From the Vengeance of the Jews to the Millenarian Martyrs of the Guardianship
From the Vengeance of the Jews to the Millenarian Martyrs of the Guardianship, according to Iran Gate, the public relations of Tabriz University of Medical Sciences announced that students from four schools in this city, one school in the village of Kandroud, and one school in the village of Varjuyeh Maragheh have been transferred to medical centers with symptoms of poisoning. According to the Shargh newspaper, in Kashan as well, a number of students have fallen victim to poisoning and have been hospitalized.
Molavi Abdulhamid, in the Friday prayer sermon, considered the series of poisonings as the Islamic Republic’s revenge against protesting women and girls. Abolfazl Ghadiani, a founding member of the Organization of the Mojahedin of the Islamic Revolution, believes that Ayatollah Khamenei himself is the main instigator of this revenge, who, with the subsiding of street gatherings, has found an opportunity for revenge and to soothe his sinister spirit, targeting the health and security of the wise and courageous pioneers of the Women, Life, Freedom movement.
From this perspective, the schoolgirls are victims of revenge, of a collective nature with religious motivation. This type of revenge has historical precedence, an example being a Jewish group named Nakum, meaning revenge in Hebrew, which rose after World War II to avenge the Jews who perished in Nazi camps in the crematoria. The core of the Nakum group consisted of Jews who had escaped from ghettos in areas occupied by the Germans and had engaged in partisan warfare.
During these partisan wars, this group engaged in acts of revenge, including the massacre of 38 civilians in a village in present-day Lithuania. The Jewish partisans killed all the men, set the village on fire, and slaughtered the livestock.
The Nakum group was also pursuing blind revenge, wanting to kill six million Germans in retaliation for the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust, regardless of whether these Germans had a role in the massacre of the Jews or not. Their plan was to poison the drinking water network of the cities of Hamburg, Frankfurt, Munich, and Nuremberg.
The leader of the group, Abba Kovner, went to Palestine and, with the help of Jewish scientists who had fled there during World War II, prepared a poison capable of killing millions of Germans. However, his plan was exposed on his return journey, and while on a ship to Europe, he was captured by the British. Before his arrest, he disposed of the poison to prevent it from falling into British hands.
With the failure of this plan, the Nakum group turned to killing the survivors of the Gestapo in prisoner camps. The group members managed to infiltrate the bakery of one of these camps and laced the prisoners’ bread with arsenic. Thousands of German prisoners became ill and weakened, but no one died. Thus, the second plan was also exposed, and the Nakum group’s activities failed and disbanded. Abba Kovner emigrated to Israel and later became one of the country’s great poets.
However, the avengers of our schools have neither had their plan exposed nor failed. The security apparatus has not mentioned finding any clues about the perpetrators of the poisonings, and speculation about the involvement of the government and religious extremists in this revenge has intensified.
Mohammad Taghi Fazel Meybodi, a university professor, referred to a sociologist whose research in Qom shows that millenarians, a religious and anti-modernity group, are responsible for the poisonings because they believe that girls should ultimately study only up to the third grade.
Even the news channel of the Ministry of Education has acknowledged the religious motivation of the perpetrators of the poisonings and reported that a group named the Guardianship Devotees claimed responsibility for these attacks to prevent girls from being educated. However, this news was quickly removed from the Ministry of Education’s channel.
Among the various groups that participated in the Women, Life, Freedom movement, it is the schoolgirls who have become victims of revenge, perhaps because even during the quiet days of street protests, it was the schoolgirls who beat the drum of the movement in schools and continued the protests.
This revenge is of a blind nature because it encompasses all teenage girls, whether they played a role in the protests or remained silent. The avengers burn the wet and the dry together. It is unclear what role the students in the schools of the villages of Tabriz and Khalkhal, who have fallen victim to revenge, played in the protests, or whether they played any role at all. Kashan, where the poisoned students are now hospitalized, was one of the cities where the protest movement was reported to be less intense than in other cities.
Blind revenge burns the wet and the dry together. The fact that the religious city of Kashan becomes a scene of religious revenge is a bitter irony of history. Perhaps the avengers, who consider themselves devout, are under the delusion that they have learned revenge from their God, citing the Torah and the Quran, which are full of narratives of God’s revenge on people who, by turning their backs on the prophet sent to guide them, deserved divine punishment.
In many of these narratives, divine punishment descended equally upon all the people of a city or tribe, and the guilty and innocent alike burned in the fire of divine revenge. Divine punishment descended in the form of lightning and earthquakes, killing young and old, human and animal alike. Collective revenge knows no discrimination or privilege.