“Don’t Worry About Him, He’s Just Crazy.”
But why should we worry? Why should Israel, in particular, which has been repeatedly threatened with nuclear annihilation by Ahmadinejad, worry? For after all, he’s just crazy.
It is not just Ahmadinejad. As demonstrators in all of Iran’s major towns and cities have been at pains to allege, for several months now, the whole government of Iran is crazy. It may be worth reminding my reader that by exacting Shia Islamic standards, it is crazy: for the whole Khomeinist revolution was built upon an interpretation of Shia Islam that is far from orthodox.
Now, at the United Nations this week, where Ahmadinejad was making his annual appearance, the man who is not wearing a woman’s frilly dress was actually upstaged by the president-for-life of Libya.
By contrast, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, poster boy for Latin American socialism – and Iran’s most voluble ally in the New World – delivered an uncharacteristically understated performance, devoting half his speech to a (favourable) review of Oliver Stone’s latest movie, and saving only to the other half such stranger things as his pious hope that President Obama would not be assassinated the way President Kennedy was.
I was speaking at an academic conference in Toronto recently with an old friend who, for his sins, was made UN ambassador for his Central European country. He was telling me, I suppose mostly off the record, about the surrealist or “dada” environment of that day job. He’d noticed that conventional diplomats were perfectly aware that others of their colleagues are, quite literally, insane. “You can’t help but notice the symptoms, when you get close to them.”
Please read the whole piece. Warren titles it Madmen at the Gates. I’d only quibble with one aspect of that title. The madmen are actually inside the gates. As I have said before, far to many of the member states of the UN are tyrannies, thugocracies or badly dysfunctional. Yet the left in the West looks to the UN as some sort of enlightened body that deserves full support. Madness.
More proof of just how mad this all is comes from David Harsanyi:
And the last time Israel withdrew from disputed lands without pre-conditions to allow the potential of the Palestinian people to shine through was in Gaza. The Arabs, hungering for the light of freedom, used the gift to elect Hamas – now an Iranian proxy and always a terror organization – to rain rockets down on the civilians that voted to allow the first democratic Arab entity in history.
If Obama expects Israel to end the “occupation” that began in 1967 he is also demanding Israel abandon parts of Jerusalem. If he really anticipates a Palestinian state will be “contiguous territory,” what he expects is that Israel can’t be contiguous.
And when he uses the word “occupation” he is negotiating for the Palestinians. None of the lands up for discussion are “occupied” territory. The president, a highly educated man, knows well that there has never been an ultimate agreement on borders, nor has there ever, in history, been a Palestinian state to occupy.
There is an ethical question that the president might want to answer, as well. Why would the United States support an arrangement that scrubs the West Bank of all its Jews? Why is it so unconscionable to imagine that Jews could live among Muslims in the same way millions of Arabs live within Israel proper? Not many international agreements feature ethnic cleansing clauses.
Nicolas Sarkozy flat-out derided Barack Obama’s naivety at the UN this week. The madness of singing Kumbaya at the UN has been obvious for years. If the world had command of its rationality, UN corruption and waste would have been corrected. In a sane world, the corrupt professional UN bureaucrats who participated in and profited from the Oil for Food program would have been handed lengthy prison sentences – at best. In a world where the madmen were still outside the gates, the person who stood by while Rwandans were slaughtered would not have been elevated to leadership of the UN.
But the madmen are already inside the gates.
Appalling, Left Wing, World news | Gaius September 27, 2009
By jhstuart, September 27, 2009 @ 8:30 am
Sarko has measured Obama and found him wanting.
By Dan Patterson, September 27, 2009 @ 9:21 am
Gooks in the wire.
The world as we knew it has died, we just haven’t had the funeral yet. A thin veneer of civility separates peace from tyranny – think of Europe in 1935 or so – and we are experiencing the erosion of that protective and decorative surface. Insurrection is gainging momentum and the political powers seem to be encouraging it. Madness. Or simple-mindedness. Or ignorance. Whatever it is, the price will be paid by innocents crushed under the heel of tyranny.
History repeats.
Dan Patterson
Arrogant Infidel
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By gary gulrud, September 28, 2009 @ 10:31 am
“The president, a highly educated man,”
I see Mr. Patterson has addressed this lead to obligatory non sequiter.
If he were other than a “post turtle” perhaps his pathology would interest us, but as it stands…