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The Farsi word for Chutzpah?
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Reuters reports today that the Iranian "government" (sneer quotes fully intended) is protesting the killing of an Egyptian-German Muslim woman killed July 1 in a courtroom in Dresden. Marwa El-Sherbiny was stabbed to death while appearing in court to testify against a man who was appealing a sentence for an apparent hate crime.
Let's put aside the obvious question of how the guy got a knife into a courtroom to begin with. Consider these quotes from Reuters about protests in Iran.
"There were around 150 students and they threw eggs at the main gate of the German embassy," said the witness. "The students chanted 'Death to Germany' and 'Death to Europe'" the witness added.
Yeah, that'll help the Muslims in Germany and elsewhere in the west who are merely trying to live their lives — Muslims like, presumably, Ms. El-Sherbiny, who was killed by the same kind of hatred on display at the German embassy in Tehran.
Sherbiny's murder has incensed public opinion and the media in Iran, where hundreds of worshippers condemned the crime at Friday prayers, and state media called her a "martyr" of Islamic values.
Like, say, Neda Agha-Soltan?
Iran summoned German ambassador to Iran Herbert Honsowitz on Friday to protest against the murder, urging Berlin to do more to protect the rights of religious minorities in Germany.
Coming from virtually any other government in the world, this might be something worth considering. Coming from the government of Ayatollah Khamenei and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, it's a joke.
First of all, religious tolerance in Iran is, shall we say, limited? While Iran's constitution — Surprise! It has one! — does provide provisions for the rights of Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians, Iranian converts to Christanity live in fear and Iranian Jews live with the affront of a Holocaust-denying president. And Iranian Zoroastrians? The indigenous religious community of Iran, they get one parliament seat along with the one each for the Jews and Christians.
Of course, if you're anything else, e.g., Baha'i, then you're subject to state-sanctioned persecution.
So I'm not going to put a lot of stock in preaching of religious tolerance by Iran. Sorry about that.
But what should be obvious here is that the Iranian "government" (and I'm not going to stop using those sneer quotes until Ahmadinejad is gone) is just trying to deflect attention for its recent rigged election and subsequent violent quashing of protests. So they seize on the killing of a Muslim woman in a western country in an obvious hate crime. Never mind that the woman was Egyptian and likely Sunni, and thus a symbol of a government (Egypt's) fundamentally at odds with the goals of Iran's "government" (i.e., regional hegemony, anti-secularism, anti-Arabism, Shi'a supremacy). I can't help but wonder if Ahmadinejad et al. wouldn't have preferred that Ms. El-Sherbiny at least be Iranian.
As long as Iran continues to treat its own religious minorities as second-class citizens, then its "government" needs to shut up about what goes on in other countries, particular one such as Germany, which has taken in a huge Muslim population and where such incidents as the tragic one in Dresden is an exception and not the rule. Furthermore, as long as it continues to deny its people the right to choose their own leaders, then the Iranian "government" needs to stop criticizing any government anywhere else in the world.
I don't know if there's a Farsi equivalent of the Yiddish word chutzpah, but it strikes me that this situation merits that label, if such exists.
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