“Persian” is an ethnicity, and not all Iranians are Persians. In fact, only a slight majority of Iranians are Persians. Many are Azeris (IIRC, about 15%) and about 10% are Kurds, among many other ethnic groups.
Yes, but I do not think this distinction is the reason these ex-pats prefer to be called “Persian”.
Interestingly, at least according to Wiki, the term “Iran” originally derived from the label of an ethnicity.
I’m not sure why Fouad Kazem is not considered a reliable source while wikipedia is.
That said why are you accusing him of promoting a “conspiracy theory type meme”?
He’s hardly anti-Iranian, but is a respected journalist for Iranian.com, a respectable journal of the Iranian-American community.
Wikipedia can be good or bad, and you can decide that by how any given article is cited. However, I have not mentioned wikipedia in this thread, and I’m not claiming it as a legit cite in this instance.
Because of the weasel words the guy uses, note the underlined:
“Iran is said to have come from the Persian ambassador to Germany, who was a Nazi sympathizer. In 1935 Germany was ruled by Hitler. Aryanism was equated by the Nazis as the highest level of human civilization, in an article of faith based on a vulgar Hegelian hyperbola. Apparently the Persian ambassador was persuaded by his Nazi friends that Persia would be better off as an ally of Nazi Germany.”
No source, it is just “said”. “Said” by whom?
Now, this guy may sincerely believe he is correct, but he’s not a historian and that cite gives no primary sources as to the legitimacy of the claim.
You’'l have to explain to me how Iraq could have used the facility for the production of nuke material without the French noticing it. Osirak was not designed to produce nuke material. From what I’ve read, it was explicitly designed not to be able to be geared towards military purpose.
But, let’s entertain your fantasy and say it could.
How in hell would they have been able to do that without anyone directly involved in the running of the facility noticing it, will be your contribution to this SF story.
Actually wikipedia should usually be considered complete shit, but you’re right, you hadn’t cited it so I was wrong to respond in such a way.
He may not technically be a historian, but Ehsan Yarshater, the founder of the Center for Iranian Studies and the Hagop Kevorkian Professor Emeritus of Iranian Studies at Columbia University certainly is.
http://www.iranchamber.com/geography/articles/persia_became_iran.php
Sorry for my earlier reaction, but mentioning that the Shah requested his country be referred to as Iran to curry favor with Hitler, that the Shah was pro-Nazi, and that he was overthrown by the British are simply not controversial subjects amongst Iranian-Americans, hence my reaction to several of the people questioning this.
You were dramatically politer and more reasonable so I should not have responded as harshly as I did.
Apologies.
Then your research abilities leave much to be desired.
So far you’ve based your knowledge and understanding of Iran on wikipedia articles(which does little to help your credibility) but failed to notice that that the same wiki articles you’ve apparently based your beliefs on say
To me the real SF story is that Iraq had, in the middle of a horrible war, a burning need to conduct “peaceful nuclear research”. Presumably, future Iraqi Einsteins were brutaly thwarted by the inexplicable Israeli action, and many fundamental Iraqi contributions to science were prevented. 
But I note that you also seemingly don’t believe this fairy tale - you would rather substitute for it the notion that the plant was entirely pointless in and of itself, but merely designed to get the French involved in future collaboration.
As for extracting fissile material “without anyone at the facility noticing it”, why would that even be necessary? Surely co-opting them would be easier. If Iraq can apparently co-opt the French government into building this “pointless” facility, a few technicians ought to be a piece of cake.
In short, I am of the opinion that the French gov’t knew full well why the Iraqis wanted the plant. They would have to be fools not to. They had turned down other Iraqi offers as being too obvious on their face, and insisted (on paper) on reams of prohibitions which absolutely, positively stated the plant was not for nukes - protesting rather too much.
OK then. So if Israel has the right to pre-emptively make war against a state for verbal threats and rhetoric, then Middle Eastern Arabs have a right to perform terrorist acts and wage war against Israel, whether in retaliation to your proposed “threat elimination”, or simply in response to Israel’s actual UN-sanctioned dispossession of, and refusal to provide right of return to, the people formerly residing on their land who were pushed out beginning in 1947.
Views like yours are why I’m opposed to Zionism and thank god for the Finklestein’s of the world.
No, I’ve based my knowledge and understanding of Iran on just the quick google I did earlier, and the article you’re quoting now is totally different than the article on Iran. I never saw that quote before, and neither did you until it was posted in this thread.
My research abilities are excellent. You are the one who is making comments outside of most people’s scope of knowledge and then getting pissy about having to link to actual factual cites so the rest of us can learn what you already “know”.
Ibn Warraq’s point about the pro-Nazi tendencies of Reza Shah are uncontroversial. After 1932-1933 in particular where there was upheaval surrounding the re-negotiation of oil rights with Britain, there was a distinct backing off from the earlier relationship with Great Britain and the increasing development of closer ties with Germany. This was initially motivated by economic tensions and Germany would eventually displace Britain as the primary European trade partner by 1939 ( until 1941 ).
But there was eventually a real ideological/political penetration as well. Reza, an ardent nationalist and authoritarian, was receptive to pro-Nazi ideology which emphasized the common “Aryanness” of the two nations and validated Iranian views of themselves as racially superior to the Arabs and others. It is probably going a bridge too far to call him an actual Nazi, but German ideological wooing is also uncontroversial. I can cite Nikki Keddie and others if need be on the topic.
