Conflicting reports have clouded the story, but Canada's National Post reported in two different articles that Iran has passed legislation requiring non-Muslims to wear colored ribbons in order to identify infidels in their midst. The law, reminiscent of the notorious Nuremberg laws that forced Jews to wear a yellow Star of David (among other oppressive regulations), will allow Muslims to keep themselves pure by avoiding the touch of an infidel:

The law mandates the government to make sure that all Iranians wear "standard Islamic garments" designed to remove ethnic and class distinctions reflected in clothing, and to eliminate "the influence of the infidel" on the way Iranians, especially, the young dress. It also envisages separate dress codes for religious minorities, Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians, who will have to adopt distinct colour schemes to make them identifiable in public. The new codes would enable Muslims to easily recognize non-Muslims so that they can avoid shaking hands with them by mistake, and thus becoming najis (unclean).

The new law, drafted during the presidency of Muhammad Khatami in 2004, had been blocked within the Majlis. That blockage, however, has been removed under pressure from Khatami's successor, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

In an interesting twist, Canada.com has pulled the original story, although Amir Taheri's article is stil available. If true, this will send shock waves around the world -- and if not, Canada's National Post may never live down the damage.

Assuming this is true -- and given Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's volatile nature and his lunatic public statements on Israel, it certainly sounds plausible -- it should push the Iranian nuclear crisis into overdrive. Forcing religious minorities to wear public markers transforms them into targets for every zealot within eyesight of them. The Nazis knew what they were doing when they pioneered this particular form of brutality. They made it almost a requirement for Germans to shun the Jews, and the dehumanizing nature of this public branding made it much easier to accept the Nazi plan to ship them off to camps -- and much, much worse.

Earlier comparisons to Adolf Hitler seem almost presciently apt at the moment. Ahmadinejad has very cleverly copied Hitler's diplomatic style in dealing with the West, and unfortunately the West has mostly copied the feckless strategy of the 1930s. Ahmadinejad has continued to escalate his demands and the West has attempted to appease him in order to buy some peace. We have not yet experienced the Munich moment, but we can be sure it's coming, and it will likely focus on the existence of Israel. Ehud Olmert would do well to recall the history of Czechoslovakia, another democracy that the West gladly sacrificed to calm Hitler and avoid confrontation while it was still possible to make it brief.

Perhaps this will serve as a wake-up call, a reminder that history repeats itself and that lunacy runs in patterns. If Iran decides to impose these conditions on its religious minorities despite their long integration into Iranian society --Zoroastrianism precedes Islam in Persia, after all -- then we will have arrived at the same position as Europe in 1935. It took only three years for the Nazis to stage Krystallnacht as a ruse to excuse the roundup of Jews, the tactical tipping point for the industrialized atrocities that would follow. Ahmadinejad will not likely wait that long. For those who claim that the cosmopolitan nature and rich cultural history of the Iranians will never allow such actions to occur in the Islamic Republic, they should recall that the Germans were among the most cosmopolitan of Europeans -- until the Nazis took control.

Hopefully this turns out to be a false report. If not, history has warned us of the consequences. We will have no excuse if the Iranians attempt purification under more extreme procedures after this.

UPDATE: The National Post appears to be backtracking more intently, if not furiously, this evening:

Several experts are casting doubt on reports that Iran had passed a law requiring the country’s Jews and other religious minorities to wear coloured badges identifying them as non-Muslims.

The Iranian embassy in Otttawa also denied the Iranian government had passed such a law. ...

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre and Iranian expatriates living in Canada had confirmed that the order had been passed, although it still had to be approved by Iran’s “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenehi before being put into effect.

Hormoz Ghahremani, a spokesman for the Iranian Embassy in Ottawa, said in an e-mail to the Post yesterday that, “We wish to categorically reject the news item.

“These kinds of slanderous accusations are part of a smear campaign against Iran by vested interests, which needs to be denounced at every step.”

Sam Kermanian, of the U.S.-based Iranian-American Jewish Federation, said in an interview from Los Angeles that he had contacted members of the Jewish community in Iran — including the lone Jewish member of the Iranian parliament — and they denied any such measure was in place.

It's not the National Post's finest moment, it seems ...

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