The execution of the Jewish leader and businessman Habib Elghanian (pictured) by Iran's Islamist regime 33 years ago was indeed an economic turning point, as his grand-daughter Shahrzad Elghanian argues in the Los Angeles Times. But as with the Iraqi regime's execution of the rich and prominent Shafik Ades in 1948, the killing of Elghanian was primarily a political act. The Islamist regime in Iran was signalling a symbolic break with the pro-Zionist policy of the Shah.
Imagine where the U.S. economy would be today if John Jacob Astor, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie or any of the magnates who helped turn America into an industrialized society had been gunned down by a revolutionary firing squad. In 1979, that is what happened in Iran to my grandfather, Habib Elghanian, Iran's most prominent Jewish industrialist and philanthropist. My grandfather's execution was not only a personal loss but a turning point for Iran.
His execution and the subsequent fleeing of businessmen from Iran contributed to derailing the country's chances of building a modern, diversified, export-based economy, and foreshadowed Iran's neglect of its most valuable resource: its people. Since the revolution in 1979, a new generation of Iranians has been left to foot the hefty losses caused by the Islamic Republic's hostility to independent businessmen, its fixation on oil, uranium and nuclear power and its cantankerous rhetoric against Israel.
In the months after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's return to Iran on Feb. 1, 1979, about 200 former high-ranking members of the shah's security forces, military and government were killed, many charged with "association with the shah's regime." That May, my grandfather was the first businessman to be executed. During a show trial that lasted no longer than 20 minutes, he was falsely charged with being a "Zionist spy" and a "corrupter on Earth." Newspaper stories and editorials around the world, including in the Los Angeles Times, carried the news of the execution of "Iran's plastics king."
My grandfather's crime, according to the prosecutor, was making financial contributions to Israel and meeting with Israeli politicians when they came to Iran or when he traveled to Israel — as was customary for leaders of the Jewish diaspora. He was the leader of Iran's 80,000 to 100,000 Jews in the 1960s and 1970s when Iran and Israel enjoyed peaceful, if not always cordial, relations under the shah. Not mentioned was how hard he had worked to form partnerships with Muslim and Armenian businessmen, how he had rehabilitated hospitals — including one in which injured revolutionaries were treated — and had funded charities to help poor schoolchildren and the elderly.
It didn't matter that even as members of the elite were fleeing the country with their money, my grandfather had returned to Iran from a brief visit to the U.S. and Israel in November 1978. "I have done nothing wrong; I'm going home," he said. The prosecutor instead focused on his contributions to Israel and concluded that made him "a friend of God's foes and a foe of God's friends."
My grandfather grew up poor. He began working in an uncle's hotel at 15, went on to become a merchant in a bazaar and later, along with his brothers, spent decades building factories, creating thousands of jobs, producing modestly priced goods for a growing middle class and laying the foundations for an Iranian export industry.
For 30 years, the family played a pioneering role in Iran's modernization and industrialization, building the first high-rise and shopping arcades in Iran. An aluminum factory manufactured household goods including refrigerators, and a plastics factory mass-produced simple consumer products never before made in Iran.
Iran is merely the tip of the spear. Muslim nations in the Maghreb or West Asia historically don't care what happens to their own countries or the people in them. They don't typically see them even as countries at all. Mostly they are artificial collections of tribes clans and ethnicities who have been raping and murdering each other for hundreds of years or more. The Ayatollahs never worried if Iran economically imploded just as Egypt today is falling off a cliff and no one worries about it as long as they can scream for the death of all Jews everywhere. Then they're all happy. So it goes across most of that part of the world. There's a few foreign car factories here and there, a few foreign expats running the industries. And in the case of the oil states, few of them employ their own people to do that either. They simply pump money out of the ground, hire some Africans and Bangladeshis, treat them almost like slaves why they sit home doing whatever it is they do all day. The Arab world is going to have to create hundreds of millions of jobs in the next generation just to keep up with their own population explosion. And this will occur just at the time that oil peters out AND the Islamist maniacs decide that women can't work or go to school, infidels must be exterminated and no one can do business with the outside world.
ReplyDeleteSounds like a plan to me. I can't wait.