Iranian Jews fear reprisals, denounce Israel over Haniyeh assassination
5 mins read

Iranian Jews fear reprisals, denounce Israel over Haniyeh assassination

justin0

Beni Sabti, Israel’s leading expert on Iran’s dwindling Jewish community, said Jewish leaders in Tehran fear the mullahs’ regime will retaliate against them over Israel’s alleged assassination of Hamas terrorist leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran.

The Jerusalem Post has obtained a shocking letter published by Tehran’s Jewish community, in which Iranian Jewish leaders castigate Israel for killing Haniyeh, designated a terrorist by the United States.

According to the letter, “the Zionists killed him in Tehran.”

The letter also stated that “the terrorist act against Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran was a crime and a terrorist attack contrary to international law. This martyr worked for the liberation of Jerusalem. He was attacked all his life and he lost part of his family. He is now a martyr for defending Gaza and the poor people of Gaza.”

The anti-Israel letter from Iran’s largest Jewish community in Tehran adds that “the Jewish community extends its condolences to the Palestinian hero, Ismail Haniyeh, and to all resistance fighters, including the Iranian leader. The Jewish community expects a firm response against the terrorists who killed Haniyeh.”

Iranian Jews pray at the Abrishami Synagogue on Palestine Street in Tehran, December 24, 2015. (Credit: RAHEB HOMAVANDI/REUTERS)

Intimidating Iranian Jews into submission

Sabti said that Iranian Jews “are so afraid of certain groups in the regime, such as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Basij, which may attack Jews, that they had to do it (publish an anti-Israel letter).”

He added: “This is the most humiliating message I have ever heard. It is much worse than Al-Quds Day and the protests that followed on October 7 (when Hamas massacred Gaza border communities in southern Israel).”

Iranian television channel Iran International reported in April 2023 that the Islamic Republic had ordered Jews to participate in the anti-Semitic Al-Quds Day rally during the Jewish holiday of Passover.

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, established al-Quds Day (Jerusalem Day in Arabic) after the 1979 revolution in Iran as a mobilization event calling for the destruction of the Jewish state.

Sabti, a researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies, said that the head of Tehran’s Jewish community, Homayoun Sameach, who is also the Jewish community’s deputy in Iran’s pseudo-parliament, drafted a second letter with other religious minorities, Christian and Zoroastrian, to parliament condemning Haniyeh’s assassination. The Post obtained a copy of the parliamentary letter against Israel.

Sabti sees the role of Jewish community leaders as a low point in their submission to the ayatollahs. According to official statistics, there are about 9,000 Jews left in Iran out of a population of nearly 90 million, Sabti said. Iranian Jews are largely classified as second-class citizens, experts say.

Iranian Jews and other religious minorities are relegated to an inferior status in the totalitarian, Muslim-majority regime of the Islamic Republic. The term dhimmi is used to define the servile position of Jews in the Islamic Republic of Iran and in Arab countries where Islamism eviscerates the civil, political and social rights of non-Muslims. The Middle East Forum published a review of Bat Ye’or’s 2001 book, Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide, which deals with the plight of persecuted religious minorities in the Muslim world.

Mordechai Nisan of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem reviewed Ye’or’s book in 2022. He wrote that Ye’or “focused her research for three decades on the institution she dubbed ‘dhimmitude,’ meaning the humiliation and vulnerability of being a dhimmi (the Islamic legal term for Jews and Christians who accept Muslim sovereignty).”

In an article published last week in the U.S. government news agency Voice of America, Michael Lipin reported that the U.S. State Department had called reports that Iranian Jews were being coerced into voting in the presidential election “deplorable.”

According to VOA, “The reported coercive measures, verified by VOA, included Iranian authorities setting up special polling stations for the first time for Jews to vote in a presidential election and organizing an unprecedented campaign event for Jews to meet with representatives of the presidential candidates.”

VOA quoted a U.S. State Department spokesperson as saying of the forced voting: “The behavior described in these reports is deplorable” and “We never had any hope that presidential elections in Iran would be free or fair, so these reports of coercion, while appalling, are not surprising.”

Former Iranian health minister Massoud Pezeshkian won the second round of the presidential election in early July. He is unconditionally loyal to the Islamic Republic’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, who advocates the eradication of Israel.



Website http://loconrepta.biz.id

Related Posts