company’s concession, took control of the currency away from the British Imperial Bank, and nationalized the telegraph system. He encouraged trade with Germany and Italy to further weaken British and Russian influence. He also changed the name of the country from Persia to Iran, which means Land of the Aryans in Farsi. Even so, he declared neutrality when World War II broke out, and allowed neither the Axis nor the Allies to operate on Iranian soil.
Not that it helped him. In 1941, the British and the Russians, whom he had so far successfully played off against each other, joined forces and occupied Iran — ostensibly because they needed a route by which the Allies could supply war materiel to the Russians, but recouping losses was definitely part of the agenda. The first thing the British did was force Reza Shah to abdicate in favour of his son, who, they correctly assumed, would be easier to handle. So Prince Mohammad Reza Pahlavi became Shah of Iran at the age of 22.
In any case, Anglo-Persian Oil Company resumed operations under the new name of Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, and carried on until 1951, when Mohammed Mosaddeq got the Iranian parliament to vote him in as Prime Minister after engineering a coalition that nationalized the company. In response, Anglo-Iranian pulled all of its people out of Iran and the British navy blockaded the Persian Gulf, which cut off oil revenues and turned Iran into a pressure cooker.
Mosaddeq assumed emergency powers, stripped the Shah of money and authority, and broke off diplomatic relations with Britain. The Shah fled the country. All kinds of factions emerged and before long, everybody was stabbing everybody else in the back. Mosaddeq’s manoeuvrings became increasingly desperate and totalitarian, and this gave the British MI6 what they needed to convince the American CIA that Mosaddeq might get in bed with the communists in a last-ditch effort to keep himself in power. The CIA mounted Operation Ajax in cooperation with MI6.
To make a long story short, the CIA threw a lot of money around, played everyone against everyone and engineered a coupe that deposed Mosaddeq and put the Shah back on the throne in 1953. All the gory details of Operation Ajax can be found here, if you’re interested. In the end, Anglo-Iranian became British Petroleum, took the lead of a consortium of oil companies, and resumed production. To consolidate his power, the Shah created a new secret police called SAVAK, whose agents were trained by the CIA and the Israeli Mossad (!) and beefed up the Iranian army, which was funded and equipped by the Americans. Then he proceeded with his White Revolution in 1963, which we have already touched on.
All of this, of course created the perfect set-up for the backlash that dethroned the Shah for the second and last time in 1979 and put Khomeini firmly in control of Iran. And for all the reputation that SAVAK had for brutality and torture, its replacement, called VEVAK, has a reputation for being a hundred times worse — of course, not much hard information is available outside Iran, since VEVAK operates without government supervision, but instead answers directly to the Supreme Leader, currently Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — in any case, the stories that are told are perfectly consistent with the methods known to be used by their friends and neighbours, the Taliban.
So, who are the good guys in this story? I’ll be damned if I can find any. If I had to pick anybody as the least bad, I guess it would have to be the Shah, but that isn’t saying much. Not much at all.
However, it’s interesting to note the speculations that the CIA has backed every player in this game since the 1940’s, including Khomeini–! Why would they do that? Because it gives them leverage no matter how the balance comes out. And in the present circumstances, that means leverage to manipulate the level of tension in the region to whatever level they need to set the price of oil where they want it, while justifying whatever level of military presence they deem necessary to keep control of Persian Gulf oil fields out of Russian and Chinese hands. At the same time, it breeds terrorism, which they can use as a scourge of fear to justify increasingly repressive measures against their own population, back home in America.
As Baron Harkonnen said to Muad D’ib, “there are feints within feints within feints.”
Xanthippa says:
THE SPICE MUST FLOW!!!
Thank you for the extensive lesson! Fascinating!
There is SO MUCH I have to learn!!! Though, while I do agree with your assessment of the motivations behind the CIA actions, I am not sure if I agree with the level of competence you appear to ascribe them… Still, if you cast enough lines, some are bound to catch fish…
This is something more people ought to read than just who are likely to browse the comments. May I use it as the body of a post (or two)? One, say, starting with ‘Cultural Marxism’ and the other with the 20th history of Iran. I could do a little intro – pointing to the comments – then re-post them just as they appear.
No pressure – just thinking other people might find it just as fascinating!!!
March 31, 2009 at 04:48
Xanthippa:
Well, I’m flattered! No one has ever wanted to turn anything I’ve written into a guest post before. More often, they call me names and delete my posts…
So YES, by all means, post ‘em up! Especially the overview of cultural Marxism. The more people read it, the better. I only wish there were some way to get it on prime-time television!
And I think splitting the material into two posts is a good idea. The two subjects only make sense together as an answer to the questions you asked me, but as posts on the front page of your blog they would work much better as separate entities.
Anyway, now that I’m sitting here writing to you, I can’t resist clearing up another matter that you brought up:
There are fewer Semites in Iran than commonly thought.
The Iranians themselves are not Arabs, they are Aryans — in the technically correct sense of the word, not to be mistaken for the bastardized Nazi-propaganda sense of the word — and a good fraction of the Jews in Iran are most likely descendants of the Khazars, a Jewish-ruled Turkic people whose empire dominated the northern Caucasus and the adjacent steppes until the 11th century. Of course, some fraction of Iranian Jews are descended from the Semites who didn’t return home to Judah at the end of the Babylonian captivity, but it must be remembered that Iran borders on the Caspian, which is still called the Khazar Sea to this day throughout the region — particularly in Iran.
An interesting side light on this: indigenous Iranians (descendants of the Persians), call themselves Parsi (not Farsi, which is an Arabization of the word). They commonly refer to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the Shiite mullahs as “Tazi parast” (Arab lovers) and they call the Pahlavis “Yahudi parast” (Jew lovers). Needless to say, neither is intended as a compliment. So in that part of the world, anti-Semitism really is anti-Semitism.