Iran’s Ministry of Education has distributed a new, deeply racist textbook for children in the Arab Ahwaz region depicting Arabs as savage, uncivilised idiots.
According to credible sources in Ahwaz, the latest textbook (cover shown at left) depicts various derogatory images of Arabs, with the cover showing an image of an Arab man on camel, wearing traditional dress in the desert, certainly intended as a racist caricature.
Such crude anti-Arab bigotry and offensive stereotypes are standard in Iranian media and culture. All such depictions, as well as anti-Arab video games, poetry and other cultural artefacts, are closely monitored and approved by the theocratic regime, which actively encourages anti-Arab racism.
The two pictures show how an Arab man wearing traditional clothes inappropriately, suggesting that Arabs are stupid and uncivilised, like the stereotype carried in the popular Persian whenever Arabs are shown.
Another textbook shows an Arabic man, again riding a camel in a desert with a dirty face, piglike nose and bare feet, eating something with his finger and only dreaming of arriving at a lush garden and a beautiful waterfall.
Ahwazi activists have condemned this latest expression of anti-Arab sentiment, particularly in the guise of an educational book for Arab children, adding that this is part of a systemic supremacist culture of hatred towards Arabs and all things related to Arab identity rooted in resentment amongst many Iranians dating back to the fall of the Persian Empire at the hands of Muslims and Arabs.
This resentment has been actively promoted and encouraged by successive Iranian rulers, up to and including the current regime, as a way of justifying their own brutal persecution of Ahwazi and other Arab peoples.
The Ahwazi activists warned against the perpetuation of such racist policies against both Ahwazi Arabs and other non-Persian minorities in Iran, adding that it could lead to a backlash against not only the regime itself but against Persian peoples generally.
This latest incident of regime-sanctioned racism follows recent widespread regional anger over Iranian state TV broadcasts of racist slurs against the Turkmen people of Southern Azerbaijan, which led to large demonstrations in Azerbaijan and elsewhere.
The racism against Ahwazis runs rampant; we can feel that the anti-Arab sentiments tainted by a deep-rooted fascism are not confined to ordinary Persian citizens, but include a considerable portion of the Persian elite that is directly fueled by state politics.
These racist textbooks are seemingly encouraged by the nonexistence of a law that penalizes such pernicious acts in a country. Akbar Abdi, a well-known comedian, has lately engaged in more of this racist chauvinism during a live program on state television. He mentioned a trip with his family to Mecca in which he reacted to an Arab man who requested to get his son engaged to his daughter by saying: If I equaled my daughter with Gold, I would not equal Arabs, you or your son with Persian rubbish.” He described the Arab man with ugly and dirty epithets. This was not the first time and will not be the last, when the state-sanctioned stream of bigotry against Arabs and Ahwazis is broadcast nationwide. Television programme and state-owned newspapers for years have been offending and attacking Arabs as Ahwazis are bearing the brunt.
What actually motivates racism among Persians against Arabs in general and Ahwazi Arabs in particular along with Kurds, Turks and Baluchis is the misplaced belief instilled into Persians minds that they come from the special superior Aryan race while the rest of other ethnic groups have some inferior racial traits that result in that group being detestable.
Source: MR. RAHIM HAMID
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