Monday, September 17, 2007

Iranian TV Shows Holocaust Movie

It wasn't that long ago that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad held a conference suggesting that the Holocaust never happened. How things have apparently changed in Iran so quickly.

From Iranian TV shows Holocaust movie at Talking Points Memo:

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.

The show is reportedly wildly popular among the Iranian public and people are watching the state-run show instead of watching satellite TV.

It raises a lot of questions given the Bush White House's insinuations of intentions to attack Iran.

1 comment:

RD said...

You must have missed the cartoon for kids in Iran that shows Jews in a (shall we say) less than favorable light?

And just because they put a television show on admitting jews were slaughtered doesn't mean we should let them get nukes... and use them.

You're not really that gullible... are you?
-red