What’s Real and What’s Fiction About Ahmadinejad?
“What do I really know about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and should I believe a word of what he is saying?” These were the questions I kept asking myself as I listened to Ahmadinejad speak on Columbia’s campus.
The truth is, I am not sure how to answer. Why? Until Monday, all of my information on Ahmadinejad had come from the product of our mainstream media. But that all changed when I was given the opportunity to hear from the man, himself.
What struck me about Ahmadinejad’s words was that they in no way matched up with anything I’d ever heard him quoted as saying in our media. These media have presented him as a dictator, a terrorist, an Islamic fundamentalist, a threat to freedom and democracy an anti-Semite, a warmonger, and a danger to us all.
All of this may well be true. But the important question here is, “How do I know?”
Ahmadinejad, as he spoke to Columbia, used a lot of familiar words and phrases. He generously repeated “democracy”, “freedom”, and “peace”. He said again and again that countries should be free to determine their own paths, and be given the same rights and freedoms as other countries to become legitimate democracies providing the same opportunities for their people. The funny thing about the way he said all of these things is how much he sounded like our own president, George Bush.
In addressing some of his hot button issues, Ahmadinejad pronounced a number of times that he does not hate Jews, supports the rights of women, wants to be friends with all nations, including America, and only wants nuclear technology for peaceful uses. All of these, of course, go against everything our media have told me.
When making statements against America, I’d fully expected Ahmadinejad to lash us with the vitriol of his supposed razor tongue. Instead, he used allusions and metaphors to dance around criticizing America, in ways that were below the surface, and not direct statements, which the media would not be able to turn into soundbytes like “wipe Israel off the map!”
I then started to picture our own president in an Iranian University, having just endured a seething indictment of insults. Would he be able go into Iran and use Iranian political and cultural rhetoric against his audience like Ahmadinejad did to us? Could he turn us on our head with such cunning and guile?
Ahmadinejad brilliantly navigated through our cultural and political references to use our own arguments against us. He made us as Americans look like hypocrites for promoting freedom, yet banning him from the World Trade Center site. He questioned how Americans could defend free speech, but try to deny him a public speaking engagement. He challenged our claims that he is promoting insurgent groups in Iraq, reminding us that the US government had funded and trained Iraq and the brutal dictator, Saddam Hussein, during Iraq’s eight-year war with Iran. He reminded us that thousands of his people suffered tremendous tragedy, and essentially asked who the real freedom-hating terrorists were.
I think that trying to understand the real story behind what happened on Monday requires a close examination of our media, what we are being told, what we aren’t being told, and why. What are the real interests affecting the flow of information?
A lot of those questions were raised the night before the event, when I watched the BBC documentary “The Power of Nightmares” (part one, part two, part three). This documentary demonstrates how much of what we have been told for the last 30 years has been twisted and warped against our supposed enemies. It gives reasons for why people in Middle Eastern countries might have a bone to pick with us, and why our government might want us to feel the way we do toward places like Iran. Meanwhile, little of this makes it into our media or our national dialog.
So where does this leave me? I need to do more research before I decide what I think the truth is. Of course, I can’t be too quick to assume Ahmadinejad’s telling the truth, given the mass of people demonstrating on campus, so many of them painting a picture of a much darker reality in Iran. Plus, remembering that he’s a politician, there’s a very good chance he’s a charismatic scumbag. And why DID his words sound so much like what our own president has said to us through the media?
Then I go back to something Ahmadinejad said, and how it was interpreted and spread. He was asked about homosexuals being killed in his country, and his response has been flooding the Internet and news media ever since, with him saying that there were no homosexuals in his country.
I spoke with an Iranian that I know about what Ahmadinejad had said. She didn’t speak Farsi, but the girl next to her at the event did. That girl said that the translator stumbled on her translation, and gave an inaccurate impression of what he’d really said. According to her, he wasn’t saying Iran had no homosexuals. He was saying that homosexuality in Iran is not like it is in America, that it is not so out in the open.
But, to hear the mainstream media tell it, it’s a much different story.
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To be so naive as to expect the dictator to proclaim in plain Farsi that he intends to acquire the means to follow through with his promise to wipe Israel off of the map is unrealistic at least in the U.S. Even Abraham Lincoln was less vocal about abolishing slavery when he spoke in the south than in the north.
