Amir Taheri re-writes history again

Now:

This is not the first time Taheri has been associated with a media controversy. In May 2006, the Canadian daily The National Post published an article by him on the significance of Iran's having passed a law to impose an Islamic dress code.

"I speculated about what they were then going to do about religious minorities," Taheri explained to Jerusalem Post editors. "Then I went back to history - how Jews were distinguished; how Christians were distinguished; how Zoroastrians were distinguished. The Canadian paper presented this as a news story - as though it had already happened [as though Jews were going to be forced to wear the equivalent of the Nazi-imposed yellow star] - and everyone started attacking me [for giving false information]. It was really a big, big misunderstanding."

Then, in his own words:

"The law … envisages separate dress codes for religious minorities, Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians, who will have to adopt distinct colour schemes to make them identifiable in public. The new codes would enable Muslims to easily recognize non-Muslims so that they can avoid shaking hands with them by mistake, and thus becoming najis (unclean)…

Although the final shape of the uniforms is yet to be established, there is consensus on a number of points… Religious minorities would have their own colour schemes. They will also have to wear special insignia, known as zonnar, to indicate their non-Islamic faiths. Jews would be marked out with a yellow strip of cloth sewn in front of their clothes while Christians will be assigned the colour red. Zoroastrians end up with Persian blue as the colour of their zonnar."

The National Post doesn't deserve a pass for their credulity, but they got out of Taheri's article exactly what he intended them to. This was a stunningly blatant neo-con psy-op, as The Nation revealed.