So a notion that Reza changed the official name of the country to Iran in part to strengthen ties with the Nazis is not necessarily absurd on the face of it. However…
I haven’t run across an academic work in English that makes that claim and though I’m not that exhaustively read on 1930’s Iran, you think I would have. It’s a juicy tidbit of true. But there are plenty of references to “Iran” as a national name both in Europe and in Iran itself prior to 1935. The racial theorist Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, notorious for his influence on Nazi racial ideology, was quite fascinated by Iran and referred to it by that name in his Trois ans en Asie ( de 1855 à 1858 ) several times ( the text is available online ). In Iran itself in the late 19th century early native nationalist writers like Mirza Fath Ali Akhundzadeh and following him Mirza Khan Kermani were using terms like mellat-e Iran ( nation of Iran ) and mellat-e Aryan ( nation of the Aryans ), respectively. In the opening years of the 20th century, a decade before Reza Khan came to power in the 1920’s, the native nationalist Society for the Progress of Iran ( Jam 'iyat-e taraqqi khahana-e Iran ) came into existence and spent a fair bit of time bleating about Iran and “Iranianess.” In 1933, two years before the name change, local history textbooks like those by Abbas Eqbal Ashtiyani were using the word and promoting a racially supremacist-tinged history of the glories of “Old Iran.”
So this had been an on-going evolution, to be sure influenced by 19th century European Iranophile racialist writers like Gobineau and Ernest Renan, who provided intellectual validation for notions of Iranian racial superiority and nationalism. Nazism was not needed and pro-Nazi sympathies were hardly necessary to explain the name change. Indeed Nazism and Iranianism, to coin a word, grew from parallel roots. In Iran it was all part of the same nationalist and frankly racist trend towards ethnic homogenization that had been an intellectual strain in Iran for nearly a century. In the same year Reza Shah changed the name, he opened the linguistic academy Farhangestan to purify Farsi of foreign accretions and promote Persian literary development.
Given the context, while I don’t necessarily dismiss the idea that Reza Shah may have thought the name change might have been politically beneficial to his relations with Nazi Germany, I’m unconvinced that was a primary reason for it. I suspect its a tad more likely that story about the ambassador is apocryphal, though I wouldn’t want to argue about it. It could be true, at least in part - stranger things have happened in history.
I’ll note that the above names and details are mostly taken from the paper The Evolving Polemic of Iranian Nationalism by Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet in Iran and the Surrounding World: Interaction in Culture and Cultural Politics ed. by Nikki R. Keddie and Rudi Matthee ( 2002, University of Washington Press ).
From the looks of it, Fouad Kazem is a plagiarist. These are almost the exact same words as his article used, and even include no citations, just weasel words.
Compare:
So now we add plagiarism to the mix of unsupported contentions. Do you have any factual cites you could add to this so the discussion can move on?
Have you ever heard of Israel vowing, threatening, suggesting or even contemplating wiping out Palestinians?
Actually I have no argument with the Palestinians doing what they can to regain their homeland. Its just that their terrorism approach so utterly futile and counter productive. To be honest with myself though. I’ll just have to admit that I’m on Israel’s side because they are more like westerners and do behave more like a democratic and plural society and their very survival is hard fought.
Iran however has no direct stake in Israel or the Palestinian quest.
Okay, but who did Yarshater plagarize ?
I have to admit being floored by the arrogance of someone who admits that his knowledge of Iran is limited to “a quick google search” implying that the director of the Center for Iranian Studies and a Chair of Iranian Studies at Columbia isn’t a valid source.
I don’t know whether it’s better described as hysterical or pathetic.
Mutually assured destruction! Are you the reincarnation of Reagan?
Say what? Reagan hardly originated the idea; it’s a pretty straightforward consequence of both sides in a conflict having nukes. Although in this case it’s not really MAD; I’m pretty sure that America would nuke Iran if Iran nuked Israel. Since America wouldn’t be destroyed that’s not MAD.
Oh please.
Why should we accept the word of one of the most distinguished scholars on Iranian history in the US when we can accept the word of an American who doesn’t even know how to say “Good morning” in Farsi and who’s knowledge of Iran consists of a single, lazy, extremely limited google search.
Please, this is America!
We don’t trust any of those Ivory Tower intellectuals with their book learning.
Or because “Persian” sounds cooler. A “Persian,” that could be a guy with cool hair, dark and graceful and exotic, steeped in the wisdom and mysteries of the ancient Near East. Elaborate carpets are Persian, beautiful overbred cats are Persian . . . An “Iranian” is just some cranky towelhead with hemorrhoids. 
It’s not controversial as a matter of historical fact, but I’d say it’s controversial to bring it up in the context of the present government of Iran threatening Israel.
The name change occurred in 1935, years before the death camps, years before the invasion of Poland, and even years before Krystallnacht, so it is wrong to imply that has anything to do with present-day anti-Semitism. I can think of several European nations with a much richer history of anti-Semitism, including jolly old England.
And siding with Germany during the war was just realpolitik. You might as well call Obama a commie because the US sided with the Soviet Union during WWII.
But if you are a native Iranian, maybe you can clear something up. Juan Cole, among others, has said that Ahmadinejad is being mistranslated in the often repeated (including this thread) quote about wiping out Israel. They say he was not talking about killing everyone in Israel, but merely restoring control of it to Palestinians, i.e. wiping it off the map just means changing its name and government, with former Israeli Jews becoming future Palestinian Jews.
Can you comment on this?