[Peace-discuss] Iran and the Judeocide

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Interesting corrective to MSM's propaganda picture of Iran.
--CGE]

 The Monolith Crumbles: Reality and Revisionism in Iran  	
Thursday, 02 March 2006

It is a well-known fact – except among the American media, the
American government, and about 98.7 percent of the American
people – that Iran is not a monolithic state where sheep-like
masses bray with a single voice in chorus with their demented
leaders, but is, on the contrary, a complex society where many
conflicting opinions on matters political, religious, social,
historical, etc., contend with each other in open debate.
True, it does have a government dominated by repressive
clerics, who exercise the kind of veto power over secular law
that George W. Bush's vaunted "base" dreams of seeing
established in the United States; but Iran is far more open
than, say, Saudi Arabia or China, just to name two countries
where the Bush Family and friends have long engorged their
bellies through insider connections with the ruling cliques.

Therefore it must have come as a great shock to the system for
Americans this week to hear Iran's former president, Mohammad
Khatami, rail against the ignorant Holocaust revisionism
mouthed by his successor, the hardline flibbertigibbet Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad. (Excerpts after the jump below.) Or rather, it
would have come as a shock to the American system to hear
Khatami's words – if Americans had actually been told about
them. But it serves no interests among America's own ruling
cliques to dilute the current line of the day: that Iran is a
hellhole of unremitting evil, a new Nazi Germany led by a new
Hitler. So Khatami's remarks, reported widely elsewhere in the
world, were not allowed to disturb the lie-drugged slumber of
the American consciousness.

No one knows what dark dreams stir in Ahmadinejad's noggin, of
course; he seems from most accounts to be an unpleasant
character, as rabid fundamentalists usually are, proud of his
willful ignorance, which he mistakes for steadfast integrity.
(The type is not unknown among world leaders today.) However,
in coming to grips with the Iran "crisis" that is being forced
upon us, there are two salient facts to keep in mind.

First of all, Ahmadinejad's malevolent blather does not
represent the entirety of the Iranian people – or even the
entirety of the Iranian government, as even a cursory
examination of current Tehran politics shows – any more than
George W. Bush and his rapacious gang of cronies and cranks
represents the entirety of the American people. (Although at
the moment, Bush has far greater control over the American
government than Ahmadinejad has in Iran.)

Second, and perhaps most importantly, it is highly unlikely
that Ahmadinejad would have ever been elected president if
Bush and his crony-cranks had not relentlessly and ruthlessly
undercut every attempt by the moderate government of Khatami
to forge a new relationship between Iran and the United
States. The greatest opportunity came after September 11, of
course, when Iran sought to help the US break al Qaeda, a
common enemy that threatened both nations. But Bush and his
circle, as we now know, were not interested in breaking al
Qaeda or fighting terrorism; they were interested in
"establishing a military footprint" in Iraq, as part of a
wide-ranging plan to "project dominance" over the energy
resources of the Middle East and Central Asia, while fomenting
"creative destruction" throughout the region, in the belief
that when the resultant rivers of blood had at last subsided,
there would be a series of obedient client regimes installed
in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Afghanistan and elsewhere – including,
in the dreams of some of the crankiest cronies, new, even more
obedient American satraps in Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Therefore, there could be no accommodation with moderate
elements in Iran; on the contrary, the existence of a moderate
faction within the Iranian power structure could only be a
hindrance to the Bushists' avowed goals. How could you
maintain the profitable, fear-fomenting image of a dastardly
nation – a member of the "axis of evil," no less – bent on the
destruction of "the American way of life," if its leaders are
trying reach an accommodation with you, if they speak of
moderation, of a "dialogue among civilizations"? Khatami –
already hemmed in by the hardline mullahs, unable to deliver
all of his promised domestic reforms – was also left with
nothing to show for his moderate foreign policy. Instead, Bush
confirmed the mullah's criticism of Khatami: "You reach out to
the infidels, and what do you get? They spit in your face,
they try to destroy us."

