“Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator. You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated.” ~ Lee C Bollinger, President of Columbia University addressing the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Sept 24th, 2007.
Thus began the opening remarks of the man who invited Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of Iran, to speak at his university. In many ways it sums up the attitude of a nation buried in hypocrisy and media/corporate indoctrination that a man is assessed, condemned, and insulted by his host even before he has begun to speak.
Whatever one’s personal viewpoint of the Iranian president he undoubtedly displays a quality sadly lacking in his American counterpart. That attribute is personal courage. George W Bush has not even the backbone to stand up and face his own American critics. Every speech, every engagement, every opportunity for George W Bush to speak before his countrymen, is screened and ticketed, with invited guests scrutinized by secret service police before ushered into his hallowed presence. Wear the wrong T-shirt, and you’re out on your ear. If you’re not a member of “the Party”, you’re barred.
Freedom of speech, the great right this country hollers from the rooftops, is not available in the presence of the United States’ president.
The greatest sadness, the depths to which this nation has plummeted, is in the mis-information filling the heads of so many US citizens. Read any of the forums relating to Ahmadinejad’s visit, and you’ll find them filled with hatred and violent response. Most, are from people repulsed by his being allowed to set foot on American soil. They are completely unaware of their country’s obligations as permanent host of the United Nations. This is the level of their ignorance, yet they choose to vent hatred and hypocrisy against a man and a nation of whom they lack any knowledge, except for the putrid claptrap emanating from a moribund “free press” long degenerated into a platform for the biased, the petty (Time magazine managed to describe him as both ‘naive’ and a ‘dark genius’ in one sentence), and egocentric. (Today, J. Scott Carpenter’s article in the New York Daily News was entitled, “How Can We Bring Him Down?”)
Why should anyone in the West wish to bring him down, Mister Carpenter? What would it achieve? A greater sense of American pride and patriotism?
It is sad this nation has once again taken to its breast the act of warmongering as a talent and asset to be lauded. From the event now known as 9/11, an occurrence perpetrated by a small group of deluded fanatics mostly of Saudi Arabian origin, and allowed to happen by a US political system long grown fat, idle, and corrupt, has been born a monster that ravages the world like some international King Kong, or Creature from the Black Lagoon. That monster is America, and those presently ravaging the world are Americans.
Blindness is not normally contagious, except in the United States, where millions are unable to see anything but the propaganda spewing forth from Washington:
“Iran is building a nuclear bomb and must be stopped at all costs. Such actions endanger the whole world.”
What has endangered the whole world more than the occupation of a Middle Eastern nation by a foreign power; more than the support of the most powerful nation on earth for a country that has steadily eroded the rights of its Arab neighbors for the past sixty years?
Is a nuclear armed Iran more dangerous than that?
Iran states it has no interest in building a nuclear weapon, but challenges its right to do so, should it wish. After all, it argues, Israel, Pakistan, India, and most Western nations have oodles of nuclear weapons. The UK alone has enough plutonium, around 100 tonnes, to build fourteen thousand bombs. If a small island like the UK has that amount, how much is stockpiled by the US?
Would an Iran with a couple of nuclear devices really be the threat US politicians are so fanatical about posturing? Or, does the truth have more to do with corporate-American interests in the Middle East, its furtherance of empire?
As for the hysteria self-righteously whipped up over Iran’s alleged involvement in the bombings of US forces in Iraq, would not Canada come to America’s aid if it was being militarily occupied by foreign forces? Americans still have this totally stupid idea that somehow the US is doing something good in Iraq; that the Iraqi people want them there, cling to a desire to be ‘Americanized’. Imbibe anything other than the American press or Fox News and realization engenders a situation vastly different from that promulgated by the US media.
Wake up, America!
No-one in the Middle East wants you there. You are the enemy. You are occupying someone else’s country by force of arms. Those who tell Americans anything else are liars.
The leader, or mouthpiece, of these lies, the one from whom most of the falsehoods and iniquities issue, is presently residing in the White House. No-one is allowed to question his ideals. Only the ‘faithful’ are invited to his soirees. He lacks both moral fiber and basic courage. He sends his own countrymen to die for a cause few, but he, believe in.
This week, Ahmadinejad has been likened by Americans, to Adolf Hitler. No-one is suggesting he is a virtuous man, or anything other than a power-mongering politician, but he believes his country has a right to that which others have, but deny him. The regime he represents may not be democratic, it may be loathed by some, but it is Iran’s sovereign government and only Iranians have the right to change it, as only Iraqis had the right to topple Saddam Hussein.
For all his faults, Ahmadinejad displayed certain qualities just by being at Columbia University yesterday. As stated earlier, they were virtues lacking in the United States ‘Commander-in-Chief’.
No-one will ever get the opportunity to stand before Mister George W Bush and say:
“Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator. You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated.”
Filed under: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
