On 10 December, 250 Basij students from Abu Ali Sina University in the Iranian city of Hamedan gathered in front of the mausoleum of two Jewish saints and threatened to tear it down, in revenge for what the students claimed were Israeli threats to infringe on the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.
The graves are those of Esther and Mordechai. Esther was the second wife of Xerxes I (the Great) (486-465BCE, also known as Khashayarsha in Persian), the fourth Zoroastrian king of the Achamenid Empire. Esther was a Jew who moved to Persia after the Babylonian captivity of the Israelites (6th century BCE). King Xerxes also appointed Mordechai, who was Esther's cousin and had raised her, as a royal court adviser. The king's vizier, Haman, plotted to kill Mordechai, who refused to bow down to Haman, and all the Jews of Persia. That plan was foiled and King Xerxes, who wanted to protect his country's Jews, hanged Haman and his 10 sons instead.
Since then, every year on the 14th day in the Hebrew calendar month of Adar, Jews everywhere celebrate the deliverance of Persia's Jews from death. Children and adults go to synagogues and read the Book of Esther all over the world, including in Iran.
The hostile act of tearing down part of the tomb is unprecedented in the modern history of Iran, as graves of Jewish saints in Iran (which also include Daniel) have always been considered holy and respected by Jews and Muslims alike. In fact, many Muslim families go to such graves to pray for the health of their loved ones, alongside their Jewish compatriots.
Even more worrying is the revisionism of Jewish history flourishing in Iran under the government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The narrative being promoted by this regime is that it was Mordechai who was a murderer because he ordered the massacre of more than 70,000 Iranians. This is being called an "Iranian holocaust".
The eminent Oxford University Professor Homa Katouzian, in his book Sadeq Hedayat: His Work and His Wondrous World, traces this fabrication back to an article published in Iran-e Bastan in 1934. According to Professor Katouzian, this publication, "imitating German antisemitism, fabricated sensational reports of Jewish plots". Not only did this publication reverse the facts in the story of Esther and Mordechai but it also, among other things, distributed reports that Jews were "selling fatal medicine to Muslims". One of the goals of such articles was to emphasise and promote what it saw as the Aryan roots and historical commonality between Iran and Nazi Germany. Such false reports provided the foundation for anti-Jewish Islamist campaigns in the 1940s.
For years afterwards, no one took notice of such antisemitic material, let alone promoted it. This has all changed since Ahmadinejad took power in 2005. These days one can hear about the fabricated and highly anti-Jewish "Iranian holocaust" from Iranian politicians.
This was seen in September this year. Hussein Kanaani Moghadam, secretary general of the Green party (a separate party – not related to Mousavi or Karroubi) and a member of the
central committee of the Osulgarayan coalition, stated in an interview: "According to what is said in the Torah, in the time of Khashayarshah (Xerxes), through Esther and Mordechai, Jews were told that they had three days to kill Iranians and it is said that 75,000 Iranian women, children, old and young were massacred by them."
Kanaani Moghadam's fabrication of history did not end there. In order to give a historical basis to this antisemitic belief, he tried to intertwine it with a distortion of Iran's pre-Islamic Zoroastrian history. "In their Iranian Killing festival, which is celebrated in the Persian month of Esfand, they [Jews] read the book of Esther. One of the reasons Iranians leave their homes every year on the 13th day of Farvardin (called Sizdah be dar in Persian) is that on this day the order to kill Iranians was given and, in order to escape from this massacre, the people of Iran took refuge in the countryside."
A similar narrative is also being printed and promoted in Iran's press. The Tehran-based Farda News is one such publication. In an article, as well as promoting the "Iranian holocaust", it tells global Jewry: "Those Jews who accuse Hitler of burning them should look for the real holocaust in their own dark history."