Westerners who don hijabs in Iran are a disgrace
dal Trigger
Australian diplomat Julie Bishop wears a head covering while in Tehran last year with Iranian counterpart Mohammad Javad Zarif.Photo: Getty Images
Australian diplomat Julie Bishop wears a head covering while in Tehran last year with Iranian counterpart Mohammad Javad Zarif.Photo: Getty Images
In Iran, do as the mullahs say, not as Iranians do. This seems to be the motto adopted by a string of foreign dignitaries rushing to Tehran in the wake of the mythical “nuke deal” marketed by the Obama administration.
For more than a decade almost no one wanted to go to the capital of the Islamic Republic, designated by many as “the world No. 1 sponsor of international terrorism.” This year, however, heads of state and other senior officials from over 60 nations, including most Western powers, have taken the flying carpet to Tehran to pay tribute to Obama’s “new moderate Iran.”
President Obama’s seven-year campaign to restore diplomatic relations to Iran was never likely to alter the Khomeinist regime’s destructive behavior. But some European powers were keen to disregard the Islamic Republic’s visceral anti-Americanism and focus on obtaining juicy commercial deals.
The mullahs seized the opportunity to claim “total victory over the Great Satan” as part of a new narrative according to which “the whole world” was rushing to Iran to pay tribute to the “Supreme Guide” as the living incarnation of Islam.
It was no surprise that high-profile visitors like Russian President Vladimir Putin or his Chinese counterpart Xi Jingping failed to mention such issues as human rights, executions and terrorism in polite dinner-table conversation in Tehran.
The surprise came from Western leaders visiting the Islamic Republic and talking in strict accordance with scripts established by the ruling mullahs.
German Vice-Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel went to Tehran twice, recalling their “common historic bonds” which presumably include the claimed “joint Aryan ancestry.” But he uttered not a word about such embarrassing issues as Iran topping the list of nations in the number of executions and political prisoners.
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius was warm in paying tribute to the “great Iranian culture,” but was too polite to mention that for three decades the Islamic regime has been busy trying to destroy that very culture to the point of establishing a list of words that cannot be mentioned in Persian poetry.
Meanwhile, Austrian President Heinz Fischer, whose term has since ended, put flowers at Ayatollah Khomeini’s mausoleum and praised the despot who had presided over the execution of more than 120,000 Iranians as “a man of peace and spirituality.”
Then we have Cardinal Vincenzo Paglia, head of the Vatican’s office on family affairs. He went to the “holy” city of Qom to persuade the ayatollahs there to enter an alliance with the Catholic Church in defense of “the sacred institution of marriage” and against “deviant ways.”
The cardinal’s visit came just two days after the massacre at a gay bar in Orlando, Fla., and was seized upon by the Tehran media as a reminder by the church that a “same-sex relation” is a sin.
The Western women officials who visited the mullahs didn’t always behave in a dignified manner either. They discarded their ordinary attire in favor of dress codes and hijab styles approved by the Islamic Foreign Ministry, the same dress codes and hijabs that millions of Iranian women are fighting against each day.
The European Union foreign policy tsarina Federica Mogherini, a frequent hobnobber with mullahs, came dressed in black, the color of Bani-Abbas. She went even further by inviting Islamic Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif to join the dialogue on “human rights in Europe” and suggest measures in favor of Islam which Mogherini says is an “integral part of Europe.”
The Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop brought a whole delegation of “Islamic scholars” with her to Tehran. They went around claiming that Australia was “thirsty for Islam” while the Islamic Republic was hungry for the import of Australian mutton. Ayatollah Mohsen Araki, head of Office for Islamic Convergence, promised Bishop that Iran would open a full university in Australia to train “Islamic scholars” Down Under.
But the crown for vile flattery goes to Christine Defraigne, president of the Belgian Senate, who went around telling the mullahs and their minions that the West had “a lot to learn from Islam” to “improve the status of women.” She ignored the fact that, while she was flattering the mullahs, hundreds of Iranian women were arrested and insulted by Islamic vigilantes who claimed their hijab was “inadequate.”
Defraigne tried to justify her own wearing of the hijab by claiming that the headgear was “part of Iranian culture,” a manifest lie as it was invented in the 1970s and imposed from 1980 onwards.
Two officials behaved with dignity. One was South Korean President Park Geun-hye who dressed normally and wore a white, thin, headpiece and said not a word in praise of the mullarchy. Another was Croatian President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic, who wore thin headgear covering half of her blond hair at official functions but not during unofficial sightseeing. The mullahs retaliated by posting photos of her in swimsuits on the Internet and even attacking her as “a slut with no qualms about wearing a bikini.”
However, the main prize for dignified behavior must go to German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
She simply refused to visit the Islamic Republic because she would not wear the hijab and dress up for what amounts to a farce endorsing tragedy.
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