Ahmadinejad has threatened to wipe Israel off of the map plenty of times in the past, and I believe him. He stated that in Iran they do not have a homosexual problem, they arrest them and hang them, no problem. Perhaps Ahmadinejad does want nuclear energy only for civilian purposes, but you know what? I don’t want to take that chance. Hitler promised not invade Poland, but hindsight is always 20/20. Maybe Ahmadinijad doesn’t plan to lead the way in the annihilation of the only democracy in the Middle East, but I don’t want to take that chance either. Call me overly cautious.
The United States and Israel are run by human beings, and though they are democratically elected, they are only human. Both countries have made mistakes, backed the wrong people, and have acted in ways that are sometimes not entirely honorable. There is however no excuse for sending children to run across a mine field to clear them of mines, as Iran did during their war with Iraq.
I am sure Ahmadinejad has never seen the back of his head, at least not directly with his own eyes. Yet he has never doubted its existence. Yet somehow, the most documented genocide that has ever occurred is in need of a closer look. I wonder what the Iranian committee that will conduct the investigation will conclude, probably the conclusion that will best serve their interests. I am very happy that Ahmadinijad did not visit the WTC site. That would be like a mobster going to the funeral of a person he killed to mock him. He could have visited the site, but he would have received no protection from the city of New York, it seemed that this “brave statesman” feared for his life. I am just glad that he has left my country.
Wow, I just got called “naive”. Nice. I believe my point wasn’t to say that I believed what he was saying, but rather to cast doubt on what I’ve been told.
Eugene makes a lot of claims about Ahmadinejad, but doesn’t back them up with sources. So, why should I believe him any more than I should believe what our mainstream media sources have been saying? To watch the films I’ve linked to is to see why we shouldn’t necessarily trust our government or our media as a source of information on our “enemies”.
This is not to say that none of these reports in our mainstream media are true. It is to say that our media have reported a lot of fabrications, historically, about our enemies, and that it is important for us to examine where we get our information from.
Hey, thanks for calling me naive. And for making such a clear case.
Hi Ben,
Each one of us can freely access information from all over the world. No one is restricting us to listen to one source or specific media outlet. Feel free to research, cross-check facts, read the reports from numerous human rights organizations – could they all be wrong? Are they all slanting the story and feeding us a conspiracy theory?
Liat
http://columbiaracistspeaker.blogspot.com/2007/09/public-hanging-in-iran-other-recent.html
Thank you, Derek, for posting this link with a lot of foreign media sources of information on Iran’s questionable human rights practices. It’s nice to get info from the outside.
One thing I’d like to comment on, however, is that most of these links are to stories of Iran hanging people in public. While it is good to be informed on this, and it certainly paints a grim picture of Iran, Iran could just as easily have posted in response a series of episodes of US capital punishment. This is one thing that Ahmadinejad called us out for when we accused him of public hangings. He asked didn’t we in the US also have capital punishment?
Don’t forget how many retarded people we’ve killed in Texas. If you just look at the world from a capital punishment perspective, we don’t look all the much better than Iran, or China, or anyone else who kills citizens as a form of punishment.
Ben, Eugene is right. You need to do your own homework and then draw your own conclusions. The fact that you haven’t done your homework doesn’t suggest that you have an admirably open mind, it just indicates that you have your work cut out for you and may wish to hold your tongue until you know what you’re talking about. Seriously, no offense meant, but you should do the minimal amount of research, like googling Ahmadinejad’s public statements, before posting this sort of thing.
I guess you missed my point: so many people are so sure about this Ahmadinejad guy, and a lot of those people should think more about where they are getting their information from. I’m not necessarily questioning those who have done their homework. I am questioning those who are too trusting of what they hear and read and don’t do their own homework. A LOT of media out there focus on the side of Ahmadinejad as bad guy, and spend VERY LITTLE time showing the side of America as bad guy. I don’t personally think Ahmadinejad is a good guy, per se. I also think that in America, a disproportionate amount of the discussion is about him as a bad guy, and very little of it is about 50 years of US foreign policy giving him plenty of reasons to make public statements against the US.
I’m doing my homework to examine BOTH sides of this issue. Are you?