Special to WorldTribune.com

By Sheda Vasseghi

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” – George Orwell, 1984

When ancient history is not properly taught in schools, then anything goes, and the masses find the butchery of history as “informative.”

It is no secret that debate in the American Mainstream has been replaced with agenda-driven bullying meant to formulate public opinion and policy, not to educate!

When a nation is without guardians – patriotic leaders – then its people can be “liberated” then promptly suppressed and marginalized. Manipulating history is a tool in this endeavor.

Iranians have been living under this condition for decades since the illegitimate Islamo-Marxists took over their country using foreign Mainstream propaganda and terrorism in 1979.

Now, especially in the aftermath of the San Bernardino massacre, it seems that America faces a similar fate. Is no nation safe? Sadly, no.

American history is no longer considered an important enough topic for college undergraduates, and the validity of teaching western civilization is actually under scrutiny in favor of “world history.” America’s beginnings as a nation is under major revisionism that only leads to national self-hate – an age-old tactic for control.

President Ronald Reagan warned, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.”

It is with these heavy thoughts as a historian and educator of part Iranian decent that I read a disappointing article by Josh Gelernter published in National Review on Dec. 4, 2015 .

Gelernter’s butchery of the 2,500-year-old Iranian-Jewish history bleaches out the most important aspect of this relationship in that the Jewish community was freed along with others from Babylonian captivity allowing modern Judaism to flourish under the religious freedom policies of the Persian kings (Persians are one of many Iranian peoples), as well as the continued interactions and collaborations for some 1,000 years between the peoples from 3rd century BC to 7th century at the eve of the first Arab Muslim invasion which greatly affected the future of both peoples.

Omissions and misrepresentations of Iranian history have been ongoing since that nation fell to the hands of ideologist Islamo-Marxists. These are prevalent in Gelernter’s National Review article. For example:

Gelernter fails to note what happened to the ten lost tribes of Israel. That is, the Assyrian deportation of ancient tribes of Israel involved moving the population to Media, an Iranian nation where their descendants have lived until now.

Gelernter bypasses the significance of Babylon’s conquest by the Persians and jumps 220 years to Alexander of Macedonia. As noted by Jewish records and the Bible, the Persian Empire freed the Jews and all captives in Babylon. The Second Temple Era or Persian Era (550-330 BC) is when the Jews were able to rebuild their temple funded personally by the Persian king, Cyrus the Great. The Cyrus Cylinder is considered the first known human rights decree that set religious freedom across the first world empire. As numerous historians, scholars, and theologians have written over the ages such as the authors of Three Testaments: Torah, Gospel, and Quran (2012), modern Judaism was formulated during the Persian Era under the direction of the Persian Empire and was heavily influenced by Iranian religion known as Zoroastrianism.

Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Dr. George Cameron, writes in an article “Cyrus the ‘Father’, and Babylonia” (1974) that Cyrus was able to conquer Babylon because “there was unhappiness among native Babylonians, fearing famine, and … disaffected Babylonians may secretly have been in communication with the Persians, just as Jews.”

In leading Swiss business school IMD’s 2014 book Quest: Leading Global Transformations, one learns: “Leadership development was a critical issue long before the emergence of modern business. Take the case of ancient Persia, the world’s first superpower…. A key innovation of the ancient Persian Empire that endures today is statecraft – the need to articulate the organization’s legitimate purpose and to specify the character demanded of its leaders. The Persian emperors were the first to use the ideology of ruling by the consent of the people. Cyrus’s answer to the problem of leadership development was pluralism.”

Gelernter claims in his National Review article that Alexander “had a soft spot for the Jews.” Alexander only lived about seven years after conquering the prized Persian Empire. He did not spend any time governing. He showed no mercy or soft spot for fellow Greeks in destroying any city that defied him and selling its inhabitants into slavery. That is why the Greeks called him the city burner, not “the Great.”

According to Aryeh Kasher in Jews and Hellenistic cities in Eretz-Israel” (1990), Jews did not join Alexander’s army in destroying their rivals, Tyre, because of their “obligation to the King of Persia, to whom they had sworn fealty,” and that nothing is known about the relationship between foreign cities in Israel and the Jewish population post Alexander’s conquests. Kasher claims the Jewish population was probably divided in its political positions and a large group left Israel at the time.

Gelernter then claims that the Jews successfully rebelled against the Seleucids (Iranic-Greco dynasty post Alexander), and that “Judea became a wholly independent state for the first time in 400 years. This was the last independent Jewish state in the land of Israel until 1948.” This is absolutely astonishing!

Gelernter ignores the 500 year rule of the Iranian Parthians and the 400 year rule of the Iranian Sasanians (total of some 900 years), and unethically and irresponsibly claims that for some 2000 years there was no Jewish state, freedom, or independence.

According to Steven Bayme in Understanding Jewish History (1997), “[t]he arrival of Parthia, or Persia, in Palestine shorlty after the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 B.C.E. created an expectation of Parthia as a redeemer of the Jewish people … Jews looked to Parthia as would-be redeemer…the Jewish community of Babylonia, the leading Jewish community in the world outside of Palestine, were loyal Parthian citizens and looked to Parthia for protection.”

Jonathan Porter Berkey writes in his 2003 book The Formation of Islam that “[m]ost accounts of the Jews under [Iranian Zoroastrian] Sasanian rule have assumed that they fared considerably better than their co-religionists to the west.” The Persian king Khosrow II conquered Jerusalem and established an independent Jewish State in 614 during the Sasanian-Roman conflicts (see A. Khamneipur’s Zarathustra (2015)).

As far as continued Iranian influences on Jewish culture and religion during Zoroastrian Sasanian Empire, one may refer to The Iranian Talmud (2014) by Dr. Shai Secunda, a scholar of rabbinic literature, Iranian studies, and comparative religion.

History is important because it connects peoples to their shared roots. If people are unaware of their ancestral connections then they are more likely to be misled for the benefit of a few. When a nation’s leadership is not patriotic, then its history is vulnerable.

Perhaps that is why under Common Core – the undemocratic nationalization of America’s education system “transformed” under the Obama Administration and endorsed by Hillary Clinton – and new advanced placement standards for U.S. history, American students will not really study America (see http://dailycaller.com/2015/05/09/scholar-under-new-ap-standards-american-history-will-not-be-about-america-video/).

I have certainly noticed that each semester less and less undergraduates in my history classes know about the founding principles of America and the Constitution.

If American history is experiencing a similar demise as the treatment of Iranian history, then the two nations are victims of the same problem – lack of patriotic leadership.

Mainstream institutions seem to have lost their way in using history. They should start taking ownership and responsibility for the words and stories they publish.

Sheda Vasseghi is a doctorate candidate, historian, and educator specializing in Iran (Persia). She is a member of Azadegan Foundation in Washington, D.C.

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