Its always been Iran. In Cyrus the Great time all the way to the Ayatollahs. It was never persia.

When everybody is done with the pious chest thumping about the evils of Nazisim, we can at least discuss zagros statment in a detached unemotional manner, as the mature adults we are supposed to be. I don't necessarily agree with him, but he has got a point, certainly without Nazism, it is very difficult to see a state fo Israel, which was zionism's true aim. So you can say that Nazism was perhaps a help for Zionism (certainly not an apprceiated one I imagine) in achieving its aims.

quote: "Its always been Iran. In Cyrus the Great time all the way to the Ayatollahs. It was never persia."

It has never changed... It has always been called Iran by Iranians, always.  Reza Shah requested that the name Iran be recognised internationally in 1936, as Persia was not representative of Iran's ethnic groups.

That is not the rationale put forth in Iran at the time, although Iran, like the USA and many other countries did have links with the Germans  -

No connection between Iran and Nazis?

9. In order to help the listener to better understand the historical relationship between Iran and Nazi Germany, Mr. Emory presents an article by Edwin Black, the author of The War Against the Weak, IBM and the Holocaust, and The Transfer Agreement. “Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has shot to the forefront of Holocaust denial with his rabble-rousing remarks last month. But it's more like self-denial. The president of Iran need only look to his country's Hitler-era past to discover that Iran and Iranians were strongly connected to the Holocaust and the Hitler regime, as was the entire Islamic world under the leadership of the mufti of Jerusalem. Iran's axis with the Third Reich began during the prewar years, when it welcomed Nazi Gestapo agents and other operatives to Tehran, allowing them to use the city as a base for Middle East agitation against the British and the region's Jews. Key among these German agents was Fritz Grobba, Berlin's envoy to the Middle East, who was often called ‘the German Lawrence,’ because he promised a Pan-Islamic state stretching from Casablanca to Tehran. Relations between Berlin and Tehran were strong from the moment Hitler came to power in 1933. At that time, Reza Shah Pahlavi's nation was known as Persia. The shah became a stalwart admirer of Hitler, Nazism and the concept of the Aryan master race. He also sought the Reich's help in reducing British petro-political domination.” (“Denial of Holocaust Nothing New in Iran Ties to Hitler Led to Plots Against British and Jews” by Edwin Black; San Francisco Chronicle; 1/8/2006; accessed at: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2006/01/08/INGODGH99Q1.DTL.)

10. “So intense was the shah's identification with the Third Reich that in 1935 he renamed his ancient country ‘Iran,’ which in Farsi means Aryan and refers to the Proto-Indo-European lineage that Nazi racial theorists and Persian ethnologists cherished. The idea for the name change was suggested by the Iranian ambassador to Germany, who came under the influence of Hitler's trusted banker, Hjalmar Schacht. From that point, all Iranians were constantly reminded that their country shared a common bond with the Nazi regime.” (Idem.)

11. Note the presence in this sequence of events of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. The Grand Mufti was the first leader of the Palestinian movement and an individual whose presence figures prominently in the history of World War II, the Middle East, international fascism and the events in and around 9/11. (For more about the Grand Mufti, see—among other programs—FTR#’s 354, 414, 416, 456.) “Shortly after World War II broke out in 1939, the Mufti of Jerusalem crafted a strategic alliance with Hitler to exchange Iraqi oil for active Arab and Islamic participation in the murder of Jews in the Mideast and Eastern Europe. This was predicated on support for a pan-Arab state and Arab control over Palestine. During the war years, Iran became a haven for Gestapo agents. It was from Iran that the seeds of the abortive 1941 pro-Nazi coup in Baghdad were planted. After Churchill's forces booted the Nazis out of Iraq in June 1941, German aircrews supporting Nazi bombers escaped across Iraq's northern border back into Iran. Likewise, the mufti of Jerusalem was spirited across the border to Tehran, where he continued to call for the destruction of the Jews and the defeat of the British.” (Idem.)

