And America's, too!
Read this column on-line at
"http://Ouwww.sobran.com/columns/2007/071003.shtml"
"Our Worst Enemy" by Joe Sobran
"When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's president, or dictator, or tyrant, or whatever he is (his constitutional and actual practical authority is rarely defined for us), arrived in New York, it was to tremendous media excitement. The intensity of the furor is suggested by the fact that he knocked O.J. Simpson clean off the front pages of the city's identical-twin tabloids. After all, O.J. has never denied the Holocaust or called for Israel to be wiped off the map.
Ahmadinejad, whose name is nearly as hard to spell as "Condoleezza" is now the main selection of the Hitler-of-the-Month Club, following such luminaries as Louis Farrakhan, Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Kim Jong Il, Saddam Hussein again, Mel Gibson, and Don Imus.
The Iranian "leader" was invited to speak at Columbia University, whose president explained that this would be the best way to expose him for what he is, to wit, a bad apple. He faced some hostile questions from the student body, but he also won applause several times. That figures. He may be a Hitler; on the other hand, he's not President Bush.
In the pro-war press there were countless hysterical references to Nazis, the Holocaust, terrorism, the 9/11 attacks, and so forth.... It was all naked propaganda, sheer denunciation, designed solely to stupefy.
Columbia's president, Lee Bollinger, feeling compelled to insult his guest, called him "astonishingly uneducated." Well, that would seem to make him a fit match for Bush, one of the most ignorant of all U.S. presidents. Listen to ordinary Americans discussing presidential powers the next time you're in, say, McDonald's: they take for granted that the president has
virtually absolute power, never mind what the Constitution says. They'd heatedly deny that he's a dictator... Besides, dictators are bad, and our presidents are good.
We are horrified at the idea that dictators may have nuclear weapons, but it's fine for democratic leaders to have them -- even though the only two nukes ever used on populated areas were dropped by order of an American president. (Thank heaven Hitler didn't get them first! He might have abused them; whereas the United States used them to "shorten the war.")
Ahmadinejad did excite raucous laughter when he said there are no homosexuals in Iran... As for the Holocaust, a note of skepticism would have been more plausible than flat denial: surely it's an extraordinary fact that the war memoirs of Churchill, De Gaulle, and Eisenhower don't discuss it, but this is not the same thing as saying it didn't happen. It merely invites the inference that whatever actually occurred during World War II, there has been a lot of subsequent embellishment, as usually happens with history, an omelet in which fact, propaganda, and legend are hopelessly scrambled by the victors.
At any rate, Ahmadenijad has so far done little to justify the lurid Hitler parallels.... Where are his victims? Compared with Saddam, he seems almost humanitarian.
At the moment, the worst enemy we Americans have seems to be George Walker Bush. Who else has done this country so much harm?
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