Time Peddles Old Stereotypes With Op-Ed on Iranian ‘Carpet Merchants’

Time magazine depicts a meeting between US officials and what it would have you think of as Iranian carpet merchants. (photo: Brendan Smialowski/AP)

Here’s what gets filed under “Ideas” at Time‘s World Affairs section (4/3/15):

The Iran Deal and How Not to Buy a Middle Eastern Carpet

Yes, it’s an extended analogy by former Israeli ambassador to the US Michael Oren, likening negotiating with Iran to dealing with a Middle Eastern rug merchant:

Want to purchase a carpet in the Middle East? If so, the first question the merchant will ask you is, “How much do you want to spend?” Seasoned buyers never answer. They know that whatever amount they cite will become the baseline for the negotiation. They understand that the merchant’s smiles, the many cups of tea he serves, his invitations to stroll along the riverbank, are all part of his selling tactic. So, too, are his protests—in response to any offer—of wounded pride. Veterans of Middle East carpet markets expect the give-and-take to be lengthy, even exhausting, but are always willing to leave the shop.

This series of ethnic stereotypes becomes Oren’s whole prism for interpreting the negotiations, which are “an ideal example of how not to buy a Middle Eastern carpet.” He argues: “The Security Council’s five permanent members plus Germany could have offered the lowest possible price as their final bid—take it or leave it. Iran would have had little choice but to sell the carpet.”

When the US and its negotiating partners “recogniz[ed] the Islamic Republic’s right to enrich and to maintain its nuclear facilities,” Oren scolds: “The haggling had scarcely begun and already the merchant profited.” Actually, the right to a peaceful nuclear program was guaranteed to Iran when it signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (FAIR Blog, 4/8/13), but there isn’t really a stereotype that involves the customers of a “merchant” agreeing to respect international law.

Some of this just shows that one of what Time calls “the world’s leading voices” is capable of embarrassing writing, as when Oren’s piece concludes:

The world must provide for the possibility that the treaty — like the carpet — will fall apart…. Only later, when its colors quickly fade and its threads unravel, will they discover that, in the Middle East, there is no return policy.

But Oren’s main point is that the untrustworthiness of Iranians is an essential, unchangeable quality: “The Middle Eastern form of negotiating, perfected over thousands of years, should no longer be alien to Westerners,” he writes.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell the Islamophobe’s depiction of Muslims from the antisemite’s depictions of Jews. (Buffalo News‘ Adam Zyglis; Egyptian newspaper Al-Goumhuriyya)

By “Middle Eastern,” Oren appears to include Arabs, as he follows up this assertion with an example of how Palestinians can’t be trusted either. But Iranians are part of the Indo-European language group, separated for many thousands of years from the Afro-Asiatic language group to which both Arabic and Hebrew belong; as Islam was founded in the year 610, it’s not clear what kind of “Middle Eastern” characteristic going back “thousands of years” would include both Iranians and Arabs and exclude Jews.

Despite his citation of “secret, fortified facilities” that have “hidden their previous work on atomic weapons” as evidence that “the Iranians, we know, cheat”—descriptions that apply to Israel’s undisclosed nuclear arsenal at Dimona—one can assume that Oren doesn’t mean to suggest that the United States should apply his “carpet merchants” stereotypes in its dealings with Israel.

Indeed, one would certainly hope that Time would reject out of hand an op-ed, written by one of the “world’s leading voices” or not, that used ethnic stereotypes as frame for understanding Israel: suggesting, for example, that to understand Tel Aviv, you needed to understand how “diamond merchants” or “Jewish bankers” operate. Similarly crude caricatures, however, are a stock feature of commentary on Iranian politics.

The Washington Post (10/1/13), for instance, during a similar peace scare a couple of years ago, quoted the observations of an anonymous Israeli who sounded remarkably like Michael Oren:

Israeli leaders fear that the international community, and the United States in particular, is in danger of being duped by the Iranians. One official compared the Americans to tourists wandering into a Middle East bazaar.

“The Persians have been using these tactics for thousands of years, before America came to be,” said a senior Israeli official.

Fouad Ajami: fond of bazaar metaphors (photo: Hoover Institution)

When Fouad Ajami, long the US media’s favorite explainer of all things Muslim, said “we get lost in the twisted alleyways of the Middle Eastern bazaar” (CBS News, 3/5/91), he was referring to Arab reaction to the Gulf War, but more recently he’s recycled the metaphor to mock Tehran: “Back to the Iranian Bazaar” was the headline of a piece he wrote for US News (8/7/08), while in the Wall Street Journal (9/12/13) he was declaring that “Obama Is Lost in the Iranian Bazaar.”

Stereotyping doesn’t get much cruder than Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen (9/28/09) declaring, after Iran reiterated that its nuclear program was peaceful, “These Persians lie like a rug.” Then again, it was Richard Cohen who wrote that “only a fool–or possibly a Frenchman” would have failed to believe Colin Powell’s 2003 UN presentation about Iraq’s imaginary weapons of mass destruction.

The New York Times (4/14/12) put an intellectual gloss on the Iranians-are-liars trope in a piece by James Risen:

Some analysts say that Ayatollah Khamenei’s denial of Iranian nuclear ambitions has to be seen as part of a Shiite historical concept called taqiyya, religious dissembling. For centuries an oppressed minority within Islam, Shiites learned to conceal their sectarian identity to survive, and so there is a precedent for lying to protect the Shiite community.

This notion that Shiites are liars by doctrine is bogus theology (FAIR Blog, 4/17/12)—and remarkably similar to the arguments antisemites make about how Jews are commanded to lie by the Talmud.

Time‘s depiction of Iranian President Hasan Rouhani, apparently being orientally indirect. (photo: EYEPRESS/SIPA)

Coming back to Time magazine, it has advanced the notion before that there’s just something about those people over there that means you can’t trust what they say. Time Jerusalem correspondent Karl Vick wrote a piece (11/19/13) that declared that

Iranians are masters of what has been termed “Oriental indirection”—which amounts to not quite saying what you mean, but getting your point across in a range of subtle ways.

That link goes back to an earlier Vick piece (9/20/13), which explained that Iranian government messages are

wreathed in what’s been dubbed in the past as “Oriental indirection.” Translated—and anything coming out of Tehran must be translated—Oriental indirection means “listen to what I didn’t say” and “watch my eyes dance as I don’t say it.”  It’s a bit like “you get my drift,” except the drift is never evident from a single conversation.

From the various conversations Time and other US media outlets have had about Iranians and their essential untrustworthiness, I think you can get their drift—and it isn’t pretty.

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