Iranian journalist: ‘Xenophobic chants don’t identify with me or with my generation’

Iranian jounalist and author Nazila Fathi was in elementary school when she first heard the chant "Death to America."

It was in 1980, a year after the Islamic Revolution and hardliners, still filled with Revolutionary zeal, wanted to crystallize their anti-Western sentiments.

“We learned to line up every morning at the schoolyard and chant all the slogans that we were told to chant,” Fathi recalls. At the time, the Islamic Regime wanted to set itself apart from other countries in the region. It wanted to become not only a leader for Iranian people, but also for other Muslims in the region.

Just like Fathi, most of the other students at her school didn’t believe in what they chanted. They simply did what they were told. They were only 10, maybe 11 years old.

At the time, America wasn’t the only power Iranian Revolutionaries wanted destroyed (at least in slogans). The chant sometimes included the then-Soviet Union, Britain, France, Israel and Germany. And as the years went on, Iran mended its relationship with some of those countries, so the slogan was altered to reflect those changes. The Soviet Union, for example, was left out as Iran improved its relations with what later became Russia.

Still, except for a few key moments, such as after the events of September 11th, the US and Israel remained in the chants.

But now that Iran and the US have negotiated a nuclear deal, has the chant become obsolete?

Fathi believes in some ways, yes. “Iran and America were engaged in this dialogue. For about 20 months Iran’s foreign minister spoke to John Kerry, the secretary of state,” she says.

That was something completely unimaginable in the days right after the Islamic Revolution, when the slogan was first introduced.

Yet Fathi points out that the chant will very likely be belted out at the next Friday prayer. “A lot of these regimes that rely on propaganda, they can use them, they can snowball it into something bigger,” she says.

She adds that today, a big part of the Iranian population doesn’t wish the death of any nation. She feels the same. "I think that any slogan that contains ‘death to’ represents a xenophobic narrative that doesn’t identify with me or with my generation,” she says.

This generation, she thinks, is one that’s young, highly educated and more than ready to join the global community.