Save your indignation

Editorial

A journalistic snafu has landed a Canadian newspaper on the pages of international media. Last Friday, the National Post reported, under a huge headline, that Iran was preparing to force Jews to wear a yellow patch to identify them as a religious minority. While the report said other religious minorities would be forced to don similar apparel – red for Christians, blue for Zoroastrians – the idea of Jews being forced to show an identifying yellow patch had obvious connections to the Holocaust.

Israel's Ha'aretz reported: "For a few hours on Friday, many around the world were ready to believe a report in the media that Iran had decided that Jews living there would be forced to wear a yellow strip of material on their clothing to denote their religion.

"Leaders of international Jewish organizations were quick to respond, and likened the decision to the Nuremberg Laws of Nazi Germany," reported Ha'aretz, "... after it emerged that the report had been false, the affair of 'the yellow patch that wasn't' left us with one lesson: the world is ready to believe anything when it comes to a country ruled by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad."

And why wouldn't we? From a country with a president who has called for Israel to be wiped off the map, why would the world community hesitate to believe a report that the same government would force Jews and other religious minorities to wear signifying items?

There are apparently 25,000 Jews still living in Iran.

A spokesman for the Iranian embassy in Ottawa told the National Post: "These kinds of slanderous accusations are part of a smear campaign against Iran by vested interests that need to be denounced at every step."

Identifying items like yellow stars do not date back only to the Nuremberg Laws. Forcing Jews to wear identifying articles has been going on since the Middle Ages and before. Yellow stars, special hats and other distinct items have been forced on Jews for centuries. They did not come out of the imagination of Adolf Hitler nor, sadly, did they die with him.

Inexplicably, despite outrage over the issue of religiously specific attire, there remains little international outrage over the fact that Iranian law still proscribes specific dress codes for women. Forcing tiny religious minorities to dress uniquely may raise global revulsion, but forcing more than half the population to adhere to medieval dress codes elicits no similar reaction.

What has been perhaps most illuminating in this exercise has been the reaction that the apparently false story has caused. Noticeable most immediately on blogs – those democratic forums in which anybody with a computer can now publish their own "news" – the idea that a newspaper could run so startling a story (and have it turn out to be wrong) has caused a sharp and smug reaction. That the National Post, a favored enemy of the Canadian and international left, was apparently caught running a story that proved not exactly accurate seemed to cause a degree of glee among bloggers. The self-righteous indignation over the Post's story is telling.

There are two things to consider here. First, just because the Iranian government claims it wasn't planning to make Jews wear a yellow signifier doesn't mean the Iranian government wasn't planning to make Jews wear a yellow signifier. Having discovered that the world reacts with a certain nonchalance to their president's assertion that Israel should be wiped off the map, why on earth would Iranians think that suggesting that Jews be forced to wear a yellow article of clothing would raise any more hackles? The fact is, the Iranian government may have been planning to do just that but may have recanted when they gauged international reaction. If there were a disagreement between the government of Iran and the National Post, who should one believe?

Second, the scorn heaped upon the National Post by some commentators seemed to exceed the amount of outrage garnered by Ahmadinejad's earlier comments about the destruction of Israel. The story in the National Post demonstrates something very unpleasant, hypocritical and duplicitous. But it is not the National Post that is to blame, it is the ambivalent attitude of most of the world, including too many Canadians, to the genocidal intent of the Iranian regime.

Whether the Post story was accurate or not, save us the indignation. If outrage is called for, save it for the misogyny and murderous institutionalized anti-Semitism of the Iranian dictatorship.

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