Iran's version of Schindler's list

Surprise , surprise: "Zero Degree Orbit," an Iranian miniseries about the Holocaust that the AP described as sympathetic to the Jews, is anything but.

Allah has the clips, which kept causing my computer to crash. Memri transcript is here. As Memri explains, the Iranians had two motives in making the film.

By means of this series, the Iranians hope to dispel allegations that they deny the persecution of the Jews during World War II and hope to discard their image as Holocaust deniers. The series was presented as an historical drama which aims to depict the suffering of the Jews during World War II, and which is even aimed at educating the Jews about their history. In several newspapers, it is stated that the series sheds light on the way the Jews fled several countries, thus becoming refugees.

At the same time, the series presents the "Zionist lie": The Jewish state is a Zionist invention, the result of collaboration between the Zionists and the Nazis in an effort to coerce Jews to emigrate to Palestine.

It also enables the Iranian regime to stick it to the Pahlavi dynasty.

Iranian police captain Asgari: These are files on students who have passed the exam in order to study overseas.

[...]

There are two problematic files. One is about a young man called Taghi Navadeh, whose brother is in jail, charged with having ties with a Communist group called "the 53 people."

Major: And the other file?

Captain Asgari: It is on a young man called Habib Parsa, the son of a doctor called Ali Parsa. According to the information in the file, the father of this student served as a top Foreign Ministry official in the Iranian consul in Egypt and Syria. Towards the end of 1931, he helped to organize and participated in an Islamic conference in Jerusalem, held at the initiative of Hajj Amin Al-Husseini, the Mufti of the Muslims in Palestine. The conference was intended to denounce the Zionist movement and British policy in Palestine. Because he did not receive the Iranian government's permission to participate in the conference, he was demoted to the position of consul-general in Palestine. A few years later, after Mahmoud Jam was appointed prime minister, and at the recommendation of former Foreign Minister Enayatollah Samii, he was designated to head a special office in the Shah's court, in charge of the policy supporting the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. He resigned in protest, and he has been working for some time now as a doctor.