Kurds May Help Bring Down Iran’s Regime

 

By Henry Srebrnik, Fredericton Daily Gleaner

There are some 40-45 million Kurds worldwide, mostly clustered as minorities in geographically contiguous border areas of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria; of these, some 10-12 million live in Iran, bordering Iraq and Turkey. They comprise some 20 per cent of Iran’s population. They are the largest people in the Middle East without a state of their own.

For decades the Islamic republic has warned that the Kurds seek to break Iran apart, and those accusations have seeped into the national consciousness. The founder of the Islamic State, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, called the Kurds secessionists. They had become his most indomitable opposition. Being Sunni Muslims, they also undermined the uniformly Shi’ite universe he envisioned for Iran.

By the 1980s, the regime had arrested, imprisoned, or executed most of the leadership of Iran’s political movements. Yet the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (KDPI), despite the blows it had suffered, survived as a clandestine but intact political organization.

Its leader, Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou, was a charismatic polyglot with a doctorate in economics and political science from the University of Prague. At the conclusion of the Iran-Iraq war in 1988, a weakened Tehran feared for its survival. Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for his murder. He was assassinated in Vienna in 1989.

Over the decades, ordinary Kurds have suffered disproportionately high numbers of imprisonments and executions in Iran. Now the Kurds once again face the prospect of leading the fight against the regime. Many have already begun readying themselves for that possibility.

Since the 2003 Gulf war, when Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime was destroyed, Iraqi Kurds have governed their own de facto state in northern Iraq. As the American-Israeli attack on Iran began in late February, President Donald Trump on March 1 phoned the two leaders of the Iraqi Kurdish autonomous government, longtime rivals Bafel Jalal Talabani and Masoud Barzani.

Talabani has traditionally been aligned with Tehran, while Barzani has long been considered a CIA asset. Observers believe that Trump offered them arms and funds if they initiated attacks on Iran’s Kurdish-populated border provinces, with American or perhaps Israeli air cover.

Iranian ballistic missiles and drones have landed in or near the northern Iraqi city of Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, targeting American or Israeli military assets as well as in the Peshmerga (Kurdish Iraqi military) camps. But neither Talabani nor even Barzani is likely to want to send Iraqi Kurdish troops to fight in Iran unless the Islamist regime is clearly on the verge of collapse. Last year, the Iraqi Kurds had signed an agreement with Tehran to protect the border with Iran against the entry of hostile elements into the Islamic Republic.

But on Feb. 22, nearly a week before the U.S. and Israel launched their joint military strikes, five Iranian Kurdish opposition parties announced they’d formed a unified front against Tehran. The press conference in Erbil generated little attention at the time. But as the war has continued, and the regime’s military forces grew depleted, the Kurdish regions of the country are voicing their intent to be the first to formally break from Tehran.

Mohammad Nazif Qadri, a member of the executive committee of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI), stated that the alliance was established under the name Alliance of Political Forces of Iranian Kurdistan. The PDKI has fought an intermittent insurgency against Tehran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. They supported the nationwide protests across Iran in January and organized a general strike across 39 cities and towns in Iranian Kurdistan.

The other four members are the Free Life Party of Kurdistan (PJAK), the Kurdistan Freedom Party (PAK), the Komala of the Toilers of Kurdistan, and the Organization of Iranian Kurdistan Struggle (Sazmani Khabat). PJAK, the coalition's most formidable military component, accounted for an estimated 70 per cent of all Kurdish attacks on Iranian forces between 2014 and 2025. PAK claimed strikes on Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) positions in January.

They have been using their safe haven in Northern Iraq to enter Iran and expand into regions no longer under Iranian military or IRGC control. They think the scale of the American and Israeli strikes on Iranian government targets in these outer provinces, including Iranian Kurdistan, will eventually force Tehran to pull back.

“We believe there will be a vacuum of power in Iran and Kurdistan. So the Kurdish forces are preparing to enter Kurdistan, to fill the vacuum of power there,” declared Taimoor Aliassi, Executive Director and UN Representative of Kurdistan Human Rights-Geneva (KMMK-G) and President of the Impact Iran Coalition. But, as Baba Sheikh Hosseini, the secretary general of Sazmani Khabat, explained, “It’s not possible for one minority to remove the Iranian regime.”

 

 

A Christian Debate About Israel

 By Henry Srebrnik, Jewish Post, Winnipeg

The Western neo-Marxist attacks on Israel, in league with Islamism, are of course a grave political and military danger, but their ideology can be rebuked by anyone with the slightest knowledge of actual history. “Jesus was a Palestinian”? “Israelis are white settler-colonialists”? These are almost jokes.

