Ahmadinejad's Demonizing Call: Hakakian's Piece in Washington Post

Shahram Kholdi, ScanIranic:

Roya Hakakian, the Iranian-American writer and documentary film-maker, has just published what I regard a novel approach to the culture of hate-mongering by the Islamic regime of Iran's propaganda machine.

Hakakian's piece (in Washington Post, here) is a novel one from many respects, in my opinion, especially in view of a recent contribution by Professor Abbas Milani, For Jews there have always been two Irans" (International Herald Tribune, here). However, Hakakian's approach is a novel one in that it catalogues the literary atrocities that the Jewish Iranians have been subjected to by the Islamic Republic of Iran's propaganda machine.

Milani's approach in acknowledging the longstanding place of the Iranian Jewish community in the history of Iranian cultural state and civilisation (which is perhaps only second to China in its continuous existence both as a nation-state and civilisation at the same time in history) is a more classic account of the discontinuities and continuities in the history of Iran and its Jewish community, while Hakakian takes a wholistic approach that, amongst other things, holds to account our intellectuals for not paying attention and producing reliable research on the place and contribution of the Jewish community to the Iranic civilisation. Read them both and judge it for yourself!