Is There An Echo In Here?
Here's a little item that indicates - quite clearly, I think - that Mad Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is very, very, very conversant with certain leftist talking points that have been in play for a while now. He says that despite all his vile, hateful rhetoric about wiping Israel off the face of the Earth, his problem is not with Jews. His problem is with Zionists.
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Iran's president, responding to Western criticism of his questioning of the Holocaust and a call for Israel to be "wiped off the map," said on Thursday his quarrel was with Zionists and not Jews.
But Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did not respond directly when asked by a reporter if he had been correctly translated as saying last year he sought the elimination of the Jewish state. He said Zionists were aggressors and murderers who had driven Palestinians from their home to set up the Jewish state and then occupied Palestinian lands.
"We love everyone around the world. Jews, Christians, Muslims, non-Muslims, non-Jews, non-Christians — we have no problem with people," he told a news conference on the sidelines of a U.N. General Assembly meeting.
"Zionists are Zionists, period. They are not Jews, they are not Christians, and they are not Muslims," he said. "They are a power group, a power party, and we oppose the oppression and the aggression that any party that seeks pure raw power goes after."
Zionism is the name of the movement to establish a Jewish homeland that led to the creation of the state of Israel nearly 60 years ago. Ahmadinejad says he favors a return of Palestinians to the land now called Israel, and a referendum "with the participation of everyone" to determine its fate.
Felice Gaer, director of the Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights, dismissed the president's distinction between Jews and Zionists.
"Ahmadinejad's desire to rid the world of Israel is the transference of the classical bigoted treatment of the Jew to the state of the Jews," she said. "There is an inextricable historic Jewish connection with the land of Israel. As Martin Luther King said, 'When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews."'
Now, why is this important? Because the left says the exact same thing. Here on this blog in the comments in fact.
Israel is not “the Jews,” and to instantly jump up and down about the “the Jews” the minute foreign policies concerning Israel are discussed shows a very brainwashed mentality.
The commenter accuses me of being brainwashed because of earlier remarks - go read the thread if you're interested. (His argument with me was completely negated by the Shura council's remarks that said there would be no truce with the West until it submitted. He never did answer after that.) The point is, Ahmadinejad is playing exactly into the beliefs structure of the left. He is, most assuredly, doing so on purpose to gain maximum positive press from the left-leaning press. Understand this: if Ahmadinejad gets nuclear weapons he will use them against Israel. It will not matter one whit whether the people who are being incinerated are Zionists or Jews or Muslims or Atheists.
He will incinerate them all. That day comes closer every day we give him diplomatic and media slack. It has to stop if we are not going to go off the cliff together. We are all in this. Better wake up folks and stop buying what monsters are trying to sell. I noted that Ezra Kein thought Mad Mahmoud was winning the media war in an earlier post. He can only win that war with the willing assistance of the Western media.
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BuzzTracker.com — Sunday, 24 September , 2006 @ 9:29 pm
By Bob, Thursday, 21 September , 2006 @ 10:02 pm
Gaius – I don’t know who the “leftist†poster you quote is, and it’s hard even to get a sense for what they were trying to say from the snippet you present. But I take exception to the idea that “the left†is some monolithic entity that is unanimously hostile to either the U.S. or Israel, or that they are the dupes or the secret allies of people like Ahmedinejad. I think it’s safe to say that any Democrat you can think of (which doesn’t include, by the way, leftist extremists like Noam Chomsky) is safely on the same side of the disagreement with Iran as you and your conservative friends. Various people may advocate different strategies, like limited diplomatic engagement, Security Council resolutions, sanctions, etc., but “the left†is certainly not on the side of Ahmedinejad – neither wittingly nor unwittingly.
I feel that there is a concerted effort on the part of “the right†to slander “the left†by equating opposition to the Iraq war – or to certain other controversial Bush administration policies – with de facto support for al Qaeda or the Iranian theocracy. It’s a rather dishonest approach that unfairly brands half of the country as traitors only to attempt to score cheap political points. It has much more to do with the typical Bush administration tactics of smearing and laying waste to anyone who dares to question their absolute power, than to any honest assessment of the facts about who liberals are and what they really stand for.
By Gaius, Thursday, 21 September , 2006 @ 10:24 pm
Follow the link, read the comment section.
When I say “the left” I am not trying to blanket any and all people who oppose the administration on a lot of things. Hell, I oppose Bush on immigration, big time. I use the term specifically for the “blame America first” crowd.