Insane Frenzy Over Ahmadinejad Visit Concocted by Israeli Propagandists
By Michael Collins Piper — AFP
The real news is that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is proudly and unswervingly continuing to assert his nation’s sovereignty in the face of what many now openly call “the NewWorld Order.”
Speaking before the United Nations on Sept. 25, Ahmadinejad said the matter of dispute (by the United States and Israel) surrounding Iran’s nuclear program is “now closed” and that his country will not submit to pressure from “arrogant powers.”
The issue is no longer “political” for the U.S.-dominated UN Security Council, he said, but a “technical” one for observation and monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency. The IAEA has refused to rush to endorse claims by the United States and Israel that Iran is engaged in a fervent drive to build nuclear weapons.
Ahmadinejad did not mention in his UN speech (as he could have) that Israel is known to be one of the planet’s best-armed nuclear powers—central to the problem of atomic proliferation in the Middle East, having been engaged in weapons development since the early 1950s. Israel does not permit inspections of its own nuclear arsenal nor has Israel signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which Iran has, the latter a point the Iranian leader did make. In short, Ahmadinejad—and Iran—will not buckle.
For failing to bend to U.S. and Israeli pressure, Ahmadinejad was hounded during his visit to New York with perhaps the loudest, most outlandish media spectacle that even that city has ever witnessed.
And while the media would have Americans believe the bizarre frenzy that erupted in the streets of NewYork was a spontaneous grass-roots uprising in opposition to the appearance at Columbia University by Ahmadinejad (prior to his UN speech), nothing could be further from the truth.
The carefully-coordinated agitation was “street theater” orchestrated by a well-financed propaganda campaign by the powerful Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, which includes Israeli lobby cogs such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) among its members. The media predictably lent its historic special expertise in demonizing Israel’s enemies (real and perceived) to the circus-like atmosphere.
American politicians also screamed along with Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) sounding like other office-holders and office-seekers declaring, in all apparent seriousness, that Ahmadinejad “is not just a threat to Israel, but the U.S. and the entire world.” That view, say numerous Israeli writers—privately and in small-circulation books and journals—is absolute nonsense. They argue that it would be utter folly for Iran to launch an attack of any kind on Israel or the United States, knowing the retaliation that would follow.
Alter.Net’s UN correspondent, Ian Williams, accurately described the media’s schizophrenic approach to dealing with Ahmadinejad, noting that the media cast the Iranian as both “the supreme evil being and a superklutz at the same time.” In fact, Israel’s publicists have a long record of presenting Israel’s critics in that fashion, adopting a “catch-all” lowest-common-denominator approach designed to both amuse and horrify.
Williams noted that when the president of Columbia University introduced the Iranian, calling him a “petty and cruel dictator” that it sounded “like a plea to Fox News and the ADL to give him a break” for not canceling Ahmadinejad’s appearance. Fox, the television voice of Zionist billionaire Rupert Murdoch, the ADL and others have demanded the Iranian leader not be permitted to have a free forum on an American campus.
AFP correspondent Mark Glenn compared the media’s assault on the Iranian and the behavior of many public officials to the antics displayed in the low-brow Hollywood film Animal House, a raucous, cheap, vulgar “comedy” about a college fraternity.
But there was an uglier, more dangerous side to these events. Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid, The New York Post, glowingly hyped a comment by one person, John Bedell —a Gulf War veteran whose brother died in Iraq—who said, “I wish one of these cops would come and shoot him. I would.” The irony—which Bedell probably doesn’t understand—is rich: Ahmadinejad volunteered for frontline service to fight against Iraq at a time when the United States was funding Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War.
It took a Norwegian graduate student at Columbia, Stina Reksten, to underscore the nature of the efforts to silence Ahmadinejad. “I don’t want to confuse the very dire human rights situation in Iran with the issue here, which is freedom of speech. This is about academic freedom,” said Ms. Reksten, whose views on freedom of expression, as enunciated to The New York Times, clearly diverge with those of the ADL and its allies.
Meanwhile, Renate Bridenthal, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany and a critic of Ahmadinejad, pointed out in a letter to the Times that “if we wish to take the high moral road on grounds of freedom of speech, we fail by insulting an officially invited guest speaker before he has even spoken. This does not do credit to the principle of free speech.”
Some people understood what the commotion was really all about and why the mass media was giving it so much publicity. Anti-war protesters from the Troops Out Now Coalition, who gathered outside the White House to decry the demonization of the Iranian leader, held signs saying “Don’t Appease Israel” and “Don’t Terrorize Iran.” Larry Holmes, a spokesman for the group said, “There’s a hysteria in the media emanating from New York. And we know what it’s about. We know that the government is in very advanced stages of planning for a war in Iran. And now we see the psychological preparation.”
Holmes dismissed complaints about Ahmadinejad’s comments about “the Holocaust” and of matters relating to Iran’s domestic treatment of women and homosexuals as being irrelevant to the big picture: that is whether the United States and/or Israel will launch a military assault on Iran, even using nuclear weapons as some have urged, at a time when the United States is spending $750 million a day to pursue the ongoing bloody debacle in Iraq.
The Washington Post displayed amazing hypocrisy by suggesting editorially that it was Ahmadinejad who “managed to distract attention” from the issue of Iran’s nuclear intentions when it was the media—not Ahmadinejad— that was caterwauling about Ahmadinejad’s views on Israel and the Holocaust.
As informed Americans know, Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric has consistently been deliberately mistranslated or otherwise misrepresented by his enemies.
Regarding Israel, Ahmadinejad had said that he looked forward to the day when a single democratic state composed of all peoples in that country—Jewish, Muslim and Christian alike—would replace the state of Israel, perceived by many to be racist and religiously supremacist. He likened the withering away of that state to the demise of the Soviet Union.
In the case of the Holocaust, Ahmadinejad convened a conference in Teheran (which this writer covered for American Free Press) at which a variety of viewpoints regarding the Holocaust were discussed, with many participants endorsing the popular theory that “six million Jews were gassed by the Nazis”—hardly “denial” of the Holocaust.
While the media also squealed about Ahmadinejad’s remark that there were no homosexuals in Iran, a comment he accompanied with a laugh, it was clear Ahmadinejad was saying that, in Iran, there is not open homosexuality and acceptance of what he called “this phenomenon” as in the United States. Only naïve folks would believe Ahmadinejad was saying there were no homosexuals in Iran.
Alternet’s Ian Williams put it best when he asked: “Of what is Ahmadinejad guilty? He supports the death penalty? Anyone would think he was a Texas governor. Is the president of China ostracized for threatening to rain missiles on Taiwan, for not having elections, or for executing thousands of people a year? No, we give him the Olympics, and all the TV channels will be there.”
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(Issue #41, October 8, 2007, AMERICAN FREE PRESS)
