A Tale Of Two Speeches

Ahmadinejad’s and Netanyahu’s

By Jerry Mazza
Online Journal Associate Editor
Oct 2, 2009, 00:20
Courtesy of The Online Journal

Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s Speech at the UN General Assembly on September 23 was titled The End of Capitalism, more brusquely titled on the YouTube clip: Greedy Capitalism Has Failed And Will Be Swept Away.

He proceeded, quite fairly I might add, to scour the US for its political, financial, colonial, war-making policies.

Starting by criticizing discrimination, lack of equality and respect for the human community, he spoke of two conflicting outlooks in our world, one based “on the predominance of materialistic interests through spreading inequality and oppression, poverty and deprivation, occupation and deception,” which “tends to bring the entire world under its control and impose its will on other nations. “This outlook has produced nothing but frustration, disappointment and a dark future for the entire humanity.”

Ahmadinejad mentioned specifically the US economy. “It is no longer possible to inject thousands of billions of dollars of unreal wealth to the world economy simply by printing worthless paper assets, or transfer inflation as well as social and economic problems to others through creating severe budget deficits.” In fact, he said, “The engine of unbridled capitalism with its unfair system of thought has reached the end of the road and is unable to move.” I would say that is an opinion shared by any number of economists.

He elaborated, “The era of capitalist thinking and imposition of one’s thoughts on the international community, intended to predominate the world in the name of globalization and the age of setting up empires is over. It is no longer possible to humiliate nationals and impose double standard policies on the world community.”

He talked, too, about the people of this country and the world “waiting for real and profound changes,” not the ersatz brand we’re presently experiencing. He went on to discuss the injustices heaped on Palestine that have forced and continue to force the entire population out of their country for the last 60 years, through force and coercion, attacking Palestinians with all kinds of weapons, “denying them of their legitimate right of self-defense, while much to the chagrin of the international community calling the occupiers the peace-lovers, and portraying the victims as terrorists.”

This was tough stuff. No punches were pulled, whether on the recent 22-day deconstruction of Palestine, the violation of human rights, allowing genocide to take place and “the heaviest economic blockade being denied of their basic needs, food, water and medicine.” He went on to say, “It is no longer acceptable that a small minority would dominate the politics, economy and culture of major parts of the world by its complicated networks, and establish a new form of slavery, and harm the reputation of other nations, even European nations and the U.S., to attain its racist ambitions.”

He said, “It is no longer possible to bring a country under military occupation in the name of fight against terrorism and drug trafficking while the production of illicit drugs has multiplied, terrorism has widened its dimensions and has tightened its grips, thousands of innocent people have been killed, injured or displaced, infrastructures have been destroyed and regional security has been seriously jeopardized; and those who have created the current disastrous situation continue to blame others. How you can talk about friendship and solidarity with other nations while you expand your military bases in different parts of the world, including in Latin America.”

Ahmadinejad even lambasted communism though he predicted capitalism would meet with the same fate: “By the grace of God, Marxism is gone. It is now history. The expansionist capitalism will certainly have the same fate. Because based on the divine traditions referred to as a principle in the Holy Quran, the wrong like the bubbles on the surface of water, will disappear. There remains only what that can be used forever towards the interest of human societies. We must all remain vigilant to prevent the pursuit of colonialist, discriminatory and inhuman goals under the cover of the slogans for change and in new formats.”

He continued with the change theme so often elaborated by our own president: “The world needs to undergo fundamental changes and all must engage collectively to make them happen in the right direction, and through such efforts no one and no government would consider itself an exception to change or superior to others and try to impose its will on others by proclaiming world leadership. All problems existing in our world today emanate from the fact that rulers have distanced themselves from human values, morality and the teachings of divine messengers.”

”Regrettably,” he said, “in the current international relations, selfishness and insatiable greed have taken the place of such humanitarian concepts as love, sacrifice, dignity, and justice. The belief in the One God has been replaced with selfishness. Some have taken the place of God and insist to impose their values and wishes on others. Lies have taken the place of honesty; hypocrisy has replaced integrity and selfishness has taken the place of sacrifice. Deception in interactions is called foresight and statesmanship; looting the wealth of other nations is called development efforts; occupation is introduced as a gift towards promotion of freedom and democracy, and defenseless nations are subjected to repression in the name of defending human rights.” Whether you believe in god or not, there is a great deal of truth in these words that applies to your own US conundrum.

My continuing to quote his speech is my concern that you may not have heard or read it. I want you to get a sense of the man, his concerns and his candor. Ahmadinejad pointed out that “Our country [Iran] has been a main victim of terrorism and the target of an all-out military aggression during the first decade of the revolution. All through the past 30 years we have been subject to hostile attitudes of those who supported Saddam’s military aggression and his use of chemical weapons against us, and then they took military action in Iraq to get rid of him,” which is all true, including the ongoing embargos, the war we fomented between Iraq and Iran for eight years, arming Saddam, even the Iranians, and causing losses of life and human displacement on both sides that ran in the millions.

