Iran’s Crazy Colour-Coded Catastrophe
First the Holocaust, then Egypt's National ID Cards, and now.. a calamity of colourful (and cataclysmic) proportions.
You haven’t the foggiest notion what I’m talking about, have you.
Well, consider this: To begin with, Hitler made Jews wear a Star of David, to easier identify them for his devious, “experimental” and genocidal purposes.
Then—and I have no idea just when it started—the Egyptian government put “Christian” and “Muslim” on National ID Cards, making it that much easier for systematic and legalised discrimination against Christians to take place in Egypt (check out a satirical take on “The Way Things Are in Egypt” if you don’t believe me, at http://sallybishai.blogspot.com/2006/05/what-are-copts-doing-in-egypt.html ).
Moving on, however, and focusing our attention something that’s happened in 2006, a year that positions Blackberrys and iPods and laptops as “the basic minimum” of technology, we now turn our attention to something that happened very recently.
It was only this week, actually, that the laughable (but not at all funny) and not-so-new notion of religious identifiers in a less-than-tolerant atmosphere was brought up again, this time in Iran, where their Parliament passed a new law that would “force the country's Jews, Christians and other religious minorities to wear color-coded ID badges...[including] a yellow strip of cloth to their [Jews’] clothing,” as well as the fact that “Christians would wear red badges and Zoroastrians would wear blue ones,” while all people “got to” don what the law dubbed “standard Islamic garments,” which I guess means “a black tent with a panel of additional fabric that covers the face.”
(From http://www.upi.com/InternationalIntelligence/view.php?StoryID=20060519-105912-5198r )
I had more to say about this fracas, but I’ve actually grown very depressed at the state of the world in the past 24 hours, and shall, thus, refrain from saying anything until this indigo funk lifts from my being..
You haven’t the foggiest notion what I’m talking about, have you.
Well, consider this: To begin with, Hitler made Jews wear a Star of David, to easier identify them for his devious, “experimental” and genocidal purposes.
Then—and I have no idea just when it started—the Egyptian government put “Christian” and “Muslim” on National ID Cards, making it that much easier for systematic and legalised discrimination against Christians to take place in Egypt (check out a satirical take on “The Way Things Are in Egypt” if you don’t believe me, at http://sallybishai.blogspot.com/2006/05/what-are-copts-doing-in-egypt.html ).
Moving on, however, and focusing our attention something that’s happened in 2006, a year that positions Blackberrys and iPods and laptops as “the basic minimum” of technology, we now turn our attention to something that happened very recently.
It was only this week, actually, that the laughable (but not at all funny) and not-so-new notion of religious identifiers in a less-than-tolerant atmosphere was brought up again, this time in Iran, where their Parliament passed a new law that would “force the country's Jews, Christians and other religious minorities to wear color-coded ID badges...[including] a yellow strip of cloth to their [Jews’] clothing,” as well as the fact that “Christians would wear red badges and Zoroastrians would wear blue ones,” while all people “got to” don what the law dubbed “standard Islamic garments,” which I guess means “a black tent with a panel of additional fabric that covers the face.”
(From http://www.upi.com/InternationalIntelligence/view.php?StoryID=20060519-105912-5198r )
I had more to say about this fracas, but I’ve actually grown very depressed at the state of the world in the past 24 hours, and shall, thus, refrain from saying anything until this indigo funk lifts from my being..
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