If anything, the scriptures point to the Third Anti-Christ as being none other than George W. Bush, readers.
Frightening!
"'Hitler' does New York" by Pepe Escobar/Asia Times September 26, 2007
CBS reporter: But the American people, sir, believe that your country [Iran] is a terrorist nation, exporting terrorism in the world. You must have known that visiting the World Trade Center site would infuriate many Americans.
President Mahmud Ahmadinejad: Well, I'm amazed. How can you speak for the whole of the American nation? You are representing the media and you're a reporter. The American nationis made up of 300 million people. There are different points of view over there.
The new "Hitler", at least for a while, has lodged in a prosaic midtown Manhattan hotel. Contrary to a plethora of demonizing myths, this Persian werewolf did not evade his abode to eat kids for breakfast in Central Park. Instead, he turned on a carefully calibrated public relations charm offensive. Whatever his polemical views, for a now-seasoned head of state like Ahmadinejad to turn astonishing US disinformation on Iran, the Middle East and US foreign policy for his own advantage ended up as a string of slam-dunks.
Articulate, evasive, manipulative, the Iranian president - even lost in translation - was especially skillful in turning US corporate media's hysteria upside down consistently to paint those in the administration of President George W Bush as incorrigible warmongers. Both at the National Press Club, via video-conference, and live at Columbia University, Ahmadinejad even had the luxury of joking about fabled Western "freedom of information" - as so many are still "trying to prevent people from talking".
He scored major points among the target audience that really matters: worldwide Muslim public opinion. Contrasting with a plethora of corrupt Arab leaders, Ahmadinejad has been carefully positioning himself as a Muslim folk hero capable of standing up to Western arrogance and defending the rights of the weak (the Palestinians). The way he deflected US ire on the enemy's own turf will only add to his standing.
At the United Nations this week, a remix of 2002 couldn't be more inevitable: it's the same soundtrack of tortuous diplomacy with the bongos and congas and special effects of war beefing up the background. By going on preemptive public relations, Ahmadinejad was clever enough not to commit the same mistake of the previous, "invisible" Hitler, Saddam Hussein.
He was also clever in preempting ear-splitting rumors of a next war: "Talk about war is basically a propaganda tool." One of his key points may not have made an impact in the US, but resonated widely around the world, and not only in the Muslim street: "We oppose the way the US government tries to rule the world"; there are "more humane methods of establishing peace". He assured that no Iranian weapons are flowing into Iraq, adding that "regional countries in the Middle East don't need outside interference".
On uranium enrichment, he repeatedly stressed that it is Iran's right, as a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency, to conduct a "legal" and "peaceful" nuclear program. "Why should a nation depend on another?" But if the US would engage in peace talks, so would Iran: "International law is equal to everyone." As for the US and France, they "are not the world" - a reference to both the Bush administration's and the French saber-rattling. "France is a very cultured society, it would not support war." Humanitarian imperialist French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner was summarily brushed aside: he needs to attain "higher maturity".
On Israel, Ahmadinejad said, "We do not recognize a regime based on discrimination, occupation and expansionism," and he said that country "last week attacked Syria and last year attacked Lebanon"; pretty much what most of the Middle East agrees with. He may have granted that the Holocaust did take place, but the world needs "more research on it". The Holocaust is not his main point: it always serves as an intro to one of his key themes - why should the Palestinians pay the price for something that happened in Europe? He said he wanted a "clear" answer. No one deigned to provide it.
To put in perspective the Iranian hostage crisis in the early days of the Islamic Revolution in 1979, he said one would need to "go back to US intervention in Iran since 1953". His hosts preferred to change the subject. Humming non-stop in the background noise was the "wipe Israel of the map" myth. No one had the intellectual decency to point out that what he really said, in Farsi, in a speech on October 2005 to an annual anti-Zionist conference in Iran, was that "the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time". He was doing no more than quoting the late ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini - hoping that an unfair (toward Palestine) regime would be replaced by another one more equitable; he was not threatening to nuke Israel. Warmongers anyway don't bother to check the facts.
You've got to change your evil ways
US corporate media's treatment of the new "Hitler" seemed to have been scripted by the same ghostwriter lodged in the same (White) House. On 60 Minutes, the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) was firing on all cylinders for a casus belli - from "There's no doubt Iran is providing the IEDs" (improvised explosive devices, in Iraq) to "Why don't you just stop denying that you're building a nuclear bomb?" Ahmadinejad was bemused, to say the least. CNN for its part could not resist proclaiming, "His state even sponsors terrorism ... in some cases even against US troops in Iraq."
