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Ayatollah Khamenei’s “Free Palestine” Poster: Heavy on Holocaust Imagery, Light on Palestinian Freedom

In the first year of his reign in Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini instituted Quds Day (literally, Jerusalem day), a public holiday observed with rallies and calls for Israel’s destruction. To honor the occasion this year, the office of Khomeini’s successor, Ali Khamenei, released a celebratory poster advocating for a “final solution” to the problem posed by the Jewish state. Arash Azizi writes:

The 2020 poster is headlined “Palestine Will Be Free.” In a cartoonish style reminiscent of the Where’s Waldo series, it shows a group of people who have apparently conquered the courtyard of Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque. The Dome of the Rock is seen in the background. The holy mosque is emblazoned with a picture of Qassem Suleimani, the commander of Iran’s Quds Force who was assassinated by the Americans in January. But the most significant feature of the poster is its unmistakable subtitle: “The final solution: resistance until referendum.”

In addition to the [appalling] subtitle, other features of the poster betray Iran’s attitude to the Palestinians. There is no flag of Iran, but there are flags of Iran’s Shiite partners in the region, such as Lebanon’s Hizballah. There are large pictures of Khamenei and Khomeini, plus those of the Hizballah figures Hassan Nasrallah and Imad Mughniyeh, but hardly any images of Palestinian national figures. There is a small picture of Ahmed Yassin, a Palestinian imam and the founding figure of Hamas, assassinated by Israel in 2004. There are only three women in the picture, all wearing the Islamic hijab, and one holding a baby.

This is . . . the “free” Palestine imagined by Khamenei: inspired by Adolf Hitler, for men only, where icons of the Islamic regime of Tehran loom large without any sign of the rich repertoire of Palestinian national life.

Read more at Iran Wire

More about: Ali Khamenei, Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran, Palestinians

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic