Flag Burning Festivities In Tehran
This is a great time of year. Crisp, sunny afternoons, outdoor festivals, the happy company of family and friends. I’m describing, of course, the festive atmosphere of a nice autumn anti-Israel rally in Tehran, Iran.
I kid you not. Thousands of Iranians, young and old alike, gather in the streets to burn Israeli, and occasionally American flags, and otherwise have a good time. It’s hard for Westerners to grasp the day’s theme of hatred as descriptive of a good time, but then again, we’re just not as comfortable yet with overt demonstrations of hatred.
Ramita Navai, a correspondent for The Times (UK) described the scene almost as a Sunday in the park here in America. "It’s a bit like a family day out, but with cursory outbreaks of flag burning. There are people sitting on picnic blankets, street-vendors and people selling balloons… there’s a kind of carnival atmosphere."
And then there’s plenty of activities for the kids. Navai describes one, "… I walked past one stand where people were writing messages on a flag to send to Palestine. There was a girl there, she can’t have been older than 5, and she had just signed her name below a message reading ‘Death to Israel, death to America."
But does that mean that most Iranians are calling for Israeli heads to roll? According to Navai, that’s not the case, "The majority of ordinary Iranians don’t really care about Israel - they have enough to worry about at home with a declining economy and high unemployment."
However, Tony Blankley, the editorial page editor at The Washington Times, takes a more analytical view of the situation, "Radical currents within Islam drive some Muslims to terrorism and push others at least to a more adversarial view of their relationship to non-Muslim nations and cultures…"
And Navai, perhaps inadvertently, bolsters Blankley’s claim. In describing the average Iranian’s reaction to their President’s verbal attacks on Israel, he says, "Nevertheless, Iranians are really quite puzzled by the reaction to the President’s comments. To them it’s nothing that they don’t hear at every Friday prayers."