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Iranophobia: The Panic of the Hegemons
- Tikkun
- Duke University Press
- Volume 25, Number 6, November/December 2010
- pp. 27-29
- Article
- Additional Information
N O V E M B E R / D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 0 W W W. T I K K U N . O R G T I K K U N 27 I srael’s Iranophobia may in part be traced back to domestic tensions between secular Ashkenazi (European-rooted) and the Orthodox and Mizrahi (Middle Eastern and North African-rooted) communities, according to Haggai Ram, an Israeli expert on Iran. As the Ashkenazim have gradually lost their power and privilege, he argues, they’vebeenstrickenwitha“moralpanic”andhavelookedforascapegoattoblame. Backin1979,eliteAshkenazivoicescondemnedtheIranianrevolutionforthesamereasonsthey condemned and feared the Orthodox and Mizrahim: for promoting traditional religious and culturalvaluesthattheAshkenazimsawasbarrierstotheadvanceofWesternmodernity.Theysaw inIran’spresentavisionofIsrael’sfuture.Theystilldo;hencetheirfear. That may well be part of the story. But there must be more to it, because Iranophobia is just as intense, perhaps even more intense, among the Mizrahim and the Orthodox as among the Ashkenazim. We face the same paradox in the United States, where Iranophobia is also rampant. Polls show between 56 percent and 66 percent of the public supporting military action to prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon. In some liberal circles, the attack on Iranian theocracy echoes fears of America’sownreligiousRight,whichmaywellheightenIranophobia.ButintheUnitedStatesasin Israel, much of the hawkish fearmongering comes from the Right, including the religious Right. How can the moral panic theory explain that? Moreover, the same kinds of fears now directed toward theocratic Iran were aimed, just a few years ago, at the secular government of Saddam HusseininIraq. So the problem goes beyond moral panic. For U.S. elites, the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran symbolizes the more frightening prospect of Iran challenging U.S. hegemony in the greater Middle East. Questions of moral panic pale in comparison to competition for power and oil. In Israel, too, the warnings about an Iranian bomb sound like fears of losing Israel’s nuclear hegemony in the region. Nevertheless, the kind of discourse analysis that Ram offers is very useful. In politics, language alwaysmatters.Controlofdiscourseisacentralelementinanykindofpower.Andtheelitesarenot merelycynicalmanipulatorsofpublicopinion.Theyandthemassesaretiedtogetherbyacommon bondofpoliticaldiscourse,asGeorgeLakoffhastaughtus. WhatculturalframemightexplainthescopeandintensityofAmerica’sIranophobia?Wecanget some important clues from Israel, if we put that nation’s Iranophobia in the broader context of assumptions shared across the Israeli cultural spectrum. Ram offers occasional glimpses of this broadercontext;forAmericanreadersthismaybethemostvaluablecontributionofhisbook. The Need for a Threatening Enemy Ram notes that Iranophobia first appeared during the Egyptian-Israeli peace negotiationsinthelate1970sandearly1980s. Iranophobia: ThePanicoftheHegemons byIraChernus Iranophobia (noun): an excessive, irrational fear of Iran, almost always expressed as fear of a nuclear-armed Iran. IraChernusisaprofessorofReligiousStudiesattheUniversityofColoradoatBoulderandauthorofMonsters ToDestroy.HiswritingonIsrael,Palestine,andtheUnitedStatesiscollectedatchernus.wordpress.com. Ira Chernus uses Haggai Ram’s book Iranophobia: The Logic Of An Israeli Obsession (Stanford University Press, 2009) as a springboard to argue that exaggerated fear of Iran does not reflect “moral panic” so much as American and Israeli realpolitik fears of losing power in the Middle East. Politics_2.qxd:Politics 10/12/10 1:27 PM Page 27 “To convince Israelis that peace could be made with the Arabs it was, at the same time, also ‘necessary’ to construct the image of threat from elsewhere ,”hewrites.“Israelneedsanexistentialthreat.” The Iranian revolution, coming right on the heels of the Begin-Sadat agreement, gave Israel “a golden opportunity” to fulfill that need. In the yearsthatfollowed,Iran’sleadersofferedplentyofwordsthatcouldserveto substantiateIsrael’sculturallynecessaryimageofforeignthreat. Another key element in Iranophobia is the assumption that Israel has done nothing to provoke such menacing language. In fact, according to Ram, “this rhetoric is part of a long-standing Iranian and Israeli exchange of threats and counterthreats.” But that truth is largely ignored in Israeli publicdiscourse.Instead,hewrites,theIranianthreatisascribedtoan“unprovoked hatred that ‘Islam’ nurtures against Jews in general and the Jewish state in particular,” which is why Ahmadinejad is so often linked to Hitler. IranophobiaintheUnitedStatesalsohasdeeprootsinahistoryoffears of Iran and other foreign nations, accompanied by a firm insistence on U.S. innocence. UnfoundedColdWarfearsofacommunisttakeoverofIranin1953promptedPresidentDwight Eisenhower to authorize a CIA-led coup that overthrew the elected government and installed the autocratic Shah as ruler. But all the elements of the Cold War frame were already prominent in the anti-fascist rhetoric of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, even before the United States entered World War II. In my own research, I’ve found numerous examples of EisenhowerandRooseveltvoicingthesamefearsinprivateasinpublicthattheenemy,ifnot stoppedbyforce,woulddestroytheUnitedStates—andcivilizationitself. So the same kind of...