(There is a remarkable parallel here to the curious dynamic
between Bush and Osama bin Laden, whereby almost every action
undertaken by Bush tends to confirm bin Laden's vision of the
world: "You see? I told you America was a Crusader Nation bent
on attacking Islam – and now Bush has invaded Iraq and all its
holy sites for no reason whatsoever. You see? I told you
America regards Muslims as nothing more than dogs and beasts –
now see how they treat our brothers in their secret prisons!"
And so on and depressingly on. Even Bush himself has
acknowledged this odd symbiosis, when, just this week, he
admitted that bin Laden's (or "bin Laden's") sudden appearance
in the closing days of the 2004 presidential election tipped
the race in his favor. As Eric Alterman and others have noted,
bin Laden is more than savvy enough to know that such an
intervention would have precisely that effect: bolstering
Bush. Both men need each other to stoke the fear and hatred
they feed upon.)

Just as the September 11 attacks were openly regarded by the
Bushists as an "opportunity" for implementing their
long-planned militarist agenda – "Through my tears, I see
opportunity," Bush declared just days after the strike – so
too the election of Ahmadinejad was a god-send for the gang: a
hard-line goon straight out of central casting, waving the red
flag of Holocaust-denial before the world. Now some serious
warmongering and fear-fomenting could be done! For who would
defend such a moral cretin? Through him, you could defame and
dehumanize an entire nation: the necessary prerequisite for
any mass blood-letting you have in mind.

But one doesn't have to defend Ahmadinejad – or Khatami, for
that matter – in order to oppose the instigation of a foolish
and murderous military action against Iran. It is self-evident
that such an action would kill thousands of innocent people
and set in motion a chain of monstrous consequences beyond
anyone's control – including the certainty of more terrorism
and    more hatred for America, the great likelihood of global
economic ruin, and the very real possibility of actually
launching the world war between the West and Islam that the
Bushists like to pretend is already taking place.

Yet that appears to be where we are heading. Although some say
that the Bushists are now too weak politically and perhaps
militarily to strike at Iran – an argument that is more of a
projected wish than a reality, I fear – no one should ever
underestimate the foolishness, recklessness, avarice, greed
and callousness of the Bush Faction. The disaster in Iraq
stands as indisputable proof of their own moral cretinism and
incompetent folly.

So it would be nice if the American people could be given a
more variegated view of Iran, as represented in the comments
below from Khatami and some of the Iranian press. But where's
the "opportunity" for war profits, war powers and world
dominance in that?

Excerpts from Agence France Presse:

Iran's former reformist President Mohammad Khatami has
described the Holocaust as a "historical reality" - a stinging
attack on his controversial and revisionist  successor Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad. "We should speak out if even a single Jew is
killed. Don't forget that one of the crimes of Hitler, Nazism
and German national socialism was the massacre of innocent
people, among them many Jews," the cleric said in comments
carried in the Iranian press  Wednesday.

The Holocaust, he asserted, should be recognized "even if this
historical reality has been misused and there is enormous
pressure on the Palestinian people." Ahmadinejad has caused
international outrage by insisting the Holocaust was a myth
used to justify the creation of Israel.

Khatami served as Iran's president from 1997 to 2005, and
attempted to open up Iran to the West and initiate a "dialogue
among civilizations" - in stark contrast to the
ultra-conservative agenda of Ahmadinejad. The former
president, who has shied away from the political limelight
since leaving office, also asserted Muslims were not out to
persecute Jews.

"The persecution of Jews, just like Nazism, is a Western
phenomenon. In the east, we have always lived side by side
with them. And we follow a religion that states that the death
of an innocent person is the death of all of humanity,"
Khatami said…

Ahmadinejad also came under attack from the prominent and
centrist Shargh newspaper, which complained that "the
Holocaust has, as wished for by the president, become a topic
of our foreign policy. The Jewish question was never a problem
for Iran or Islam, and is a Christian-European problem," the
paper argued. "Don't we have enough with the nuclear question,
human rights, free elections and political in-fighting, so do
we need to add another problem to that?" it said, saying Iran
would be better off "thinking of the creation of a Palestinian
state rather than the destruction of Israel."

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