On the Violence Against Baha’is: A violence against language
By george wesley dannells on Mar 6, 2009 in All categories, Persecution
Thus in the linguistic code of Najafabadi, freedom of belief means this: 
We will kill you if we become aware of your belief! …
The despots of the world are always disturbed by enhancement of communication and discourse in society. They survive under censorship, intimidation of the progressive forces and silencing of the voices of reason and progress in society. …
Najafabadi’s statement is the same statement which was made by the Athenian officials who killed Socrates. He was accused by the reactionary forces of corrupting the minds of youth and disturbing the public mind. …
Najafabadi’s court is the return of the medieval Spanish inquisition court in the 21st century. …
Najafabadi’s statement demonstrates the bankruptcy of the ideology that he tries to defend: What he is really saying is that despite 30 years of monopolistic attack against the Baha’is by all media, all educational institutions, and all political and economic resources, and despite thirty years of complete exclusion of Baha’i discourse from the public realm, still the reactionaries are afraid of even a private whisper of Baha’i ideas. …
What the statement of the attorney general really means is that despite many years of constant surveillance of these seven Baha’is, controlling all their activities, communications, and connections, they have found not a single shred of evidence for any espionage activity. …
The political creation of this image of the Baha’is as the “cultural other” of Iranian society, portraying it as a stranger within our borders, an enemy inside, began by the fabrication of the so called “Political Memoirs of Kiniaz Dolgoruki” in 1943. … All non-Baha’i scholars who have examined its contents have testified that it is a forgery. …
The fact is that for 30 years the reactionaries of Iran have examined all Baha’i documents that they have confiscated from all Baha’i institutions; for thirty years, they have examined all the shredded documents of the American embassy; for thirty years they have examined all the documents of Savak; for thirty years they have put all Baha’i activities under surveillance; and for thirty years, they have penetrated the Baha’i community through Hojjatiyyih spies, and yet despite all these they could not find any empirical evidence for their accusations against the Baha’i community. …
Yet the reactionaries have their own linguistic code. By entering that code of distortion, words change their meanings and turn into their opposites. …
How can the reactionaries systematically violate all the civil rights of the Baha’is while pretending that they respect and enforce religious freedom? The answer is surprisingly simple. They arbitrarily devise a new language, one in which the Baha’i Faith is not called a “religion.” …
Najafabadi states that the Iranian government has always encouraged a “loving” treatment of the Baha’is. … From now on, “love” has a new definition and meaning. Loving a person now means insulting his sacred beliefs by allavailable means, “teachers” brutally humiliating his children in front of other students, calling him najes (impure), thus boycotting any friendship, communication and interaction with him, chastising him as an apostate, an infidel, and a member of a misguided and misguiding sect, invading his house, burning the corpse of his parents and relatives, firing him first from all governmental jobs and then from various private jobs, cutting his retirement salary, even killing his livestock and burning his harvest. …
http://www.iranpresswatch.org/2009/03/language-violence/
Dr. Saiedi notes that even the Qu’ran condemns the perversion of language. -gw
Photo: “The Qu’ran,” Uploaded on December 2, 2007 by wjhe on flickr, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic
Recently Iran’s attorney general, Dorri Najafabadi, has made different statements about the trial of the seven Baha’is. Although these statements all contradict each other, there is a common point running through them all. In all his assertions, violence against the Baha’is is merged with violence against language. This is not surprising. Humans are defined by their capacity to speak, and thus violence against the Baha’is – which is nothing but the medieval worldview of apostasy, ritual impurity, censorship, discrimination, superstition, and therefore a process of dehumanization – necessarily entails a systematic violence against language. Words are systematically abused and distorted and their meanings are reversed and perverted. This is incidentally the same perversion of language (tahrif) that the Qur’an has frequently condemned. In this short discussion I address seven examples of such distortion, examples that represent the essence of Najafabadi’s words.
