Pre-Islamic Iran was for many centuries the other civilization of the Classical world, sometimes in confrontation with Greeks, then the Romans, and often in cultural and religious encounters, with them and with ancient Israel.  The prophet Isaiah called Cyrus the anointed of God — God’s messiah.  The prophet Zarathustra was the first religious visionary and poet in history whom we know by name.  His teachings about ethics, eschatology, and the afterlife became the core of Iran’s Zoroastrian religion and influenced early Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism.  Most of what is called “Islamic” culture is in fact Persian: following the Arab conquest of Iran in the seventh century, Iranian philosophy, art, language, cuisine, music, and poetry conquered the Islamic world.

When I was a student of Armenian at Columbia, my teacher, Prof. Garsoian, taught me that Iran was in many respects the substrate of Armenian culture and society.  Under the direction of Prof. Mary Boyce, I wrote a doctoral thesis, “Zoroastrianism in Armenia.”  Much of my published work (there are three volumes of opera minora) deals with Armeno-Iranica.  I taught pre-Islamic Iranian studies at Columbia for many years.  One of my pupils there, who later became a close friend, was his imperial highness Ali Reza Pahlavi, the son of the Shah of Iran.  When I was able to travel to Iran for the first (and probably the last) time, in the fall of 2000, a few high-ranking Muslim clerics whispered to me at Niyavaran palace in the capital, Tehran, “Please send regards to Ali Reza from his house.”

One evening, in the central Iranian city of Yazd, where there is still a Zoroastrian community, I was visiting a mosque and felt drawn to an antiques shop across the square.  There was a little afarganyu (Parsi fire chalice) there, and I bought it.  A stranger engaged me in conversation and asked me to accompany him for a walk.  We passed through the dark, deserted bazaar to his internet café, where he asked me to paint my national flag on the wall, the way backpackers do.  I told him the Stars and Stripes would not be a very good idea.  Not that one, he replied.  Your real national flag — the blue and white flag of Israel.

I promised him that when it became safe to do so, I would make a special trip all the way back to Yazd to do it.

There was not to be a return trip.  The next year, the 9/11 attacks changed the world.  Ten years later, griefstricken over the fate of his country and his family, Ali Reza killed himself.  Six years after that, the left-fascist ideology of wokeness killed my own career as a scholar and teacher.  My teachers died.  My parents died.  And the world around me is getting worse, not better.

Over the four and a half decades of its rule, the clerical regime has transformed Iran from a peaceful, prosperous country into the global epicenter of Islamonazi ideology and terrorism.  The vacuum at the heart of Nazism is the mythology of anti-Semitism — and, thanks in no small measure to the success of the Islamic revolution of 1979 in Iran, Islam itself has become the main vector of Jew-hatred, that cancer whose metastasis we now see everywhere.

Many Iranians detest both Islam and the clerical regime.  They have suffered the inhumanity of both — the latter for two generations, the former for thirteen centuries.  They are appalled and ashamed that the regime has become the sponsor of Hamas, Hezb’allah, and the Houthis (the three Hs of the new Nazism, standing in for Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich).  They are enraged at Iran’s isolation from the civilized world and its partnership with the world’s most unsavory dictatorships.  They harbor no ill will toward Iran’s ancient Jewish community.  They have no desire for war with Israel.

The other day, the Iranian regime launched some 350 ballistic and cruise missiles and drones at Israel, mostly at densely populated civilian areas.  The object of the attack was mass death and destruction — like the Hamas invasion of October 7, 2023, which Iran also funded and planned.  Together with its allies — the United States, the United Kingdom, and France, as well as some Arab states — Israel destroyed 99 percent of the rockets and drones in the air.  The sole civilian injured was a young Israeli Bedouin girl.  Though as of today her life is out of danger, the shrapnel may have caused permanent brain damage. 

Israel will retaliate.  It will not attack civilian targets.  It never intentionally does.  But Iran’s nuclear program, its military, its petroleum industry, and the leaders and personnel of the regime are fair game.  If the war escalates, we are in uncharted waters.

If there is any hope for the future, the Iranian people must arise, overthrow the regime, obliterate the “Islamic Republic,” and take their country back.  But time is running out.  Nobody has backed reformist Persians in the past, and the lethal force of the IRGC is overwhelming.  It would be a bloodbath.  I am not too hopeful — not for my own life and still less for the world.  But we have to try, don’t we?

One of my heroes is Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, an irascible Victorian, an explorer, hunter, and British army officer who fought for the Jews.  He was quite alone: the establishment, then as now, did not like my tribe.  Shortly before his death in 1967, at age 89, he wrote in his diary that the world he knew was dead.  Hypocrisy had replaced manliness.  But Israel lived, and that’s something.  So I should like to see Sir Salman Rushdie as the guest of honor at the Tehran Book Fair.  And I would like to pay a visit to a certain internet cafe in Yazd and paint on the wall...the Lion and Sun of a free and happy Iran.

James R. Russell is Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies, emeritus, Harvard University.

Image: Chickenonline via Pixabay, Pixabay License.