'Rosewater' Journalist Slams Brooklyn Art Vandals: 'They Finished the Iranian Government's Job'

Maziar Bahari — the Iranian journalist jailed in 2009 after appearing on ”The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” and the man who inspired Stewart’s first feature film, “Rosewater” — has a word for the type of person who would deface a protest mural of a persecuted Muslim woman.

“They’re cowards,” Bahari, 47, said in an interview. ”They are like bigots and cowards all around the world. Ignorance is universal, and also cowardice.”

Bahari referred not only to the anonymous individuals who recently paintballed the 28-foot mural of jailed Iranian cartoonist Atena Farghadani in Red Hook, Brooklyn, but to the anonymous members of the community who have rallied behind closed doors for it to be taken down.

“I just wish the people who vandalized the murals — who somehow are against it — I wish they would come and talk to us, and maybe we would reach a common ground,” Bahari said. “But the people who are criticizing it are cowards.”

The woman depicted in the mural is a 29-year-old activist and artist currently jailed in Iran for drawing a cartoon that allegedly insulted the supreme leader.

When speaking to a New York Times journalist for a story on the neighborhood row, residents in the anti-mural camp declined to give their names.

“After 9/11, people don’t want to see that,” one of them said, reportedly adding that some on the block associated the image with the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. “People around here are saying, ‘After what they did to us, let’s worry about our own instead of somebody’s right to put up art.’”

Yet the currents of anger running through the community have been strong enough — and the paintball attacks jarring enough — for the woman who owns the building, Wylie Goodman, and the woman who painted the mural, South African street artist Faith47, to want to take it down.

Faith47 wrote in a Facebook post on Monday:

“We’re speaking of issues of freedom of speech, or censorship, within Iran. But in fact what the mural highlighted was those same issues and latent racism within individuals of a small community of New York City. So on reflection I find, that what is glaringly obvious both within oppressive state structures, is also embedded in people’s hearts.”

The mural is tentatively scheduled to be removed on Wednesday. (There’s still a chance, however, that it won’t be. After speaking with the various parties involved, we get the feeling that everything is still very up in the air.)

“Art is very subjective, and I understand why there were a range of reactions to the mural’s content, especially when people were not informed it was going up beforehand,” Goodman, the building owner, told Patch in an email. ”As an individual, and in collaboration with the organization, we could have done a better job to listen to neighbors and address their concerns upfront to reduce tensions.”

Bahari’s organization, Not a Crime, commissioned the Red Hook mural of Farghadani — showing her in a headscarf, and missing a mouth — as one of a series of street murals throughout New York City protesting Iran’s crackdown on free speech and education.

Most of the other pieces are in Harlem, where Bahari said the community has been incredibly receptive to the art and its message.

Not so in Brooklyn.

“Through the grapevine, we hear that firefighters live in the neighborhood,” he said. “But a journalist imprisoned in Iran has nothing to do with 9/11.”

“In a way,” he added, “people who want to respect the memory of the people killed in 9/11 should celebrate the fact that we are fighting for a victim of fundamentalist Islam. The same mentality that created that tragedy on September 11 — that mentality has incarcerated Atena Farghadani.”

Instead, Bahari said, a handful of Red Hook residents have proven themselves no less ignorant than Iranian officials.

“In Brooklyn, they finished the Iranian government’s job by trying to silence Atena,” he said.