Skipping to his conclusion, I find it surprisingly religious, spiritual, and hopeful: “Therefore, we emphasize that: the only path to remain safe is to return to Monotheism (believing in the Oneness of God) and justice, and this is the greatest hope and opportunity in all ages and generations. Without belief in God and commitment to the cause of justice and fight against injustice and discrimination, the world architect would not get right.” Whether you believe in a deity or not, he followed that with a purely humanistic connection . . .

“Man is at the center of the universe. The man’s unique feature is his humanity. The same feature which seeks for justice, piety, love, knowledge, awareness and all other high values. These human values should be supported, and each and every fellow human should be given the opportunity to acquire them. Neglecting any of them is tantamount to the omission of a constituting piece of humanity. These are common elements which connect all human communities and constitute the basis of peace, security and friendship . . . The divine religions pay attention to all aspects of human life, including obedience to God, morality, justice, fighting oppression, and endeavor to establish just and good governance.”

Having inserted the religious traditions into political affairs, Ahmadinejad goes on to unite the traditions: “Prophet Abraham called for Oneness of God against Nimrod, as Prophet Moses did the same against Pharaohs and the Jesus Christ and Prophet Muhammad (Peace be upon them) did against the oppressors of their own time. They were all threatened to death and were forced out of their homelands. Without resistance and objection, the injustices would not be removed from the face of the earth . . . Dear friends and colleagues; the world is in continuous change and evolution.

”The promised destiny for mankind is the establishment of the humane pure life. Will come a time when justice will prevail across the globe and every single human being will enjoy respect and dignity. That will be the time when the Mankind’s path to moral and spiritual perfectness will be opened and his journey to God and the manifestation of the God’s Divine Names will come true. The mankind should excel to represent the God’s ‘knowledge and wisdom,’ His ‘compassion and benevolence, His ‘justice and fairness,’ His ‘power and art,’ and His ‘kindness and forgiveness’ . . .

”They [religious prophets] will come to put an end to war and aggression and present the entire knowledge as well as spirituality and friendship to the whole world. Yes; indeed, the bright future for the mankind will come. Dear friends, in waiting for that brilliant time to come and in a collective commitment, let’s make due contributions in paving the grounds and preparing the conditions for building that bright future. Long live love and spirituality; long live peace and security; long live justice and freedom. God’s Peace and blessing be upon you all.”

With the exception of my removing a few simple typos, which probably occurred in the translation transcription, and my omitting a number of passages for brevity’s sake, this is the substance of Ahmadinejad’s speech. Albeit grounded in religion, it is a call for justice, fairness, equality for all, to help make a better world. Ahmadinejad is obviously the president of a theocracy and not a democracy as know it and such as it is, but this is not Khrushchev banging an angry shoe on the table at the UN.

No, this is the president of Iran, which country again has been accused of a nuclear weapons program. Yet even the usually conservative New York Times reports in A Nuclear Debate: Is Iran Designing Warheads?, “When President Obama stood last week with the leaders of Britain and France to denounce Iran’s construction of a secret nuclear plant, the Western powers all appeared to be on the same page.

“Behind their show of unity about Iran’s clandestine efforts to manufacture nuclear fuel, however, is a continuing debate among American, European and Israeli spies about a separate component of Iran’s nuclear program: its clandestine efforts to design a nuclear warhead.

“The Israelis, who have delivered veiled threats of a military strike, say they believe that Iran has restarted these ‘weaponization’ efforts, which would mark a final step in building a nuclear weapon. The Germans say they believe that the weapons work was never halted. The French have strongly suggested that independent international inspectors have more information about the weapons work than they have made public.

“Meanwhile, in closed-door discussions, American spy agencies have stood firm in their conclusion that while Iran may ultimately want a bomb, the country halted work on weapons design in 2003 and probably has not restarted that effort — a judgment first made public in a 2007 National Intelligence Estimate.

“The debate, in essence, is a mirror image of the intelligence dispute on the eve of the Iraq war [italics mine].”

This is a more than veiled comparison to using a flawed premise to start a war with Iran as we did with Iraq over its so-called weapons of mass destruction, which were supposedly about to be used immediately.