12. “His venomous rhetoric filled the newspapers and radio broadcasts in Tehran. The mufti was a vocal opponent of allowing Jewish refugees to be transported or ransomed into Jewish Palestine. Instead, he wanted them shipped to the gas chambers of Poland. In the summer of 1941, the mufti, with the support of key Iranian military and government leaders, advocated implementing in Iran what had failed months earlier in Iraq. The plan once again was for a total diversion of oil from the Allies to the Nazis, in exchange for the accelerated destruction of the Jews in Eastern Europe and the Nazis' support for an Arab state. Through the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co., Iran had already been supplying Hitler's forces in occupied Czechoslovakia and Austria. Now, the mufti agitated to cut off the British and the Allies completely and supply Germany in its push against Russia.” (Idem.)

13. “In October 1941, British, USSR other allied forces invaded Iran to break up the Iran-Nazi alliance. Pro-Nazi generals and ministers were arrested, and the shah's son was installed in power. The mufti scampered into the Italian embassy, where he shaved his beard and dyed his hair. In this disguise, he was allowed to leave the country along with the rest of the Italian delegation. Once the mufti relocated permanently to Berlin, where he established his own Reich-supported ‘bureau,’ he was given airtime on Radio Berlin. From Berlin and other fascist capitals in Europe, the mufti continued to agitate for international Jewish destruction, as well as a pan-Islamic alliance with the Nazi regime.” (Idem.)

14. “He called upon all Muslims to ‘kill the Jews wherever you see them.’ In Tehran's marketplace, it was common to see placards that declared, ‘In heaven, Allah is your master. On Earth, it is Adolf Hitler.’ When the mufti raised three divisions of Islamic Waffen SS to undertake cruel operations in Bosnia, among the 30,000 killers were some volunteer contingents from Iran. Iranian Nazis, along with the other Muslim Waffen SS, operated under the direct supervision of Heinrich Himmler and were responsible for barbarous actions against Jews and others in Bosnia. Recruitment for the murderous ‘Handschar Divisions’ was done openly in Iran. Iran and its leaders were not only aware of the Holocaust, they played both sides. The country offered overland escape routes for refugee Jews fleeing Nazi persecution to Israel -- and later fleeing postwar Iraqi fascist persecution -- but only in exchange for extortionate passage fees.” (Idem.)

From:  http://ftrsummary.blogspot.com/2006/09/ftr-565-middle-east-matrix.html - http://ftrsummary.blogspot.com/2006/09/ftr-565-middle-east-matrix.html

Cultural influences, Vivek? So you're telling us that the cultural influence of India was so strong that people as far away as Ireland forgot their own languages and took up languages derived from Sanskrit? You don't think that this is far-fetched?

No it is not far fetched. Isn't English taking ovcer all over the world. I don't know your nationality, but don't you find words similiar to , from other languages in your language. Did'nt Latin influence the European languages.

Is'nt the American culture taking over as the primary culture across the world ?

The Aryan invasion theory was a propoganda devised by the British / Westerners to justifyu theior superiority over the eastern populations & it's a big fallacy. It has already been proved a hypothesis.

Vivek, I suggest you learn a little bit about general linguistics. Yes, English is important now and serves as a lingua franca. Lots of languages are borrowing from it. But the extent of the borrowing is limited to specialized words related to technology, business and entertainment. One has to look at words that are used all the time, such as mother/father, numbers, verbs like eating, walking, body parts such as head or hand. These are the core words upon which linguists base their assesment upon whether languages are related, because they very seldom are replaced in a language and if one finds languages with these words sharing a root, then those languages are likely related.

Let's look at Latin, as an example. The Romance languages of Europe (French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, Portuguese, Catalan, Romanche and Provencal) are all descended from it, in the same way that Hindi or Bengali are descended from Sanskrit. Many other European languages have also been influenced by Latin (because it was the language of the Church and of intellectual activity for more than 1000 years), but the extent of the borrowing is limited to outside the core words. Thus, even if English has about 50% of its words derived from Latin (often via French), its core words are Germanic, so it is considered a Germanic language. In English one still says head, not testa, one says hand not mano, one says son not fili, and so on. Whatever the intense radiating power of Latin was upon Germanic languages (and we're talking about 600 years side by side, and then an additional 1000 years of Latin being the language of learning), it still has not managed to modify these core words. So, if 1600 years of intense, very up-close cultural radiation from Latin has still not managed to change the core of Germanic languages, how could Sanskrit change all European languages through cultural radiation at such a distance?