Such people don’t even know that the Zionist movement in fact rejected what was called “territorialism,” the project to build a Jewish homeland anywhere – in Argentina, western Australia, and elsewhere in the world. This included the so-called “Uganda Proposal” in east Africa, which was voted down at a World Zionist Congress in 1905.

Another territorialist plan, pushed by Communists in the 1920s, was for a Jewish Autonomous Region in the Soviet Union known as Birobidzhan. This came to fruition but ended up a complete failure. Jews were not interested in places outside their ancestral homeland, the land of Israel.

Antisemitic rhetoric today appears on the progressive left in rhetoric that casts Zionism as malevolence, but also on the populist right in conspiratorial language about hidden power and divided loyalty, some harkening back to religious language we though was long gone.

The left’s arguments are shallow and, while extremely concerning, are fallacious. But the theological debates on the right are more alarming, because they will affect America’s relations with Israel. They go right back to genuine issues regarding the place of Jews and Christians in their respective religious worldviews and interactions. They are at the heart of “everything” in western history.

So-called Christian Zionism, found particularly in Protestant theology, sees the creation of Israel as part of God’s plan to hasten the coming of Jesus as the messiah at end times. Obviously, this is not congruent with our understanding of the messianic age, but politically it has been largely beneficial to Israel.

There is a deeper theological divide separating Catholics and evangelicals, the latter among the Jewish state’s most fervent supporters. Evangelicals tend to see Israel as the fulfillment of God’s pledge to the Jewish people, and they view that fulfillment as intertwined with their own religious identity. In contrast, most Catholics do not believe they have a theological obligation to support Israel.

Classical Christian antisemitism (really, anti-Judaism) is rooted in two propositions: that Jews bear the guilt for Christ’s death, and that when the majority of Jews rejected Jesus (who was a Jew, as were all his early apostles), God replaced the covenant with the children of Abraham with a new covenant, with Christians. This idea of a new bond that excludes the Jewish people is called “supersessionism” or “replacement theology.”

It consists of the claim that the Church has replaced the Jewish people as God’s covenanted, or chosen, people. According to supersessionism, Jesus inaugurated a new conception of “Israel,” one open to all, Gentile as well as Jew, because it was predicated on faith rather than the rejected markers of biological descent and observance of the law.

The Roman Catholic Church modified this stance with its historic document Nostra Aetate, promulgated in 1965 at the Second Vatican Council. It expressed some recognition of the Jews’ special relationship with the God of Israel. Though the statement recounts the fact that most Jews did not “accept the Gospel,” it also declares that “God holds the Jews most dear for the sake of their fathers.”

This has been further elaborated. Pope John Paul II said that the Catholic Church has “a relationship” with Judaism “which we do not have with any other religion.” He also said that Judaism is “intrinsic” and not “extrinsic” to Christianity, and that Jews were Christians’ “elder brothers” in the faith.

Pope Benedict XVI explicitly rejected the idea that the Jewish people “ceased to be the bearer of the promises of God.” The Catholic Church states that “The Old Testament is an indispensable part of Sacred Scripture. Its books are divinely inspired and retain a permanent value, for the Old Covenant has never been revoked.”

But now we see some of those earlier positions re-emerging, and not just among antisemites like Tucker Carlson. This is troubling and should not be ignored. On Jan. 17, for example, the Patriarchs and Heads of the Churches of Jerusalem, an assembly of Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox leaders, released a statement referring to Christian Zionism as a “damaging” ideology.

The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles, a Catholic commentator with more than two million YouTube subscribers, released a video in which he reiterated the older position on Israel: “I don’t think that the Jews are entitled to the Holy Land because of some religious premise. I don’t think that’s true. In fact, being Christian, I believe the Old Testament is fulfilled in the New Testament; Christ is the new covenant.” Catholics are not supposed to believe that Jews have a divine right to the Holy Land because, Knowles stated, Jews do not enjoy God’s favour and are not in fact God’s people any longer.

 As Liel Leibovitz, editor-at-large for the website Tablet Magazine, cautions, in “Letter to a Catholic Friend,” published Feb. 16, “What happens if good men and women don’t take up the fight and vociferously reject” such comments? “What starts with the fringes soon takes over the supposed mainstream.” For Jews, for Israel, and for America, that would be an unmitigated disaster.