Echoes of Ahmadinejad

President Ahmadinejad just keeps making increasingly demented speeches. Conspiracy theories, hidden hands, Holocaust denial, you name it, it's all there in his latest, marking the 27th anniversary of the Iranian Islamic revolution.

You thought those offensive cartoons were done by a Danish Christian in a right wing Danish newspaper? Here's Ahmadinejad on who really did it:

I ask everybody in the world not to let a group of Zionists who failed in Palestine (referring to the recent Hamas victory in Palestinian elections) to insult the prophet.

So it wasn't a plot by the West then? Ah, well, Ahmadinejad doesn't think those failed Zionists just control a Danish newspaper:

We ask, why do you insult the prophet? The response is that it is a matter of freedom, while in fact they (who insult the founder of Islam) are hostages of the Zionists.

Addressing Western leaders, the Iranian president said, “You are a bunch of proxy dictators and sergeant majors of Zionists”.

And the Holocaust? Why, a tool of the conspiracy, of course:

Holocaust is a myth that has been used for 60 years by Zionists to blackmail other countries and justify their crimes in the occupied territories

If you are looking for the real Holocaust, go to Palestine and take a look at the crimes of Israel there, or you can also find the real Holocaust in Iraq

It's much the mixture as before, but this time, there's a level of threat to the West there, too

...the people of the US and Europe should pay a heavy price for becoming hostages to Zionists...

He warned these leaders to “pack up the stuff that you unfurled 60 years ago and save yourselves from the wrath of nations...

If you don’t listen to this advice, then the Palestinian people and other nations will force you to submit to their wishes"

Now the curious thing is, how very close his threat is to the threats made by Khaled Meshaal, Palestinian leader of Hamas, in his Damascus mosque speech transmitted on Al Jazeera TV a good week earlier

I say to the [European countries]: Hurry up and apologize to our nation, because if you do not, you will regret it. This is because our nation is progressing and is victorious. Do not leave a black mark in the collective memory of the nation, because our nation will not forgive you.

"Tomorrow, our nation will sit on the throne of the world. This is not a figment of the imagination, but a fact. Tomorrow we will lead the world, Allah willing. Apologize today, before remorse will do you no good. Our nation is moving forwards, and it is in your interest to respect a victorious nation.

[...]

"Our nation will be victorious. When it reaches the leadership of the world, and controls its own decisions, then it will prevent this overt interference [in our affairs], and its pillaging of natural resources, and will prevent these recurring offenses against our land, against our nation, and against our holy places - then you will regret it.

There is an increasing number of non-Muslim and Muslim commentators pointing out the limitations of both hard line western right wing and Islamist analyses of the cartoons affair.

But it still comes as something of a surprise to find one respectable US source confirming David Rennie's view that "the Left" is lining up with Ahmadinejad in seeing the source of the cartoons in a zionist conspiracy. Well, yes, I would hardly be surprised that that might be how Respect or George Galloway saw it. But surely no more than that?

Rennie quotes Professor Juan Cole, the current president of the Middle East Studies Association as saying this:

It is worth noting that in 2004 the Danish editor who commissioned the drawings, Flemming Rose, conducted an uncritical interview with the American neoconservative and Islamophobe Daniel Pipes. Pipes, an extreme right-wing supporter of the Israeli colonization of the Palestinian West Bank, has warned of the dangers of Muslim immigration into Denmark, claiming that "many of them show little desire to fit into their adopted country" and that male Muslim immigrants made up a majority of the country's rapists.)

