The Top 40

Will they meet the same fate as Farfur?

please excuse the dgstusiing antisemites here, yonira; you're quite right: people should reorder their priorities.Consider how well-prioritized these Israelis were in 1979, as Israel's Iranian cookie jar was suddenly snapped shut by Ayatollah Khomeini: On Jan 1, 1979, Erwin Muller, [a zoo director in Iran] sat beside the gates of two magnificent animal cages, now open and empty, and wept. Brigadier General Yitzhak Segev, the Israeli military attache in Tehran, stood next to him and tried to find words to console him .Khomeini's mobs were taking control in Iran. The royal family was on the run and not all of their royal pets could survive. Four years earlier, the director of Israel's National Parks Authority, General Avraham Yaffeh, had had the idea of recreating herds of the animals that had roamed the country in biblical times, among them the fallow deer. Such animals, he discovered, could be found in Iran. The narrative describes how Yaffeh made a deal with the brother of Shah Reza Pahlavi: in exchange for a pair of fallow deer, Abdul Reza would be permitted to hunt an ibex in the Negev desert [sidenote: of course, Bedouin live in and on Negev, so what difference was it to an Israeli if animals important to the Bedouin ecosystem were traded for a fantasy?] Abdul Reza bagged his ibex in 1974, but For budgetary reasons, Israel never collected its fallow deer. On November 28, 1978, as rioting in Iran approached a crescendo, the [Israeli] Parks Authority sent a crew to Tehran. With vehicles and security provided by Segev, they travelled to a nature preserve on the shore of the Caspian Sea, picked up two pairs of fallow deer and returned to Tehran, where they hoped to lodge the animals in the local zoo until a flight to Israel could be arranged. Muller at first refused to permit the deer to leave Tehran, but later relented, or rather, negotiated, allowing the release of the deer if the Shah's royal tiger and lion were included in the shipment. Zoo director Muller was fearful that the angry mobs might harm these symbols of monarchy, and had arranged to send them to safety in Holland.After applying a great deal of pressure on El Al Airline managers in Tehran and a flood of phone calls from Israel, space was allocated on the next flight out for the four deer and the lion and tiger, at the expense of some Jewish passengers and the cargo of carpets they wanted to ship out. Alas, the space was acquired too late to save the Iranian cats, but the fallow deer did, indeed, board the El Al flight to Israel and were eventually turned loos in a nature preserve near Haifa. (The Secret War with Iran, Ronen Bergman, pp 23-24)So please excuse the insensitivity of the brutes on this forum who have no appreciation for the reality that at least Israelis prioritize acquiring animals, even if they ship them on magic-carpet El Al flights rather than through tunnels.