Ahmadinejad succinctly unveiled to the Associated Press the reasons for so much warmongering - in a way that even a kid would understand: "I believe that some of the talk in this regard arises first of all from anger. Secondly, it serves the electoral purposes domestically in this country. Third, it serves as a cover for policy failures over Iraq."
An even more appalling measure of Western arrogance - also speaking volumes about "us" when confronted with the incomprehensible "other" - is the diatribe with which the president of Columbia University, Lee Bollinger, chose to "greet" his guest, a head of state. Bollinger, supposedly an academic, spoke about confronting "the mind of evil". His crass behavior got him 15 minutes of fame. Were President Bush to be greeted in the same manner in any university in the developing world - and motives would abound also to qualify him as a "cruel, petty dictator" - the Pentagon would have instantly switched to let's-bomb-them-with-democracy mode.
Ahmadinejad, to his credit, played it cool. Stressing, in a quirky fashion, his "academic" credentials, he unleashed a poetic rant on "science as a divine gift" just to plunge once again into the Palestinian tragedy. He stressed how Iran "is friendly with the Jewish people" - which is a fact (at least 30,000 Jews live undisturbed in Iran). Then back to the key point: Why are the Palestinians paying the price for something they had nothing to do with? Iran has a "humanitarian proposal" to solve the problem - a referendum where Palestinians would choose their own political destiny.
In the absence of informed debate, Ahmadinejad stressed his points the way he wanted to. Iran does not need a nuclear bomb. Iran does not want to manufacture a nuclear bomb. But telling other countries what they can and cannot do is another matter entirely. He is more than aware that the nuclear dossier is "a political issue" - a question of "two or three powers who think they can monopolize science and knowledge". It's up to a sovereign Iran to decide whether it needs nuclear fuel. "Why should we need fuel from you? You don't even give us spare parts for aircraft."
He also stressed that Iran is a victim of terrorism - a reference to the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, a micro-terrorist group by any other name, formerly protected by Saddam, now supported by the Bush administration; but he was also referring to destabilizing black ops by US special forces in the strategically crucial provinces of Khuzestan and Balochistan.
Ahmadinejad was not questioned in detail on internal repression, intimidation of independent journalists, what his Interior Ministry is up to, from a crackdown on women not wearing the veil properly to more sinister, unsubstantiated "collaboration with America" charges. When executions were mentioned, he quipped, "Don't you have capital punishment in the US?" - and defended them on the ground that these were drug smugglers.
Nobody questioned him on his disastrous economic policies, on the competence of his ministers, on an embryonic pact between Iran and Saudi Arabia to prevent another war in the Middle East, on the upcoming, pivotal summit of the Caspian littoral states in Tehran where Ahmadinejad, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Vladimir Putin will discuss what happens next - from technical aspects of Iran's nuclear program to Bush's warmongering impetus. Anyway, Ahmadinejad made it clear: Iran is "ready to negotiate with all countries". The same could not be said about the Bush White House.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon would have liked this UN General Assembly to discuss seriously climate change and the looming water wars. But nobody - not even diplomats - is really paying attention. It's all about Bush against the "new Hitler". Gaza is being collectively punished, and Tony "invade Iraq" Blair bleats platitudes about "peace". About 100,000 brave monks are in the streets of Yangon defying Myanmar's military junta - and the UN is not even listening ("Bring democracy to the Burmese people," anyone?). It's just war, war, war.
New Yorkers may have shown the new "Hitler" a very ugly face, but at least they should know the war remix's hard sell is not dubbed in Farsi."
Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007).
Monday, September 24, 2007 Columbia to be punished for hosting the new Hitler enemy
Monday September 24, 2007 11:05 EST
Glenn Greenwald
All of the hysteria over Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's speaking at Columbia University is so tiresome for so many reasons, beginning with the fact that it is all rather transparently motivated by exactly what Juan Cole says: "The real reason his visit is controversial is that the American right has decided the United States needs to go to war against Iran. Ahmadinejad is therefore being configured as an enemy head of state."
In their minds, we are at war with Iran -- even though, in reality, i.e., according to our Constitution, we are not -- and all of the ensuing hysteria is rooted in the fantasy world they occupy in which Iran is our Enemy at War. By their nature, such fantasies cannot be reasoned with.
