In the last days of its four-year term, the 10th Islamic Consultative Assembly (parliament) approved the outlines of a bill that had been compiled and designed entirely by the regime’s intelligence services. The general bill, which initially included 14 motions, was approved yesterday with a total of 16 articles, removal of one and addition of three more to it. Israel was the subject of the bill, which included a wide range of prohibitions and punishments for citizens in various areas of life (social, political, cultural, commercial, sports, intelligence, cyberspace, technology, etc.). In addition – and this was one of the three additions to the original bill – the creation of a special committee of secret and intelligence services started following this law, a committee with elements indicating its Gestapo-like nature:
Representatives from:
- Supreme National Security Council,
- Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
- Ministry of Intelligence (Foreign Intelligence Agency and Counterintelligence Department),
- IRGC Intelligence Organization,
- Quds Force of the IRGC,
- Attorney General,
- Ministry of Interior,
- Ministry of Defense and Armed Forces Support
- And Parliament’s Secretariat of the International Conference in Support of the Palestinian Intifada
None of these bans imposed according to this law were not new on the reality of Iranian citizens’ lives. Prior to this bill, no one had the right to travel to Israel. No athlete has had the right to compete with Israeli athletes and still doesn’t. No one has had the right to deal with Israeli citizens and traders in domestic (!) and international exhibitions, and cooperation with Israeli intelligence agencies has always been considered capital offense and has been subject to the most brutal punishments. However, the question arises, then why? Why does the regime, after 41 years, bring a bill to the parliament that all its anti-Semitic materials have been implemented by all parts of the system without the need for any legal basis?
The question that has been overlooked by most observers and the media becomes interesting when we look at the trick used in unveiling this law, a trick that contributes greatly to the media’s overlooking of the above-mentioned question. Article 11 of the “Bill to Combat Israel” prohibits Iranian athletes from competing with Israeli athletes. The debate over the removal of this clause and the speculations about the reasons behind it became so hot that no one addressed the main question and the approval of the other 16 clauses.
September 15, 1935, Hermann Goering, Speaker of the Third Reich, known as the Reichstag in Berlin, announces bills approvals which are recorded in the history as the “Nuremberg Laws”. There were three categories to these laws:
- Flag law
- Citizenship Law
- The law of blood
Following these rules, black, white, and red became national colors and broken cross became the national flag. The citizenship law divided Germans into two categories: “ordinary citizens” and “citizens of the Reich.” The division of the Iranian people by the Islamic Republic into two groups, the “ummah” and the “nation,” is of the same kind. The third law defined the relationship between Jews and non-Jews in Germany and included prohibition of exchanges, transactions, marriage and other relations with Jewish citizens.
None of these laws were new in 1935 for the reality of German society at the time. The Nazi party had snatched the right to life from Jews in its ideology 13 years before it seized power. Prior to the seizure of power, groups of Nazi street thugs committed all kinds of crimes against Jewish citizens, and in 1933, after the Nazis rose to power in Germany, all of these crimes took on a naked form. At the time, for many, the passage of these three laws was not controversial. Everyday life had made crime a normal thing.
But none of those laws and routines were normal.
History has shown that the Nuremberg laws were a necessity for a horrific crime, a judicial context for a systematic massacre that humanity has never seen before: Holocaust.
Mojtaba Zulnoori, a representative of Qom and a member of the Sustainability Front (Jebhe Paydari), who is known to the Iranian people as a pro-pedophile representative in the parliament, has played a key role in presenting the bill from the beginning. He and Seyyed Hossein Naghavi Hosseini, both played a big role in misleading the public by creating a sham controversy over the removal of paragraph 11 of the law. But in the midst of these empty discussions in the media, another fact became clear: that the Islamic Republic only respects the language of “maximum pressure” and sanctions, and nothing else. Fear of the suspension of Iranian sports by international sports institutions was an argument raised during the media debate over why paragraph 11 was omitted.
By converting its common, anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic practices into law, the Islamic Republic seeks to create a legal framework for widespread crimes by intelligence forces and Basiji thugs against its opponents and protesters among the general public. Systematizing crimes requires a legal framework. This 16-article plan has been approved by the parliament in line with this necessity.
No group or individual has yet commented on the number of detainees in recent protests since November 2019. The government avoids giving any picture, albeit unreal, of the identities and whereabouts of the detainees, and is well aware of the fact that the extent and intensity of popular protests, such as those that took place in November 2019, will increase in the future. By bringing this plan to the parliament and turning its articles into law, the intelligence agencies and the IRGC are acquiring the necessary legal tools to carry out their crimes in order to suppress popular protests and create suffocation.
Translation of this post by Sahar.
Cover: Ricardo Gomez Angel
