27-Sep-08: Racism - getting to basics

The sickening applause that greeted the unvarnished anti-Jewish racism of the Iranian president's speech at the United Nations this week has a background.

TEHRAN (AFP) — Iranians chanted “Death to Israel” on Friday as Islamist students unveiled a book mocking the Holocaust in an Al-Quds (Jerusalem) Day annual parade to show solidarity with the Palestinians.

The book “Holocaust,” published by members of Iran’s Islamist Basij militia, features dozens of cartoons and sarcastic commentary. Education Minister Alireza Ali-Ahmadi attended the official launch of the book in Tehran’s Palestine Square. The cover shows a Jew with a crooked nose and dressed in traditional garb drawing outlines of dead bodies on the ground. Inside, bearded Jews are shown leaving and re-entering a gas chamber with a counter that reads the number 5,999,999.

Another illustration depicts Jewish prisoners entering a furnace in a Nazi extermination camp and leaving from the other side as gun-wielding “terrorists.”

Yet another shows a patient draped in an Israeli flag and on life support breathing Zyklon-B, the poisonous gas used in the extermination chambers.

Given the nature of this blog, we receive more than the usual quantities of vile rubbish from apologists for the haters... statements along the lines of "The Iranians have never said they want to hurt the Jews - they're just sticking up for the Palestinians" and so on.

The reality is that Ahmadinijad and those in his circle are as fully engaged in primitive racism as Hitler and the Nazis were in the thirties. We know where that led. And they're far from being alone in this.

For their own murky reasons, the official organs of Palestinian Arab society have openly embraced denial of the destruction of Europe's Jews as an article of their political agenda. Click on "Hamas Holocaust perversion: Jews planned Holocaust to kill handicapped Jews" for one more in a long series of dispassionate descriptions of the sickening racism that infects all levels of Palestinian Arab society and its apologists. (Thanks to Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook for their indispensable contribution to finding and disclosing this material that was created for and broadcast by the official Hamas television station in Gaza.)

Back to this week's Iranian performance in New York. David Horowitz, writing in Friday's Jerusalem Post, presents the facts of Ahmadinijad's UN rant in his customary dispassionate and clear way:

Ahmadinejad's address, delivered from what ought to be one of the most prestigious platforms on the planet, was cloaked in professions of obeisance to God, justice and human freedoms, but, as in years past, was dishonest, malevolent and threatening. The Iranian president - who, in accordance with the UN's own conventions, should be prosecuted for inciting genocide rather than afforded this annual opportunity to restate his toxic agenda - misrepresented his regime's nuclear program as peaceful and transparent. He gloated at the ostensible imminent demises of the Zionist regime ("on a definite slope to collapse") and the American empire ("reaching the end of its road"). And he dredged up the classic anti-Semitic libel in asserting that a pernicious, secretive act of global puppetry is being perpetrated by a shadowy Zionist cabal, manipulating the finances and the politics of the innocent, trusting masses: "The dignity, integrity and rights of the American and European people are being played with by a small but deceitful number of people called Zionists," he proclaimed. "Although they are a minuscule minority, they have been dominating an important portion of the financial and monetary centers, as well as the political decision-making centers of some European countries and the US in a deceitful, complex and furtive manner."

There's an edited video here from the UN's webcast; somehow seeing the vile outpourings in video form make them more real than simply reading the written words. But there's another reason to click: note the very public actions of the new president of the UN General Assembly, Miguel D'Escoto Brockmann (Nicaraguan diplomat, politician, Catholic priest, former official with the World Council of Churches, and a Sandinista). This man sees so much to respect and admire in Ahmadinijad's hate speech that he stops the proceedings, asks delegates to remain seated and patient, and walks to the rostrum where the Iranian has finished his speech - and embraces and congratulates him.

The president of the UN General Assembly was not alone in his embrace. Among the religious groups honoring Ahmadinejad at a glitzy reception at New York's Grand Hyatt Hotel were the Americans Friends Service Committee, the Mennonite Central Committee, the Quaker United Nations Office, Religions for Peace, and the World Council of Churches.

Winston Churchill famously described the appeasement of Hitler and the Nazis that characterized public life in Europe and North America in the days before World War II as "feeding a crocodile, hoping it will eat one last". Sadly, we're seeing public figures, media outlets and governments not only feeding but enthusiastically stroking and petting this Persian crocodile.

The Washington Post, in a lead editorial this past Tuesday entitled "Iran Slips Away," points out the real bottom line: "Even as its nuclear program accelerates, the impetus to stop it loses steam." Like the Nazis and Churchill's crocodile, the Iranians have a large appetite and their pots are already boiling.

This is not a good time for tolerating the continuing distorted, dishonest and ill-informed apologetics of public figures with agendas. We're running out of time.