Zahir's Response to Iran's 'Holy' Defense

Zahir Ebrahim responds to 'A defense which deserves being called “Holy” by Iranian Journalist Kourosh Ziabari'

Battlefield from the Iran-Iraq War. Courtesy: patdollard.com

(LOS ANGELES) - I have to respond to this “holy” bit of bullsh*t: “Iranians defended themselves nobly and their moral resistance against the coalition of global tyrants deserves to be called a holy defense.”

Are you a journalist or the PR spokesman of the beleaguered state?

Have you seen any war? War casualties?

No modern war is holy, for its victims are always non-combatant civilians - not to mention the butchery the modern uniforms do to each other even when they are paid to wear it in the name of duty. To defend oneself from aggression is an evil existential necessity, an existential right to self-defence that cannot be legislated away. But the exercise of that inalienable right in modernity almost always entails inflicting the most extreme forms of violence upon the enemy. The sorts of barbarisms that one is forced to exercise, and to experience, even in self-defence, can in no way be termed “holy”, except in [Orwellian] Newspeak. Only the dead have seen the end of war (I think it's Plato's rendering – but also entirely self-evident). Perhaps that's why the dead are also the only ones at peace and deemed to be in “heaven” in all war mobilizations.

The living suffer through it both during, and afterwards. And a nuclear war, a DU decimation, being bombed into stone-age, will continue to inflict immeasurable suffering for eons to come – as in Iraq – even after the canons have gone silent. And that is the potential cataclysm facing Iran today. A self-defence against it – borrowing from your description of the previous war – will only be called “holy” in Newspeak, and all sides will indulge in it. But those suffering the aggression are not made automatically holy just because they are the victims! To be holy – i.e., in Realityspeak I imagine it means to be moral, fair, and just to most people – one has to act moral, fair and just in all circumstance. The test of it is daily, constant.

On that yardstick of non Newspeak, can you list what moral acts were undertaken by Iran in its self-defence which saw a million Muslims slaughtered on either side by Muslims, because of which one might non-propagandistically term that longest war holy?

A victimhood and holy-ness always seem to go together – just look at the pious Jews living it out daily in Zionistan.

The glorification of modern war as “holy” is exclusively the craftsmanship of war propagandists who are tasked to mobilize their people, on either side, whether ideologically as the aggressors often are, or with a paycheck as their paid shills and mercenaries always are. To wit: the War on Terror – now that's a “holy” war isn't it? Honest journalists are not state propagandists. They must expose its abhorrences, even despite self-defence being an inalienable existential imperative. So I ask you again, what was bloody “holy” in that grotesque internecine violence of brother killing brother and children sent to the front-lines as the jihadis awaiting heaven; entirely set up to partake of that holy evil by the same Hectoring Hegemons who are now ready to do it themselves directly to your country once again?

When well-intentioned journalists join in that effort of war glorification, they are called “embedded” journalists, or aren't you familiar with that term? The embedding is evidently ubiquitous, and occurs in all state-sponsorship. Awards received from state-power seem to have the uncanny power to corrupt and co-opt any commonsense. I admire that you and the majority of Iranian people and its leaders are not suffering from “Occidentosis” – the plague from the West which was prevalent during the Shah's insufferable regime, and which apparently still afflicts the tiny minority of Iranian “House Negroes” calling for “green revolution” and “regime change” – any longer. But to replace that with severe myopia is perhaps even more pathetic (and tragic).

Just for completeness of the tortuous empiricism noted in my comment above that “No modern war is holy, for its victims are always non-combatant civilians”, I quote the Israeli Military from their testimony in Rachel Corrie's court hearing:

'“During war there are no civilians,” that’s what “Yossi,” an Israeli military (IDF) training unit leader simply stated during a round of questioning on day two of the Rachel Corrie trials, held in Haifa’s District Court earlier this week. “When you write a [protocol] manual, that manual is for war,” he added.' -- Source: http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2010/09/201098123618465366.html

While the world is expressing its usual 15-seconds of shock at this cold admission, the world is also full of idle spectators' ooos, aahs, and boos as the case may be. This is a case of the latter. That statement however is empirical – and only the Chutzpah of the 'chosen peoples' permitted them to brazenly admit in court what is already known to everyone that “During war there are no civilians,” for they know that this isn't the Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, nor Adolf Eichmann's Trial in Jerusalem. The judge, jury, and executioners are all the same presiding over their own murderers – not victors over the vanquished.

But the empirical facts don't need the admission of the guilty, nor the verdict of the victor's court, to become fact.

The United States has itself killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, millions if we start counting from World War II and include the Allied fire-bombings of Japan and Germany culminating in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and tens of millions if we include all wars during the past 100 years, including the Iran-Iraq war, and now the 'War on Terror', count-em – the dead are mostly innocent civilians. The wars themselves, all of them as a dispassionate study indicates, were set-up by third parties who first created the antagonists, and then got them to kill each other according to pre-planned agendas. Inextricably caught in those man-made evil agendas, the poor victims are not made holy, nor their efforts to survive become holy.

The fact that this Iranian journalist has tried to whitewash the destruction of an entire generation of his own Iranian peoples as “holy”, and has not responded to my critique above, has left me no choice but to firmly conclude that he is indeed a state propagandist who, as Hitler had stated of every journalist in Mein Kampf (Vol. 1, Chapter X, http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200601.txt ), is “fundamentally a rogue who sometimes speaks the truth” – nothing more. What a shame....

Iran can perhaps survive its many traitors and uncle toms – all the flag-waiving regime-changers – but surely not its handful of fools in key places (nor its propagandists who believe their own lies).

Zahir Ebrahim Project Humanbeingsfirst.org