This desire to prevent people from speaking when they express views that one finds offensive is just always baffling. That is true in general, and includes even pettier though still inane suppression efforts such as this one, which recently resulted in the recission of an invitation to Larry Summers to speak at an event for the University of California regents. Other than converting the individual into a martyr and dramatically elevating their importance, what do people think is accomplished when a person with a certain viewpoint is denied a forum?
In any event, there is not much new worth saying about the "debate" over whether Columbia should have invited Ahmadinejad to speak. People either believe in the value of having academic institutions be a venue for airing all viewpoints or they do not.
Exactly as is true for the First Amendment, it is so often the case that those who claim to believe in this principle when it comes to ideas they like suddenly find all sorts of reasons why the "principle" does not apply when it comes to ideas they hate most. And -- as is true for Osama bin Laden -- nobody has done more to inflate the importance and power of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (who, just by the way, is not even the leader of Iran, let alone the WorldWide Evil Axis of Hitlerian Dictators) than those who have focused on him obsessively.
But what is new, and what most certainly is worth commenting upon, is this extremely disturbing report from The New York Sun regarding the threats made by Democratic State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver to use state power to punish Columbia for inviting a speaker whom Silver dislikes. Silver -- who, among other things, has long been a leader in efforts to free convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard from prison -- did not even bother to disguise the threats he was making:
As the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, prepares to address Columbia University today amid a storm of student protest, state and city lawmakers say they are considering withholding public funds from the school to protest its decision to invite the leader to campus.Silver sounds like two-bit hooligan making not-so-veiled threats to Columbia ("Obviously, there's some degree of capital support that has been provided to Columbia in the past. These are things people might take a different view of") for committing the crime of inviting a speaker whom Silver finds offensive. Is there anyone who fails to see how dangerous and improper this is -- not to mention unconstitutional -- that government officials threaten and punish universities for hosting speakers whom the officials dislike? Do we want our universities to be able to provide speaking venues only to individuals who are approved by the likes of Sheldon Silver and Dov Hikind?In an interview with The New York Sun, the speaker of the Assembly, Sheldon Silver, said lawmakers, outraged over Columbia's insistence on allowing the Iranian president to speak at its World Leaders Forum, would consider reducing capital aid and other financial assistance to the school.
Lawmakers warned about other consequences for Columbia and its president, Lee Bollinger, who has resisted campus and public pressure to cancel Mr. Ahmadinejad's appearance today, arguing that Columbia's commitment to scholarship requires the school to directly confront offensive ideas.
"There are issues that Columbia may have before us that obviously this cavalier attitude would be something that people would recall," Mr. Silver said. "Obviously, there's some degree of capital support that has been provided to Columbia in the past. These are things people might take a different view of . . . knowing that this is that kind of an institution" . . .
"It's not going to go away just because this episode ends. Columbia University has to know . . . that they will be penalized," an assemblyman of Brooklyn, Dov Hikind, who also attended the rally, said. The lawmaker said Mr. Ahmadinejad should be arrested when he sets foot on campus.
What this really illustrates more than anything else is the true danger to our national character and basic liberties from being in a permanent state of war fighting. When we become a society that just leaps from one New Ultimate Hitler Enemy Who Must Be Destroyed to the next, we ensure that all of our political values and institutions become infected by this bloodthirsty mentality. When we have one Enemy after the next to annihilate, who really cares about dreary luxuries like due process or restraints on government power or the First Amendment? Saddam/binLaden/Ahemdinijad/Assad is Evil, a Hitler, and all power must be vested without limits in our Leaders so they can destroy him/them.
Along those same lines, this "interview" of Ahmadinejad by Scott Pelley of "60 Minutes" has to be read to be believed. As Ezra Klein says: "Pelley declined to interview Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and instead popped off aggressive statements as if he were a White House press release with a cardiovascular system."
It would be perfectly appropriate for Pelley to pose aggressive and challenging questions to Ahmadinejad. That is actually what reporters in general are supposed to do when questioning any government officials, not merely the Foreign Muslim Enemy du Jour. Fathom how elevated our political discourse would be if "reporters" like Pelley were even a fraction as adversarial and challenging when interviewing Bush officials as Pelley was when yelling at Ahmadinejad.
But Pelley did not question him so much as make a series of highly dubious war-fueling statements as fact. And far more revealing than Pelley's tone were the premises of his "questions" -- ones which blindly assumed every accusation of the Bush administration towards Iran to be true -- such as these:
PELLEY: Sir, what were you thinking? The World Trade Center site is the most sensitive place in the American heart, and you must have known that visiting there would be insulting to many, many Americans.Scott Pelley wants Ahmadinejad to know that -- like all of us -- he "owes President Bush." Almost every word out of Pelley's mouth was a faithful recitation of the accusations made by the Bush White House. Ahmadinejad obviously does not watch much American news because he seemed genuinely surprised that someone he thought was a reporter was doing nothing other than reciting the script of the government.AHMADINEJAD: Why should it be insulting?