So what I'm trying to say is that cultural radiating power can never fully explain the fact that Indian, Iranian and European languages are related, so that core words are often similar. Something more had to occur, and as far as we know, the only thing that would account for it is a common origin for these languages. Given the very wide spread of these languages, the next conclusion is that a migration and probable conquest must have occured from the original homeland of the Indo-Europeans, for them to have spread over such a huge area. The original homeland could have never been as big as the extent of these languages is now, because languages quickly change, and we wouldn't notice such similarities. Now, this may have been manipulated by 19th century European historians, but it doesn't change the fact that there is no other explanation than a common origin for these languages, and hence there must have been a migration in the past. Whether the Indo-Europeans were conquerors or simply overwhelming migrants is another discussion.

Linguists have analyzed the preserved common words of Indo-European languages relating to geography, animals and plants. The idea is that these words can tell us what the characteristics of the Indo-European original homeland were. To give you an example, if these people had never seen a desert or a leopard, then they wouldn't have a word for it. So by process of elimination, based on these common words, linguists have determined that the original homeland must have been in some area which is mostly plains, is temperate and is near a sea (among other characteristics). Further examination has determined that this homeland must have been either to the north of the Black Sea, somewhere around the Caspian Sea or in Anatolia. This happened to play quite well in the hands of racist historians, because it meant that there was a good likelyhood that the original Indo-Europeans were white. But the fact that these historians were racist does not automatically place the location of that homeland somewhere else, does it now?

As far as the "Arya", doesn't that simply mean noble? In Greek as well (another Indo-European language), the word for noble is "arista": hence the word aristocrat in many European languages today.

Here are some sites that show how core words in Indo-European languages are related. Pay attention to which words related to plants and animals are common. One other thing to note is grammatical structure. Just as much as words, commoan grammar rules are a clear indication that languages can be related.

http://www.colfa.utsa.edu/drinka/pie/grimm.htm - http://www.colfa.utsa.edu/drinka/pie/grimm.htm
http://www.colfa.utsa.edu/drinka/pie/rel_counting.htm - http://www.colfa.utsa.edu/drinka/pie/rel_counting.htm
http://www.colfa.utsa.edu/drinka/pie/rel_animals.htm - http://www.colfa.utsa.edu/drinka/pie/rel_animals.htm
http://www.colfa.utsa.edu/drinka/pie/rel_plants.htm - http://www.colfa.utsa.edu/drinka/pie/rel_plants.htm
http://www.colfa.utsa.edu/drinka/pie/rel_sky.htm - http://www.colfa.utsa.edu/drinka/pie/rel_sky.htm

http://www.nvtc.gov/lotw/months/december/IEFamily.html - www.nvtc.gov/lotw/months/december/IEFamily.html
http://www.friesian.com/cognates.htm - http://www.friesian.com/cognates.htm
http://www.lankalibrary.com/books/sinhala3.htm - www.lankalibrary.com/books/sinhala3.htm
http://www.desijournal.com/article.asp?articleid=82 - www.desijournal.com/article.asp?articleid=82
web.cn.edu/kwheeler/IE_Main4_Sanskrit.html
http://www.hinduwebsite.com/general/indoeuro.htm - http://www.hinduwebsite.com/general/indoeuro.htm

decebel I agree with most of the reasoning you give, but the problem is that the Indian history or mythology or religion or culture, tradition, folklore  (which is the most extensive, ancient & detailed description of events in the past records everything, even minute details like what a person should eat or wear or how he should walk but does not have any mention of an arya migration into India). Amongst these surprising intricated details it is impossible to belive that somebody could miss out something as great as a migration of the type the AIT makes out to be.

I think the problem LaGolf may be having is that some Iranians outside Iran, a small minority among Persian non-Muslim community, they see Islam as terrible, Arabs and Jews as Evil, they think they're Aryan's so this make's them buddies with the white folk they now live with in addition to this White Supremacist Groups keen to exploit every avenue have been trying to feed this propoganda.

However, LaGolf I'd like to point out that this tiny minute group of ignorant people do not represent Iran, they don't even have a movement or voice in Iran, they are nothing to do with Iranians or Iran, don't take them seriously I doubt whether there actually Iranian at all.