Iran Weekly Wire Podcast

On Tuesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared before the US Congress to condemn the Obama administration’s proposed nuclear deal with Iran.

He said the deal wouldn’t really stop Iran from building nuclear weapons, and that America was just betting on hope that Iran’s rulers would change for the better.

He put the nature of the Iranian regime at the center of his speech. He described it as a dark and brutal dictatorship.

Is Netanyahu right? As Prime Minister of Israel, it’s his job to be pessimistic. But not everyone can live by pessimism. This week I’m going to look at how Netanyahu’s claims about Iran stack up.

First off, Netanyahu isn’t just pessimistic. He gets facts wrong, and he treats Iran’s domestic scene as if it doesn’t matter a bit, and never will.

Because of this, he cuts an image both frightening and ridiculous in the eyes of many Iranians.  

He frightens people because, if he orders airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, he could throw the whole country into an era of crisis and chaos and environmental catastrophe.

But people think he’s ridiculous because he’s so clueless about Iranian society. In 2013 he said that if Iranians were free, they would wear blue jeans—something most of them have done for decades.

He has a fuzzy understanding of Iranian politics, too. Netanyahu implicitly blamed President Hassan Rouhani for an increase in executions. He was blaming the wrong person, since Iranian presidents are weak in the face of the supreme leader and the judiciary.

Worse still, his interest in human rights looks cynical to many Iranians, who hope that nuclear negotiations will change Iran—and its leaders—for the better.

Iran’s political elites also watched Netanyahu’s speech. Where he calls them dark and brutal, they call him a hypocrite.

Ali Larijani, the speaker of Iran’s parliament, called Netanyahu ridiculous and clumsy. He said the speech was an example of “disgraceful bullying,” and pointed out—as Iranian elites never tire of doing—that Israel has had nuclear warheads for years.  

Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Marzieh Afkham, called the speech a deceitful show.

The hardline press reacted, too.

Iran’s most conservative newspaper, Kayhan, said the speech revealed that Israel’s real problem was not Iran’s nuclear facilities, but its political system.

Another website, Asr-e Iran, forgot Iran’s official line that it’s not pursuing nuclear weapons. It wrote that if negotiations fail, Netanyahu might have real pictures of Iranian nuclear tests to show congress next time.

Inside Iran, Netanyahu’s reputation is so toxic that politicians deploy its as a pejorative on both sides of political spats.

Iran’s former president Hashemi Rafsanjani, favors negotiations and supports President Hassan Rouhani.

He said that conservatives who tried to block nuclear negotiations were using the same tactics as Netanyahu.

He said that just as Netanyahu agitates Obama, people in parliament who call themselves “concerned Iranians” threaten to “expose government secrets” to block an agreement.

Conservative newspapers fired back at Rafsanjani. Vatan-e Emrooz, which opposes the negotiations, said Rafsanjani himself was like Netanyahu, since he was working hard to destroy any outcome that could benefit Iran.

Hamid Resaee, a conservative MP, went further, accusing Rafsanjani of forging alliances with Israel during Iran’s 2009 elections, which led to massive demonstrations against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and eventually against the supreme leader himself.

For conservatives like Resaee, any deal with the US is just part of the same big conspiracy against the future of the Islamic Republic.

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So what should people make of Iran’s domestic politics? Is Iran, as Netanyahu calls it, “a dark and brutal dictatorship”?

To anyone who follows the human rights situation in the country, Iran doesn’t run short of ways to fit that description.

Iran has one of the worst human rights records in the world.

Dissenters have been victims of torture, and have been forced to give false confessions on television. They have faced long prison terms, and have even been murdered in their homes.

To deviate openly from the state’s values in areas like entertainment and belief is to risk facing some level of threat or intimidation.

But the important thing to understand about Iran is how chaotic and disorganized most political repression is. Iran is authoritarian, but it couldn’t be totalitarian if it tried.

Nobody really knows what the rules are, and that’s why most Iranians are willing to live their lives, take risks, and see what happens.

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Iran may be brutal, but it’s not always dark. Political clashes happen in the open.