PELLEY: Well, sir, you're the head of government of an Islamist state that the United States government says is a major exporter of terrorism around the world. . . .
PELLEY: But the American people, sir, believe that your country is a terrorist nation, exporting terrorism in the world. You must have known that visiting the World Trade Center site would infuriate many Americans, as if to be mocking the American people.
AHMADINEJAD: Well, I'm amazed. How can you speak for the whole of the American nation?
PELLEY: Well, the American nation . . .
PELLEY: Mr. President, you say that the two nations are very close to one another, but it is an established fact now that Iranian bombs and Iranian know-how are killing Americans in Iraq. You have American blood on your hands. Why?
AHMADINEJAD: Well, this is what the American officials are saying. . . .
PELLEY: Mr. President, American men and women are being killed by your weapons in Iraq. You know this.
AHMADINEJAD: No, no, no.
PELLEY: Why are those weapons there?
AHMADINEJAD: Who's saying that?
PELLEY: The American Army has captured Iranian missiles in Iraq. The critical elements of the explosively formed penetrator bombs that are killing so many people are coming from Iran. There's no doubt about that anymore. The denials are no longer credible, sir. . . .
AHMADINEJAD: Very good. If I may. Are you an American politician? Am I to look at you as an American politician or a reporter? . . . .
PELLEY: Mr. President, you must have rejoiced more than anyone when Saddam Hussein fell. You owe President Bush. This is one of the best things that's ever happened to your country.
Apparently, among the American press now, it is unchallengably true that the Iranian Government has the Blood of American Soliders on its hands and is a "terrorist state." I guess our "journalists" have decided that "only a fool -- or possibly a Frenchman -- could conclude otherwise." After all, even the left-wing Michael Gordon and the NYT admit this, and they couldn't be wrong about such matters.
And besides, our Top Military Commanders in Iraq are making these accusations, and we all just learned last week from Our Senate that we must never question "the honor and integrity . . . of members of the United States Armed Forces." Our media, of course, has been diligently following that Rule for many, many years.
Skepticism of government officials? Media objectivity? First Amendment freedoms? Due Process and Habeas Corpus and diplomacy? Ahmadinejad is Hitler, Our Enemy, and We are at War -- with him and forever. That's all we really need to know.
"Ahmadinejad, the toast of the Big Apple" by Larry Chin Online Journal Tuesday September 25, 2007
That’s toast, as in burned to a crisp.
It's clear from the way in which Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was treated on his visit to New York that not only will he remain the target of massive scapegoating as a "terrorist," but the US fully intends to attack Iran, and the American public will enthusiastically support it, if and when it happens.
Ahmadinejad, whose visit was “decried” by scores of US politicians and “civic leaders," has spent the length of Monday, September 24, being sandbagged and openly blasted and baited endlessly at both Columbia University, and at the National Press Club, where the questions from so-called reporters and journalists consisted of nothing but waves of attacks, character assassinations, and accusations. The US media is clearly, openly, and aggressively serving as the propaganda weapon of the CIA and Bush/Cheney and hawkish neoliberals.
The Iranian president was in the ultimate no-win situation, the ultimate Orwellian trap. When he attempted to answer impossible questions reasonably, he was attacked. When he stated (correctly) that anti-Iran reporting was the result of US government distortions, he was attacked, and made to sound like a nutcase.
The centerpiece of the propaganda campaign against the current number one strawman, Ahmadinejad, was authorities refusing to allow him to visit Ground Zero. This proved, once again, that the original mass propaganda effect of 9/11 remains fully in effect. Iran had nothing to do with 9/11. No connection whatsoever, even if one completely accepts the Bush administration’s official story. Yet in the minds of so many brain-addled Americans, Iran is the ultimate "terrorist."
Of course, only those watching this unfold minute-by-minute on C-SPAN will ever know how rudely Ahmadinejad was treated. Corporate media sound bites will certainly frame him the way Dick Cheney wants him framed.
Whichever figure the White House chooses as its boogeyman is accepted as such, without question. Criminality on the part of the US government never enters the thought process.
The Iranian president, of course, knows that his visit will be seen differently, everywhere outside the fiercely protected bubble of the United States. But that won’t matter.