The implication seems to be that there's some sort of connection between the interview and the cartoons. Incidentally, the interview Coles refers to hardly supports the view of Pipes as an Islamophobe:

He stresses that the conflict is not directed at islam as a personal belief, but at militant islam, an aggressive political ideology striving for the establishment of islamic law, sharia, throughout the world. This difference bears in itself the seed of the conflict’s solution. "If militant islam is the problem, then the opposite, namely moderate islam, must be the solution”, Daniel Pipes concludes. "I don’t mean to say that islam, once and for all, is condemned to be on a collision course with the modern world. The majority of muslims do not wish to live in a regime such as under the Taliban in Afghanistan. We have millions of muslims on our side. If you look at it this deeply (?), the current conflict is one that must be fought out and won within the muslim world

Juan Cole has quite a track record as a consistent promoter of quasi-conspiratorial views of the role of Israel and its supposed surrogates in the Bush administration. Professor Ephraim Karsh excoriates it here. Here are two of the more telling quotes he gives:

The Founding Fathers of the United States deeply feared that a foreign government might gain this level of control over a branch of the United States government, and their fears have been vindicated....

Apparently [Bush] has fallen for a line from the neo-cons in his administration that they can deliver the Jewish vote to him in 2004 if only he kisses Sharon's ass

But David Rennie offers as a much more overtly conspiracist example of supposed left wing alternative thinking an article from the American Free Press.

The American Free Press is not a left wing publication. It is an out-and-out far right racist publication very much interested in Holocaust denial. The Wikipedia entry for the American Free Press includes this:

"American Free Press proclaims a "populist and nationalist" political orientation and runs opinionated articles and editorials aimed at a mainstream audience across the political spectrum. Critics charge that it is a subtle recruiting tool for anti-Semitism and the political extreme right-wing. The classified section includes advertisements for the National Alliance, Christian Identity materials, and Creativity Movement books including White Man's Bible, Nature's Eternal Religion and On the Brink of a Bloody Racial War"

The writer Bollyn who he quotes has a whole series of blatantly anti-semitic articles linked to the one he quotes from. He also neglected to quote this part of the article he links to:

"Are we likely to see cartoons in Jyllands-Posten calling into question the force-fed Zionist myth of the Holocaust, which has become the new "Holy Cause" of Europe?

Why should the criminal history of a Zionist leader or outstanding questions about the the Second World War be more protected than the worshipped prophet of one of the world's major religions?

Take a good look at the non-Danish "cultural" czar of Jyllands-Posten and ask yourself.

Photo: Flemming Rose, the Zionist gatekeeper and cultural czar of Jyllands-Posten, sitting in the "chairman's" seat during a trip to Estonia."

The left wing may be putting out some highly tendentious links between the cartoons row and its supposed origins in the wrongs of the west, but apart from the loonies of Respect, I don't think they are seeing zionism as the hidden hand behind it. In quoting an obviously far right racist and Holocaust denier, into zionist conspiracy theories, as if he were a representative of the left, David Rennie and the Telegraph seem to be at best under-informed, and at worst doing a grave disservice to responsible journalism

Comments

[Robert]

Interesting round-up. Its high time we started seeing all this global unrest not as a conflict of East vs West, or Islam vs the West, but as Moderates vs Fundamentalists. As Simon Schama put it: "militant theocracy against the tolerant Enlightenment."

[Martin Morgan]

The official Iranian news agency IRNA gives the game away in Persian but censors itself in English:

Iranian leader says "blood-sucking Zionists" holding Europe prisoner

Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinezhad has described the leaders of those European countries who have defended the publication of the controversial cartoons as hypocrites and prisoners of "blood-sucking Zionists".

The president's remarks were published by the website of the Iranian official news agency IRNA in its Persian-language section, but not apparently in its English service.

IRNA's Persian service quoted Ahmadinezhad as saying, while referring to the leaders of those countries who had justified the "insults" of the cartoons on the grounds of freedom of expression: "You are prisoners of a bunch of blood-sucking Zionists. Otherwise, if there was freedom of expression in your countries, you would have allowed expressions about the rights of the Palestinians."

In its English service, IRNA on 6 February reported the president as telling a book awards ceremony that those who resorted to "desecration of sanctities and tarnishing the illuminating domain of the prophets" had "embarked on retrospective path of ignorance and misery of the dark medieval style reactionaries."

Source: IRNA website, Tehran, in Persian 6 Feb 06