Make jokes, not war

LAST MAY, the Azeris of Iran demonstrated against an ethnic joke. A cartoon in a leading newspaper pictured various Iranians trying to instruct a cockroach. No matter what language the speaker used, the cockroach answered “What?” in Azeri. So Azeris were being called cockroaches -- and in a newspaper controlled by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, no less.

Not surprisingly, the Azeris were outraged. A grainy photo in the New York Times showed a dense column of Azeri protesters marching with ... “Are those antennae on their heads?” I asked my husband.

For a gleeful moment, I thought that the Azeris were answering a slur with a joke. But what looked like insect feelers were merely raised arms. After the arm-waving, the militants went on to burn buildings, throw rocks and get killed. Same old humorless protests.

Still, they had the government worried. Azeris make up 25% of the Iranian population (and, since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, there’s also been an independent Azeri state, Azerbaijan, right over the border). So Ahmadinejad got a little nervous. He had the newspaper’s editor and the cockroach cartoonist arrested immediately, even though they were his own fundamentalist supporters. That calmed the Azeris -- for the moment.

But they’ll be back. And what about other border-straddling minorities, such as the Baluchis, Uzbeks and Arabs? They can’t take a joke either, I’m sure.

In a flash, I saw how we could use this fatal flaw -- humorlessness -- to keep our foes weak and divided. If we can find the right jokes and plant them in the right places, maybe we won’t need to invade Iran. We can stir up internal dissent and make it collapse of its own accord.

So I Googled “Iranian jokes.” That took me to Jokestan.com. This website contains thousands of Iranian ethnic jokes, at least half of them aimed at Azeris. For example:

Q: What do you call a Turk with half a brain?

A: Gifted.

Azeris are commonly called Turks or Torks because they speak a Turkish- (or Torkish)-based language. And almost all Tork jokes are “so dumb” jokes. The only smart Azeri I encountered on Jokestan was in a joke aimed at another minority:

A Rashti -- an Iranian from the city of Rasht -- complained to his friend that Torks are so stupid.

“How so?” asks the friend.

“My neighbor is a Tork, and he’s got his own wife but he keeps going into my wife’s bed.”

The Rashtis on Jokestan are portrayed as inept at safeguarding their women while the Qazvinis -- people from Qazvin province -- are portrayed as preferring anal sex. I couldn’t find any Baluchi jokes. Perhaps Baluchis are just too few and too poor to warrant website slurs. On the other hand, they’re strategically located on the Pakistani border.

So I have written to the U.S. government, volunteering to travel through these dark corners of the Middle East, collecting ethnic jokes for our assault. Yet, so far, the CIA, National Security Agency and Pentagon have not responded to my offer. I’d like to believe that’s because they already have their own operatives at work on the plan.

Our commander in chief has made it clear that he feels obliged to destabilize the Iranian government because of the threat it poses to world peace. If he must go ahead, I think we owe it to the world at least to try ethnic jokes before we escalate to nuclear weapons.

Speaking of which, has anybody heard any good North Korean jokes?