At the same time Ahmadinejad was defending himself, Senator Joe Lieberman was on the floor of Congress demanding action against Iran, spewing lies, pushing legislation that paves the way for military action against Iran .
Is it any wonder that as America tunes in to PBS to get patriotic and riled up about Ken Burns’ corporate-financed World War II documentary, The War, the US government is systematically setting up another atrocity right under their noses?
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"Neocons Insult Ahmadinejad at Columbia" by Kurt Nimmo Tuesday September 25, 2007
It doesn’t take much to read through the corporate media bombast on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s “showdown” at Columbia University, as the Associated Press characterized what in essence was an ambush and a heaping dose of disrespect by the Iranian leader’s surly hosts. In the very first sentence of the report, we learn that “Ahmadinejad defended Holocaust deniers and raised questions about who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks,” both entirely legitimate topics of discussion, that is outside the purview of Bushzarro world.
“Thousands of people jammed two blocks of 47th Street across from the United Nations to protest Ahmadinejad’s visit to New York for the opening of the U.N. General Assembly session. Organizers claimed a turnout of tens of thousands. Police did not immediately have a crowd estimate,” the Associated Press reports. “The speakers, most of them politicians and officials from Jewish organizations, proclaimed their support for Israel and criticized the Iranian leader for his remarks questioning the Holocaust.”
In other words, thousands of people are outraged by something Ahmadinejad never said, a lie fabricated by MEMRI, a Mossad front designated to provide propaganda to convince Americans they are obliged to squander their hard-earned money and precious lives for the sake of Israel’s territorial ambitions, although of course this is rarely mentioned. Instead we are warned ad nauseam the Arabs and Muslims “hate us for our freedom”—to shop until we drop and run up the credit cards—and are keen to slaughter our grade schoolers, thus we have to fight them over there before they swarm over us like “Islamofascist” vermin here with a sword in one hand and a Koran in the other.
If you sincerely believe you are free, attempt to question the Holocaust and see how far you get. For that matter, attempt to discuss the plight of the Palestinians, as Ahmadinejad did, and see how far you get. Simply insisting the Palestinians are human and are grossly and habitually victimized by the Israeli state is a dangerous pursuit, on occasion leading to not only ad hominem attacks but threats of violence, lost careers, as the American political scientist Norman Finkelstein recently discovered, and even prison time, as questioners in Europe and Canada have learned.
“Asked why he had asked to visit the World Trade Center site—a request denied by New York authorities—Ahmadinejad said he wanted to express sympathy for the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks,” the Associated Press continues. “Then he appeared to question whether al-Qaida was responsible, saying more research was needed.”
Indeed, more research is needed, but we will not get it, as the neocons will not be challenged on their preposterous claim that a gaggle of cave dwelling Arabs were responsible and a hand-picked whitewash commission, leaving out enough contrary evidence to fill a large hole at the Fresh Kills landfill site on Staten Island, have put aside all question, at least all questions the corporate media and our Congress critters refuse to ask, preferring instead the absurd claim Arabs defied physical science and magically, as if through a voodoo trance, made Norad stand down on September 11, 2001.
“If the root causes of 9/11 are examined properly—why it happened, what caused it, what were the conditions that led to it, who truly was involved, who was really involved—and put it all together to understand how to prevent the crisis in Iraq, fix the problem in Afghanistan and Iraq combined,” Ahmadinejad said.
Not exactly, although Ahmadinejad will be excoriated severely for the crime of offering a critique. As we know—or a small number of us know—the attacks served as a much anticipated and meticulously plotted “Pearl Harbor event,” not designed to prevent “crisis in Iraq,” and soon enough Ahmadinejad’s Iran, but precisely for the opposite reason—to inflict a series of violent crimes of the sort familiar to the Nazis on the people, culture, and society of the region. Simply reading a few neocon documents makes this perfectly and horrifically obvious, not that we should expect the average American to read anything more or less than the side of his morning cereal box.
Obviously, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad walked into a trap at Columbia University, as he should realize far too many Americans have surrendered to the brutal vision of the neocons and their Jabotinskyite mentors, preferring to insult and harangue foreign visitors and, provided with the appropriate contrived pretext, bomb their nations into Neolithic condition, as the neocons will do soon enough to Iran.
If Ahmadinejad had his wits about him, he would stay as far away from America as possible and prepare the inevitable—cruise missiles and bunker busters with his name attached, a prospect disgusting as children signing artillery shells last summer at Kiryat Shmona, Israel.
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