Iran's most repressed religious minority is also its largest. Members of the community are routinely imprisoned, frequently executed, banned from universities, and ruthlessly repressed economically. Tens of thousands have been murdered by one regime after another. The current government--the Khomeinist "Islamic Republic"--goes farther than any other by vowing to crush these people wherever they live and erase them from the face of the earth.
There are only six or seven million in the entire world, and their spiritual home is in Israel. I am not, however, referring here to the Jews, but to the Bahais.
Their world headquarters is in Israel, and they came during Ottoman times from Persian lands. The nation-state of one of the world's oldest religions now hosts the holiest site of one of the newest, and the nation where the Bahai Faith was born vows to destroy the nation where the Bahai Faith had to migrate.
The strikingly different treatments of these people by Iran and by Israel infuses the looming showdown between the Middle East's two most powerful countries with even more moral clarity than it already had.
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