Wednesday, November 10, 2004

Anti-Arab?

I don’t know how many people are part of, have seen or heard of “Orkut”, For those who haven’t, this is simply a networking website with some new features and cool design offered by Google. One Can create his/her profile, upload pictures, add friends, look for old friends, create communities and invite others with common interest to be part of, write testimonials, become ones fan and etc. You can have a profile inside Orkut only if one member invites you to. There are thousands if not millions of people on there, I my self have about 150 friends on my list and have joined several communities such as “any one but Bush!!”, “Forough Farokhzad” The Iranian poet and etc, today however I was invited to a rather disturbing community created by some fellow Iranians called: “Anti Arab Iranians” and some extremely fascist and racist comments were posted by the owner and unfortunately and NOT surprisingly, over 1000 Iranians had joined the community. Apart from the fact that Google perhaps has some responsibilities here to remove communities that promote hatred but I like to talk about/address Iranians who create such a non sense and who joined it. Is it a shock that some people express the feeling of hate for Arabs in Iranian community? NO, we all know the historic backgrounds of this story, The great Persian empire being attack by Arabs 1400 years ago and we were forced to become Muslim but we never gave up our own language and culture..blah blah blah.. or more new ones such as: Iraq invasion to Iran and the support of the Arab leaders was thrown behind Sadam Hossein , claims over our land by UAE ,Islamic Republic’s extreme pro Palestinian policy that has hurt Iran’s national interest and etc.., But lets pick another country, Britain for instance, interfering with Iran’s politics since 200 years ago, separating Afghanistan from Iran, occupying the country along with Russians in 1941, taking our oil for 60 years almost free, organizing a coup deta’ against the only democratic and nationalist Prime Minister(Mosadeq) in 1953, Supporting Sadam… the list goes one guys, but does that mean we should hate all British people? Don’t get me wrong I my self would suggest an aggressive and offensive policy toward Arab leaders to protect our national interest, but how in the world is all this aANY justification for such fascism against people of Arab race? Do we have any idea how damaging to our reputation would such approach be? How could we possibly hate normal people that are victims of dictatorship themselves and have no role in the policies of their leaders? I hope people who created that community on Orkut would pull is down and if not Google should act, as an Iranian I am ashamed of this action.