A Revolution Still
A trial of Iranian Jews shows moderates haven't prevailed
The late Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai was once asked his opinion of the significance of the French Revolution of 1789. "It's too soon to tell," he answered. Revolutions have their own cunning and method, their own mix of audacity and cruelty and reason. We have been reminded of this yet again by the latest turn of events in Iran. There were anticipations of a "Tehran Spring" and hopes in Iran, as well as in Washington, that the fury of the revolution was spent. But in truth, the reformers have not prevailed. The cynical and cruel trial of 13 Iranian Jews in Shiraz on charges of spying for Israel is one expression of the impasse between the reformers and the real masters of the land--the hard-line clerics.
The trial also seems to provide an answer to the Clinton administration, which sought to test the mood of the revolution. In mid-March, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright launched "pistachio diplomacy," offering an olive branch to the would-be reformers mobilized around President Mohammad Khatami. The sanctions on investments in Iranian oil would remain, she announced, but they were lifted on Iranian pistachios, caviar, and carpets. More accommodation was promised if Iran, in Albright's words, indicated "a desire and a commitment" to improve relations. In an administration and a cultural climate of confessions and apologies, an apology of sorts was given to the Iranians for Operation Ajax, the covert Anglo-American effort that overthrew Iran's popular Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and restored to power his rival, Mohammad Reza Shah. Secretary Albright gave that history a new twist. That 1953 coup, she said, was a "setback for Iran's political development." The shah, who had done a fair measure of America's bidding in the Persian Gulf, was written off by Albright as a man who had "brutally repressed political dissent." It was history at a distance, after history's dangers and truths have long scattered to the wind.
Iranian pawns. On the face of it, the trial in Shiraz is "revolutionary" tribunal justice in its purest and crudest form. Three of those hapless victims--an unlikely group that includes a rabbi, a high school student, and a clerk in a shoe store--have offered the scripted public confessions of those caught up in a lawless world beyond their power. These men are pawns; they have been held incommunicado for more than a year now. The first to offer a "confession" was Hamid Tefileen, a clerk in his father's shoe store. The chance that a man in Shiraz--far removed from the political center in Tehran and the religious center in the city of Qum--would have anything of value to intelligence agencies is a proposition too absurd to contemplate. Iran is rife with corruption: The clerics and their sons and their sons-in-law are available for hire. Why bother with a store clerk when you can recruit the very best? And the chance that Israeli intelligence would put Iranian Jews in harm's way is patently absurd. Some 30,000 Jews remain in Iran. They are apolitical men and women. Anyone who knows the rules of minority survival in harsh and cruel lands can readily see through the sham of Iran's show trial.
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