Iranian civil society was in action last Sunday, as teachers’ unions across the country staged demonstrations against budget cuts.

In Tehran about 2000 teachers sat in outside the parliament building chanting slogans and demanding higher pay.

This wasn’t an officially sanctioned rally. According to the secretary of the Iranian Teachers’ Union, the government had refused permission, and had even blocked access to the union’s website.

Even so, there were no reported clashes with police, and Iran’s semi-official media covered the protests.

Sometimes you can be surprised who accuses the government of oppression in Iran. Where outsiders see a dark and brutal regime, regime supporters live in fear of emerging liberties.

In the northeastern city of Mashhad, which is one of Iran’s most important shrine cities, a revolutionary court cancelled a concert by a singer named Alireza Ghorbani.

An Islamist youth group in the city, which calls itself Hezbollah, or “Party of God,” made a point of endorsing the court’s decision.

“We will not allow the spiritual capital of Islamic Iran to be soiled by music concerts,” they said.

They said concerts were a “cultural calamity.”

In a statement they gave to the Iranian Student News Agency, they said, “If you wish your country to be a proper country, you should forsake music.”

They also urged their would-be supporters not to be so shy: “Don’t be afraid of being called a fanatic,” they wrote. “Let’s be fanatics.”

But surprisingly, their main target was the government, specifically the local authorities who had given permission for the concert in the first place.

They called them “cultural criminals” who wanted to destroy the faith of the nation.

In opposing them, they said, they drew their authority from the Ayatollah

Khomeini himself, who was a “destroyer of despots.”

They said the people who had allowed religiously unlawful concerts were “Tyrants.”

This is Iran’s far right calling members of government tyrants in public.

This isn’t the kind of dictatorship Netanyahu was talking about.

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Any English speaker who has been to Iran will remember just how many English signs there are.

Despite Iran’s political isolation, and the small number of tourists it attracts, the government puts English text anywhere it can think of.

There are probably more English signs in Tehran than there are in Paris.

Iran, like most countries, puts English directions on road signs. But it doesn’t end there. You can see English on huge propaganda murals, and on religious posters with Koranic sayings.

You can see it on public buildings and on public transport.

There is even an English sign on the outside of Evin Prison, where the government holds most of its political prisoners. It says, “Evin House of Detention.”

English is also a big part of marketing in Iran. Most products carry English labels. Some even come with English instructions.

This habit of bilingualism goes back to the days of the Shah, when there two million western expatriates living and working in Iran, and it’s never really gone away.

But as one of IranWire’s citizen journalists pointed out this week, English signs in Iran are somewhat eccentric when it comes to spelling and grammar.

Zinat Jafarzadeh, who lives in Semnan, has catalogued lots of examples of misplaced or missing letters in English words. She found them on the Tehran University campus, in banks, and at tourist sites around the country.

She found the word “tourism” spelled without an “o”, and the word “pharmacy” spelled with an “i” at the end.

She even found a can of tuna with the slogan “taste the difference” on the label. This was translated into English with the words, “different test.”

Now, most Iranian signs are perfectly functional, even if they’re not perfectly correct. Most visitors will appreciate that they’ve been put up as a courtesy.

They’re also part of the fun of visiting a less-travelled country.

But Jafarzadeh sees eccentric English signs as part of an emerging struggle over English in Iran.

She says students are receiving fewer hours of English instruction than they used to, and they’re starting a year later. They now start at age 12 or 13.

Conservatives, it seems, are not so wild about English. They recently shot down a bill in Iran’s parliament that would have brought English instruction to primary schools.

They said young children shouldn’t be exposed to “alien” languages.

But even conservatives seem conflicted on the matter. One conservative website said that while English was the language of the enemy, people should learn it anyway, just to understand the enemy better.

Chances are, enemies visiting Iran won’t see the style of English signs change any time soon.

Ideally, tourists will try to learn a little Persian, too.

But the fact that Iran lays out the welcome mat for its enemies in this way is just another one of the many paradoxes that makes Iran, Iran.