The President of Iran has granted an interview to Time Magazine, and the contents are on line for all to see. I just have a nagging question or two that I wish the interviewer had followed up on.
Ahmadinejad: Our position toward the [ ] question is clear: We say that a nation has been displaced from its own land. [ ] people are killed in their own lands, by those who are not original inhabitants, and they have come from far areas of the world and have occupied those homes.
Our suggestion is that the 5 million [ ] refugees come back to their homes, and then the entire people on those lands hold a referendum and choose their own system of government. This is a democratic and popular way. Do you have any other suggestions?
Now the word that Ahmadinejad inserted between those ellipses is, of course, "Palestinian." But if you try inserting instead the word "Jewish," you'll find that his statement explains concisely and precisely the historic roots and process of the creation of the State of Israel. Refugees of a nation, displaced by those who were not by any stretch the original inhabitants, returned to their homes and chose their own system of government. Why doesn't his democratic and popular analysis apply to the only original inhabitants of the land that are still around to lay claim to it (there being precious few Jebusites or Philistines around today)?
Here's another:
Ahmadinejad: As to the Holocaust, I just raised a few questions. And I didn't receive any answers to my questions. I said that during World War II, around 60 million were killed. All were human beings and had their own dignities. Why only six million?
This gibberish really wouldn't be worth paying attention to, but for the blazing inconsistency with his prior remarks. Of course, his numbers are terribly misleading. Almost half of those human beings were soldiers killed in battle. Of the remaining 35 million or so, the vast majority were collateral damage in air campaigns against enemy targets, were enemy targets themselves or succumbed to war-related scourges like famine and disease. While always tragic, these deaths are the necessary fallout of armed conflict. They're expected. Mass extermination campaigns of an entire people, however, are not. But why am I even trying to make sense of this man's mad ravings? The fact is that when it comes to the millions of refugees in the world, many of them Jews from Arab countries and, of course, from Iran, Ahmadinejad has no trouble singling out the "5 million" [sic] "Palestinians" [sic]. But when it comes to singling out victims of a campaign of mass extermination aimed primarily at Jews, all victims are the same. Why is that?
