Anti-Iranian sentiment
The word "ʻajam" is derived from the root ʻ-J-M and refers to "unclear, vague and/or incomprehensible" as opposed to "ʻarabi", which means "clear, understandable; with perfect Arabic tongue".
Ali immediately retorted, "While fat Arabs rest in soft beds, the Iranians work hard on the hottest days to please God with their efforts.
Other prominent Pan-Arabists were Michel Aflaq and Khairallah Talfah, as well as Sati' al-Husri, Salah al-Din al-Bitar, Zaki al-Arsuzi and Sami Shwkat (brother of Naji Shawkat).
A short excerpt of Husri's interview with the teacher is revealing:[27] Saddam Hussein forced out tens of thousands of people of Persian origin from Iraq in the 1970s, after having been accused of being spies for Iran and Israel.
By drawing parallels to the 7th-Century defeat of Persia in the Battle of al-Qādisiyyah, he announced: Saddam also accused Iranians of "murdering the second (Umar), third (Uthman) and fourth (Ali) Caliphs of Islam", invading the three islands of Abu Musa and Greater and Lesser Tunbs in the Persian Gulf and attempting to destroy the Arabic language and civilization.
After his fall, it was reported that the new Iraqi government had organized the Committee for Removing Symbols of the Saddam Era and that the Hands of Victory monument had begun to be dismantled.
[64] In several interviews conducted by PhD student Batoul Hasan, Ajam youth have shown hesitation to use or learn Persian due to stigmatisation and prejudice in Kuwait.
[80] Between the 1920s and the 1960s, some houses in the Rock Creek Hills neighborhood of Kensington, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C., included anti-Iranian language in racial covenants that were part of property deeds.
[85][87] Neda Maghbouleh is an American-born Canadian sociologist and author, with a focus on the racialization of migrants from Iran, as well as the entire Middle Eastern and North African region.
[88][89] In January 2020, the fear of “Iranophobia” has raised in the Iranian-American community by the US killing of top Iranian commander Qassem Soliemani led to an intensifying crisis between Iran and the United States.
[94] Critics maintain that Hollywood's "tall walls of exclusion and discrimination have yet to crumble when it comes to the movie industry's persistent misrepresentation of Iranians and their collective identity".
Mahmoody's husband then undergoes a strange transformation in Iran, ranging from an educated and sophisticated citizen to an abusive, backwards peasant, eventually deciding that they will not return to the United States.
According to Ebert, the film depicts Islamic society "in shrill terms", where women are "willing or unwilling captives of their men", deprived of "what in the West would be considered basic human rights".
"[100] According to Jane Campbell, the film "only serves to reinforce the media stereotype of Iranians as terrorists who, if not actively bombing public buildings or holding airline passengers hostage, are untrustworthy, irrational, cruel, and barbaric.
Alice Sharif, an American woman living with her Iranian husband in Tehran, accuses Mahmoody and the filmmakers of deliberately attempting to foment anti-Iranian sentiment in the United States.
In particular, according to historian Kaveh Farrokh, the Persian soldiers who fought at the Battle of Gaugamela are wrongly portrayed as unclean, disorganized, and wearing turbans, in contrast to the well-disciplined Greek army.
[107] According to Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, Professor of Ancient History at Cardiff University: "Oliver Stone's movie Alexander (2004) displays all the familiar Orientalist notions about the inferiority and picturesqueness of Eastern societies.
So much so, indeed, that in terms of its portrayal of East–West relationships, Alexander has to be seen as a stale cultural statement and a worn-out reflection of the continuing Western preoccupation with an imaginary exotic Orient.
"[108] The 2007 epic film 300 by Zack Snyder, an adaptation of Frank Miller's 1998 limited comic series of the same name, was criticized for its portrayal of combatants, perceived as racist,[109] in the Persian army at the Battle of Thermopylae.
Reviewers in the United States and elsewhere "noted the political overtones of the West-against-Iran story line and the way Persians are depicted as decadent, sexually flamboyant and evil in contrast to the noble Greeks".
Moaveni also suggests that "the box office success of 300, compared with the relative flop of Alexander (another spurious period epic dealing with Persians), is cause for considerable alarm, signaling ominous U.S.
[111] According to The Guardian, Iranian critics of 300, ranging from bloggers to government officials, have described the movie "as a calculated attempt to demonise Iran at a time of intensifying U.S. pressure over the country's nuclear programme".
[111] Dana Stevens of Slate states, "If 300, the new battle epic based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley, had been made in Germany in the mid-1930s, it would be studied today alongside The Eternal Jew as a textbook example of how race-baiting fantasy and nationalist myth can serve as an incitement to total war.
Harry van Bommel, a parliamentarian of the Dutch Socialist Party (SP), condemned the berufsverbot, deliberately using a German word associated with the Second World War.
[122] On 3 February 2010, a court in The Hague ruled that the Dutch government's policy to ban Iranian-born students and scientists from certain master's degrees and from nuclear research facilities was overly broad and in violation of an international civil rights treaty.
[124] Political scientist Shireen Hunter writes that there are two significant groups in Turkey that are hostile towards Iran: "the military establishment and the ultra-Kemalist elite" and the "ultranationalists with pan-Turkist aspirations" (such as the Grey Wolves).
[132] This romantic thought led to the founding of nostalgic literary works, known as the "literature of longing"; examples amongst this genre are, for instance, Foggy Tabriz by Mammed Said Ordubadi, and The Coming Day by Mirza Ibrahimov.
[137] Although this type of irredentism was initially the result of the nation building policy of the Soviets, it became an instrument for "biased, pseudo-academic approaches and political speculations" in the nationalistic aspirations of the young Azerbaijan Republic.
[136] In the modern Azerbaijan Repuiblic, historiography is written with the aim of retroactively Turkifying many of the peoples and kingdoms that existed prior to the arrival of Turks in the region, including the Iranian Medes.
The historian Elena Andreeva adds that this trend was not only very apparent in over 200 Russian travelogues written about Iran and published in the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries, but also in diplomatic and other official documents.
