October 11-13
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu displayed gross ignorance of modern Iran in an interview Saturday and now young Iranians are giddily ridiculing him in public.
Netanyahu said the Islamic Republic forbids Iranians from wearing blue jeans. The Iranian dress code forbids tight clothing for both men and women, but jeans have never been banned in Iran.
Netanyahu also said Iranians were banned from listening to Western music. Such music is frowned upon by many, but the regime has made its peace even with modern rock and allows bands to play it in Iran, although the lyrics must be cleared first by censors. Persian pop music produced by groups outside Iran is officially barred, but not very successfully. And Western rap music is barred. But most Western music is freely available.
There was some talk about banning all Western music—in fact, all music—after the revolution. But it never was banned. Western classical music has long been used on state broadcasting, and western martial tunes were played constantly during the war years of the 1980s.
Young Iranians mocked Netanyahu’s ignorance on social websites Monday, with many posting photos of themselves in jeans.
In an interview with BBC Persian television broadcast Saturday, Netanyahu had said, “If Iranians were free, they would wear jeans and listen to Western music.”
The ignorance of the remark astounded Iranians—and gave an opening for mockery and ridicule of a political figure widely disliked in Iran regardless of political leanings.
A Facebook page titled “Our jeans in Netanyahu’s face, Bibi watch out” has appeared, with dozens of pictures of young Iranians wearing jeans. (Bibi is Netanyahu’s nickname.)
“He thinks he saw our bomb but he hasn’t seen our jeans,” one user wrote.
“Even our ancestors wore jeans,” another netizen wrote, posting a photoshopped picture of an Achaemenid soldier from 500 BC wearing jeans.
One post showed a photograph of young fighters during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war in blue jeans.
On Twitter, Iranians posted more pictures of themselves wearing the supposedly forbidden jeans and enjoying Western music.
One user uploaded a picture of himself wearing jeans and listening to an album by Australian pop star Missy Higgins.
“Here are my jeans and here’s my Western music, idiot!” he tweeted.
Saaman Zahedi posted a picture of himself with a friend in front of a satellite dish with the comment: “here are our jeans, Netanyahu. So shut it.”
Some of them mocked Israel’s intelligence agencies, saying they were so busy with the surveillance of the Iranian nuclear program that they neglected to update Netanyahu on fashion trends in Tehran.
“2day I’m wearing jeans, I can send my photo 4 Netanyahu if his spies in Iran didn’t see people who wear jeans and listen to Western songs by their Iphone!” Sadegh Ghorbani, a young journalist from Tehran, posted on Twitter.
Mohammad Nezamabadi, a student at Tehran University, was even more cynical. “Not only we wear jeans, but also listen to the foreign language musics! I bet he thinks that we ride horses instead of cars!” he tweeted.
In the same BBC interview, Netanyahu said Iran’s presidential election was not free and that its people would not have elected Hassan Rohani if they had a real choice.
Netanyahu’s office treated his interview with BBC Persian as historic. It pointed out that this was the first time Netanyahu had given an interview to a Persian-speaking media outlet, addressing the Iranian people directly.
In light of what happened, that might not have been such a brilliant idea.
The prime minister’s office marketed the interview aggressively before the mockery appeared. In addition to text messaging journalists direct quotes from the interview and sending out detailed press releases, Netanyahu’s spokespeople circulated video clips from the interview to the Israeli television channels, posted parts of the interview on YouTube, tweeted on it and shared it on Facebook.
The interview actually wasn’t in Persian. It was simultaneously translated in subtitles. Netanyahu did say a few words in Persian: “harf-e pooch,” which can loosely be translated as “nonsense,” and “sadeh loh” or “sucker.” (That’s more than President Obama knows. He has only said “salaam” and “Khoda hafez”—hello and goodbye—and holiday greetings, “eid-e mubarak.”)
In Tel Aviv, the daily Haaretz said, “If Netanyahu is interested in contemporary fashion in Teheran, he can enter an album titled ‘Tehran Street Style’ on the image-sharing website Imgur. Apart from the head covering, any one of the young people there could easily blend in on the streets of Tel Aviv.”
Even Haaretz agreed that Bibi failed the hip test.
