Mick Hartley

More from Spiked, here with Max Sadie, on the concern felt by the Iranian diaspora on what’s happening in the UK with the red-green alliance, and the rise of antisemitism: An excellent piece, with some important insights…

I have spent a great deal of time with the Iranian diaspora. I have photographed them during their Nowruz (Persian New Year) celebrations in Golders Green, at the permanent encampment outside the Iranian Embassy in Knightsbridge, and at their Sunday protests on Whitehall, where they gather outside Downing Street, calling on the government to proscribe the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). They are, in my experience, some of the most serious and clear-eyed people living in the UK at the moment. They have seen political Islam from the inside, not as a theoretical proposition but as a lived system of repression and coercion. A system that has disappeared friends, imprisoned family members and attempted to overwrite a truly great civilisation. The country of Hafez and Rumi has in their exile become a byword for extremist and authoritarian terror and a nation that is now ranked 145th out of 148 for the treatment of women. Some of these protesters literally have the scars.

Unusually for people coming from the part of the world they do, and increasingly Britain, these protesting Iranians appear to be largely free of anti-Semitism too. Not carefully managed about it or judiciously restrained. It just doesn’t seem to be there. When they speak of Jews and Israel, there is none of the loaded hesitation, the over-careful neutrality or the strained balancing act one detects in even the most educated and well-meaning of British liberals. These Iranians see Jews really as cousins. And not without good reason. The relationship between Persians and Jews is probably the oldest and most honourable in the Bible. Cyrus the Great, who put an end to the Babylonian captivity and sponsored the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem, is the only non-Jew ever to receive the title, Mashiach (Messiah).

This Persian-Jewish bond was forged long before Christianity or Islam existed and continued into the modern era. During the time of the last Shah, Iran was among the first nations to recognise the state of Israel, and the Israeli airline, El Al, flew between Tel Aviv and Tehran almost daily. Something of that long-standing familial recognition has quietly re-emerged in the Iranian protest movement that has grown up in cities all across the West in recent months. Among Iranians and Jews there, one finds an ease and immediacy of understanding that requires no translation. They know what the other has experienced and there is no need to establish first principles.

The Islamic Republic, which took power after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, completed this inoculation. It made anti-Semitism central to state doctrine. Friday sermons, school curriculum, even how Iran addressed itself to the world. How could any of us forget Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s illustrious world symposium of Holocaust denial in 2006? For Iranians who have managed to escape the regime, anti-Semitism was never one detachable prejudice among others. It characterised the whole fraudulent package – the lies, the coercion, the false sense of moral grandeur. When they rejected the Islamic regime, naturally they rejected anti-Semitism, too.

The mullahs produced something else which has become genuinely rare in contemporary Britain – people with an acute instinct for the early signs of coercive ideology in a society, an awareness of the gap between a society’s stated values and what it is actually becoming. These are men and women who understand what freedom costs because they have already paid for it with theirs. And they know how quickly a country can be lost.

That is why, when the conversation turns from Tehran to London, as so often it does, what they say carries a weight that is absent from so much of the commentary that now passes for serious discourse in the UK. Their insights are drawn from bitter experience. They recognise a familiar pattern – and they care. The Iranians feel they are watching, for a second time in their lifetimes, a society that is moving, with surprising speed, from the liberal moral consensus of 20 years ago, towards something much more confused – and considerably more dangerous. What has become known as the red-green alliance, a convergence of left-coded moral language with Islamist political energy, ended, in their own country’s history, in the destruction of a free society.. […]

What has changed is not the Iranians. It is us. The solidarity that should have been extended to them was always conditional on accepting certain articles of faith that Western progressivism now implicitly requires. When the Iranian diaspora naturally and proudly aligned with Israel, they found themselves irreconcilably at odds with this worldview, one cultivated by activists and institutions over many years – and one in which the word genocide now travels freely, stripped of its meaning and singularly indicting one people, and one state, alone.

By the time of the Islamic Republic’s massacres in January, the flag of that state was no longer seeable, its name, Israel, no longer sayable. The blue and white Star of David had become the purest kind of trigger – loaded with a presumed and totalising injustice and the weight of everything the culture had learned, or remembered, to deplore. By hoisting Israel’s colours the Iranians found themselves utterly immiscible with the reigning narrative and so, in a very real way, genuinely invisible, too.

There is a profound difference between not knowing and refusing to know. The Iranian diaspora arrived in this country with a cause that should have felt unmistakably just and historically grounded. But they chose truth over indulging one of the West’s oldest and most persistent prejudices, and truth also over the lie of diversity at any cost. That is their distinction. It is also, for now, their continued invisibility.

The question this poses is not really about Iran. It is about what kind of society cannot recognise, in the people standing directly in front of it, the values it still claims to hold.