Mick Hartley

A recent Associated Press release (taken up, amongst others, by Haaretz) gave a positive spin to the airing in Iran of a series on the Holocaust:

It is Iran’s version of “Schindler’s List,” a miniseries that tells the tale of an Iranian diplomat in Paris who helps Jews escape the Holocaust — and viewers across the country are riveted.

That’s surprising enough in a country where hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has questioned whether the Holocaust even took place. What’s more surprising is that government media produced the series, and is airing it on state-run television.

The Holocaust is rarely mentioned in state media in Iran, school textbooks don’t discuss it and Iranians have little information about it.

Yet the series titled “Zero Degree Turn” is clearly sympathetic to the Jews’ plight during World War II. It shows men, women and children with yellow stars on their clothes being taken forcibly out of their homes and loaded into trucks by Nazi soldiers.

“Where are they taking them?” the horrified hero, a young Iranian diplomat who works at the Iranian Embassy in Paris, asks someone in a crowd of onlookers.

“The Fascists are taking the Jews to the concentration camps,” the man says. The hero, named Habib Parsa, then begins giving Iranian passports to Jews to allow them to flee occupied France to then-Palestine.

Though the Habib character is fictional, it is based on a true story of diplomats in the Iranian Embassy in Paris in the 1940s who gave out about 500 Iranian passports for Jews to use to escape.

The show’s appearance now may reflect an attempt by Iran’s leadership to moderate its image as anti-Semitic and to underline a distinction that Iranian officials often make — that their conflict is with Israel, not with the Jewish people.

About 25,000 Jews live in Iran, the largest Jewish community in the Middle East after Israel. They have one representative in parliament, which is run mostly by Islamic clerics.

The series could not have aired without being condoned by Iran’s clerical leadership. The state broadcaster is under the control of the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khomenei, who has final say in all matters inside Iran.

According to a comment at this post however, an article in Der Spiegel (in German) has already pointed out a few less positive features of the series, notably that while it does indeed treat the Holocaust as historical fact, it portrays it as a collaborative effort between German Zionists and Hitler to kill those Jews opposed to the re-settlement of Palestine. Also French anti-Semite Roger Garaudy is listed as a “historical source”, and the “historical adviser” to the series is Abdollah Shahbazi, well known as a Holocaust denier.

Now MEMRI are on the case. Here are excerpts from episode 1, showing Zionist agents assassinating the Rabbi of Tehran in an attempt to intimidate Iranian Jews into emigrating to Palestine. From the MEMRI introduction to the transcript:

The plot takes place in the 1930s in two locations: Iran during the reign of Reza Pahlavi, founder of the Pahlavi dynasty (World War II), and Paris on the eve of the Nazi invasion. (The Paris scenes were shot in Hungary.)

By means of this series, the Iranians hope to dispel allegations that they deny the persecution of the Jews during World War II and hope to discard their image as Holocaust deniers. The series was presented as an historical drama which aims to depict the suffering of the Jews during World War II, and which is even aimed at educating the Jews about their history. In several newspapers, it is stated that the series sheds light on the way the Jews fled several countries, thus becoming refugees.

At the same time, the series presents the “Zionist lie”: The Jewish state is a Zionist invention, the result of collaboration between the Zionists and the Nazis in an effort to coerce Jews to emigrate to Palestine.

I expect MEMRI will give us more in due course.