Maurice Motamed

Maurice Motamed, the lone Jewish MP in Iran's parliament, has the world's most thankless job, but he, bless him, is doing what he can as an Iranian patriot, with his integrity intact:

"When our president spoke about the Holocaust, I considered it my duty as a Jew to speak about this issue," Mr Motamed said in his office in central Tehran. "The biggest disaster in human history is based on tens of thousands of films and documents. I said these remarks are a big insult to the whole Jewish society in Iran and the whole world."

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Although he took on Mr Ahmadinejad over the Holocaust, Mr Motamed supports the president on other issues, including the stand-off with the US, Europe and Israel over the country's nuclear programme. "I am an Iranian first and a Jew second," he said.

He acknowledged there were problems with being a Jew in Iran, as there were for the country's other minorities. But he said that Iran was relatively tolerant. "There is no pressure on the synagogues, no problems of desecration. I think the problem in Europe is worse than here. There is a lot of anti-semitism in other countries." (Ewen MacAskill, Simon Tisdall, and Robert Tait, "Iran's Jews Learn to Live with Ahmadinejad," The Guardian, 27 June 2006)

According to Nasser Hadian-Jazy, a friend of the President's, Ahmadinejad promised to "do something to show he is not anti-Jewish. . . . He will make a gesture to the Jews in Iran and that has implications for Jews elsewhere" (MacAskill, Tisdall, and Tait, 27 June 2006). Whatever he has in mind, it had better be good. What about ending the exclusion of Jews and other minorities from "'sensitive' senior posts in the military and judiciary" (MacAskill, Tisdall, and Tait, 27 June 2006)?