[Peace-discuss] Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Cole's comments here are accurate and even important as far as they go, but 
they are shockingly incomplete: they omit the 40-year policy of the US, the 
principal source of murder and dispossession in the Mideast.  Were it not for 
the US insistence on controlling Mideast energy resources, Israel would not have 
been able to avoid a more just arrangement with its neighbors; it would not have 
been corrupted into an American military cat's paw (though admittedly a quite 
enthusiastic one).  --CGE]

	Saturday, February 27, 2010
	Ahmadinejad once again fails to call for the annihilation of Israel,
	despite what you heard on CNN

I saw Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren interviewed by Wolf Blitzer on CNN Friday 
afternoon. Oren said that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had called for 
the annihilation of Israel, and was therefore speaking of genocide.

It is dreary to see this constant drumbeat of dishonest propaganda. Whatever one 
thinks of Ahmadinejad or the Iranian regime, one should not misrepresent their 
statements, since that will lead to bad policy-making.

The Washington Post also wrote, "Ahmadinejad, a Holocaust denier, spoke of 
Israel's eventual "demise and annihilation". In fact, Ahmadinejad never 
mentioned Israel as a country at all, and spoke only about what he called the 
'Zionist regime.' He favors an admittedly odd form of the 'one state solution' 
in which Palestinians and at least some Jews would all vote for the same government.

So this is what Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Thursday at a press 
conference in Damascus:

"Iran, Syria, the Palestinian Resistance and Lebanon are ready to meet any 
conditions, and we hope that the enemies of the nations of the region will 
change their course and instead walk beside regional states in cooperation. 
Insofar as the Zionist regime threatens Lebanon and Syria and prominent 
personalities of these two countries every day, it must accept its end and grant 
in their entirety the rights of the Palestinian nation."

That is, Ahmadinejad began by offering an olive branch to any former enemies 
that wanted to make peace. But he characterized the 'Zionist regime,' i.e. the 
Israeli government with its current ideology, as intrinsically belligerent, and 
insisted that this 'regime' must 'accept its own end' and grant Palestinians 
their full rights (presumably, citizenship and property rights, which they now 
lack).

Ahmadinejad seems to see Zionism as an ideology as essentially unwilling to 
allow Palestinian human rights, and so calls for it to acquiesce in its 
obsolescence.

Ahmadinejad did not mention Israel and did not call for any genocides, or anyone 
to be killed, or war. He asked Zionists to see that their ideology has no 
future. In the past he has compared his vision of the fall of what he calls the 
Zionist regime to the fall of the Soviet Union, which happened peacefully and 
with no annihilation of the population.

Personally, I see Zionism as just a garden variety form of modern romantic 
nationalism not different in any way from scores of other nationalisms 
(including Arab nationalism, Serbian nationalism, and Iranian nationalism).

Zionism constructs Palestinian-Israelis as second-class citizens, and attempts 
to deny Palestinians in the Occupied Territories basic rights. But other 
nationalisms are also guilty of exclusions, though there are unique aspects to 
the Zionist project. Shiite-tinged Iranian nationalism disallows Sunni Iranians, 
perhaps 10-15% of the population, from serving as president, and Sunni provinces 
such as Baluchistan are the most deprived of resources and services. Only civic 
nationalism of the American and French varieties has universalistic aspirations, 
and even there it is flawed by a latent privileging of some groups within the 
nation (Protestant whites in the US, secular-minded native-born French of 
Catholic extraction in France).

Ahmadinejad may be blinkered and hypocritical, but he did not call for the 
annihilation of or genocide against anyone.

Only committed Zionists would see a one-state solution as the 'annihilation' of 
Israel.

In any case, now that a two-state solution has been made virtually impossible by 
Israel's determined colonization of the West Bank, a one-state solution is the 
most likely outcome of what will probably be a 50-year struggle for basic 
Palestinian rights to citizenship in a state. The rest of us are going to be 
mightily inconvenienced by this unnecessary and stupid conflict, and the 
inconvenience will only be increased by equally stupid propaganda from 
unreliable narrators like Oren.

http://www.juancole.com/

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