Ibrahim Nabavi, Iran's most popular satirist, knows who didn't commit the terrorist assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. It could not have been Iranians or Arabs: the attacks were successful; they were well coordinated; none of the participants got cold feet and leaked the plans in advance. And the hijacked planes went to their targets rather than diverting to Las Vegas or Hawaii.
Nabavi recently emerged from jail after serving a sentence for offending conservatives in the Iranian government but the self-deprecating, almost colonial, sense of inferiority in his reaction to the attacks in the US struck a chord.
So who did perpetrate the attacks? An astonishing number of Iranians, including the best educated, believe Israel and its spy agency, Mossad, were involved. Asking students at random at Tehran university, I kept running into the view that it was a Zionist conspiracy.
"Osama bin Laden is a terrorist and he has a vast network, but he couldn't do anything so sophisticated," said Abdol Karim, a law student.
"Israel has an interest in this. The attacks put two peace-loving civilizations into conflict and allowed the Israelis to put the Palestinians down while people's attention is diverted."
Ali Maliki, another student, said he had heard of a report in the US media that 4,000 American Jews who worked in the Trade Center didn't go to work on Sept. 11. Somebody must have warned them.
Sitting under a tree in the long black chador which is mandatory for female students, Salimeh Nodehi seemed more willing to point the finger at Osama bin Laden. But she saw him as a creature of the US, a man they had armed and trained.
"The disciple stabbed the master in the back," she said.
Although the US State Department continues to keep Iran on its list of states supporting terrorism, the missionary element in Iran's foreign policy dwindled long ago. The core nowadays is the same as that of most countries -- defensive nationalism and a feeling that the outside world ignores their case.
Iran has just been commemorating the 21st anniversary of Iraq's attack on it, which led to eight years of war. About 200,000 Iranians became "martyrs" in a war which most of the world has conveniently forgotten. Saddam Hussein, the aggressor, was a friend of the west at the time. Iran was cast as the villain.
The centerpiece of this year's commemorations was an astonishing exhibition which married religion to war.
The opening rooms were conventional, though movingly done. Crowds poured past tableaux with waxwork figures showing wounded soldiers, sandbagged trenches, ramshackle field clinics, and palm trees blown away at their stumps.
A few Iraqi prisoners with their hands up were the first hint that the display wanted to show some Iranian success and not just the horror of war. Then we moved past cases full of personal items and family portraits of husbands and sons killed in the carnage.
The climax changed gear dramatically. We were led through a maze of walkways and found ourselves at the top of steps leading down to the courtyard of the half-finished Imam Khomeini mosque.
In honor of the ayatollah who led the Islamic revolution, the mosque will be the world's biggest. From a wire strung between the tall concrete minarets, a soldier was abseiling down to the plaza which was stuffed full of military hardware. Proud families admired Scud missiles, helicopters, Russian tanks and American fighter-planes (of pre-revolutionary vintage).
On the walls around the plaza giant posters of Khomeini, the present leader Ali Khamenei and other leading clerics looked down benignly.
It is not often that mosques house tanks and rockets. This one is not yet inaugurated, so perhaps that makes it all right..
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