In all the hubbub surrounding the nuclear agreement between Western powers and Iran on the latter’s nuclear capabilities, especially now that at least 34 Democratic US Senators have committed to supporting the agreement (and 3 idiot Dem Senators are going against, unfortunately), it's quite understandable that a recent separate attempt to build more of a rapprochement, or at least offer a momentary olive branch, between one of the Western nations and Iran, may have gotten somewhat lost in the shuffle, especially as the plans didn’t work out, at least as of this time. This was an attempt by pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim to bring his orchestra from the Staasoper Berlin (Berlin State Opera, located in the former East Berlin) to Tehran for a classical concert. Given Barenboim's Israeli background, you can easily imagine the apoplectic reaction of the Likud whack-jobs. However, it turns out that they weren’t the only closed-minded idiots in the story. Namely, the country to which Barenboim reached out needs to take its share of blame too for intransigence. More, sort of, below the flip....
An early report on this move by Barenboim to try to bring his Berlin orchestra to Tehran appeared last Thursday in The Guardian here (a reworking of an Agence France Presse story), where Barenboim had the backing of Germany's foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Another report dated the same day on The Guardian’s site here, by Saeed Kamali Dehghan, quotes a passage from a statement by the Staatskapelle Berlin, the name of the orchestra when it performs outside of the opera house:
"German foreign minister Steinmeier has taken on the patronage of this concert and supports Daniel Barenboim’s commitment to make music accessible to people beyond any national, religious or ethnic boundaries."
The Israeli culture minister, Miri Regev, was not nearly so enthusiastic, and directly expressed her opposition to the idea:
"'In my letter I shall stress that Daniel Barenboim's appearance in Iran harms Israel’s efforts to prevent the nuclear agreement and gives encouragement to de-legitimisation of Israel,' she wrote in Hebrew on her Facebook page.
"Iran is a state which supports terror, is behind Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and Hamas and its leaders have blood on their hands. I believe that Germany would be acting rightly if it were to cancel the appearance of the orchestra and its conductor."
Granted, Iran is no nation of geopolitical angels, far from it. But for Likud to accuse other nation’s leaders of having "blood on their hands"….uh, can you say "chutzpah"? This is in addition to the long-standing hypocrisy from Israel about going on about the need to stop Iran's nuclear program, while not acknowledging publicly its own
hidden stash of nuclear weapons. Plus, Regev smears Barenboim by saying that Barenboim is "using culture as a platform for his anti-Israel political views". (For "anti-Israel", that means anti-Likud, of course, which is to say, pro-sanity.)
However, as reported this past Tuesday again in The Guardian (another report initially from Agence France Presse), the proposed trip appears to have fallen through, though not because of Regev's machinations or statements. Rather, the Iranian government themselves are the bad guys:
"….an Iranian culture ministry spokesman, Hossein Noushabadi, said an investigation meant Barenboim could not enter the country for security reasons, though the Berlin orchestra was welcome.
"We have no problem with the German orchestra coming to Iran, but we are opposed to the person leading that group," Noushabadi told news agency ISNA.
"He has multiple nationalities and one of them is Israeli. For security reasons and to prevent issues following the entry of certain people into Iran, we stopped it…."
"Our reviews revealed that the conductor has nationality and identity dependence to Israel, was raised in Israel and his parents have also lived there. So the suspicion of him being related to that country, which is illegitimate to us, was there."
Um, "investigation" and "reviews"? Memo to Iran: it's called Wikipedia, or Barenboim's own website. These "investigations" and "reviews" shouldn’t have taken more than 15 minutes. Snark aside, on that rather chilling phrase "illegitimate to us", Dehghan noted in his article from last week:
"Iran does not recognise Israel as a legitimate country and its citizens are banned from travelling to the Jewish state. Iranians who travel to Israel risk being jailed for up to five years. But Iran has made exceptions, especially when it involves international figures."
The point here is that in this particular situation, there's plenty of closed-mindedness and intolerance on both sides, Israeli and Iranian. Israel needs to admit that its own behavior is fueling Islamic extremism, and that its intransigent and obstructionist attitude toward the hard-won nuclear agreement (or any non-military attempt at Middle East geopolitics) is not constructive to diplomatic means of avoiding unnecessary conflict. In turn, Iran needs to accept the reality of Israel as a legitimate sovereign nation (however despicable its current Prime Minister and his ruling party are), and its support of Hezbollah and Hamas are grounds for concern on stability in the Middle East. Iran also needs to lighten up considerably with respect to the West, as
this story indicates. Yes, the West contributed to the overthrow of the legitimately elected Iranian government in 1953. But that's not a good excuse for seizing clothes and closing down stores there in 2015.
With that, on this Labor Day weekend, time for the standard SNLC protocol, namely your loser stories for the week....