What Netanyahu Said and What’s Behind It

In a speech of rebuttal by Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a day later, there is no mention whatsoever of Israel’s nuclear reactor and facility at Dimona in the Negev desert, , which has existed since the mid-50s, built with the help of the French, in return for their own nuclear facility built with the help of Israeli scientists. It wasn’t until 1986 that whistleblower and then orthodox Jew Mordechai Vanunu, a technician at the plant, exposed the fact with words and pictures in the London Times that the Israelis stocked between 200 and 400 nuclear warheads. His reward was 18 years in solitary confinement, and house arrest when he came out for speaking to a reporter.

It is the unmitigated hysteria of hypocrisy of Israel that glares most from Netanyahu’s speech, never even mentioning his country’s long-standing involvement with nuclear weapons, dating back to 1948, the first searches and finding of nuclear material in the Negev under then Prime Minister David Ben Gurion. As early as 1945, Golda Meir and Ben Gurion realized what a potent stone in the slingshot the nuclear bomb would make for themselves as a David facing the Goliaths of the world. This was just as the US exploded two nuclear bombs on Japan, one on Hiroshima, one on Nagasaki, singling out people of color for the opening of this Pandora’s box. Yet, the US joins adamantly in the hypocrisy to buttress its little big buddy Israel against Iran’s dubious nuclear weapons. And what is Netanyahu’s speech about?

Wayne Madsen reports in his article that Netanyahu equates Iranian government and Hamas with Nazis, “In a speech before the UN General Assembly on September 24, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu invoked the Nazi holocaust to launch a blistering attack on Iran and Hamas. Netanyahu said that 62 years ago, the UN recognized the right of the Jewish people to a state of their own in Israel, which he emphasized is a ‘Jewish state.’” Of course, his statement wasn’t true. Israel was supposed to be a ‘two-state’ nation, even as illegal and compromised as that was.

Madsen goes on, “Netanyahu told the General Assembly, minus the delegation of Iran, which had walked out prior to his arrival, that the previous day the president of Iran ‘spewed anti-Semitic rants.’ Netanyahu produced copies of the Nazi minutes from the Wansee meeting which outlined how the Nazi government would carry out the extermination of the Jewish people. He also held up the concentration camp plans for the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp that were signed by Heinrich Himmler.

“Thanking those delegations that walked out on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speech, Netanyahu criticized those who gave the Iranian leader a hearing, declaring, ‘Have you no shame, no decency? What a disgrace!’ Netanyahu added that delegations that listened to Ahmadinejad were making ‘a mockery of the UN Charter.’ But he of course is not. Here is the complete text of Netanyahu’s speech.

The truth is, it is Netanyahu who makes a mockery of the truth. Robert Parry noted in What Did Ahmadinejad Really Say?: “Press TV quoted Ahmadinejad as saying, ‘If the Holocaust, as you claim, is true, why don’t you allow a probe into the issue?’ Press TV added that Ahmadinejad was ‘calling the Zionist regime a symbol of lies and deception founded on “colonialist” attitudes. The Iranian president also asked why Palestinians had to pay for the genocide of Jews at the hands of Europeans.’

“So what did Ahmadinejad really say?”

Parry continues, “In the English-language account of the speech published on the official Web site of the Iranian president, Ahmadinejad calls the ‘pretext’ for founding the state of Israel ‘a lie,’ but he doesn’t spell out precisely what he means by ‘pretext.’ In the context, the word seems to refer to the Holocaust, but arguably his reference to ‘a lie which relies on . . . a mythical claim’ could be about Biblical claims to the land of Palestine that Zionist organizations cite.

“As Press TV says, Ahmadinejad frames his skeptical comments about the Holocaust within Western hostility toward the scholarship of some European and American Holocaust skeptics (often called ‘deniers’) who dispute details such as the estimated number of six million Jews killed by the Nazis.

“But some of that supposed scholarship has been widely viewed as an excuse by neo-fascists and anti-Semites to diminish the horror of the Nazi extermination campaign against Jews and other groups considered undesirable by Adolf Hitler and his German Third Reich.

“Though interpretations of Ahmadinejad’s words can be debated, two things appear undeniable. First, Ahmadinejad continues to make provocative statements that are offensive to many people around the world.

“And second, the New York Times and other Western news organizations are failing to live up to their own principles of objectivity, apparently out of an intense animosity toward Iran’s president.

“Shortly after Iran’s disputed presidential election in June, a ‘news analysis’ coauthored by New York Times executive editor Bill Keller opened up with an old joke about Ahmadinejad looking into a mirror and saying ‘male lice to the right, female lice to the left,’ a reference to his rise from the street and his conservative Islamic religious views. Later, the Times editors joined defeated candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi in rejecting the notion of a vote recount by Iran’s Guardian Council, which oversees elections. The Mousavi camp instead demanded an entirely new election, which they failed to get. ‘Even a full recount would be suspect,’ the Times wrote in an editorial. ‘How could anyone be sure that the ballots were valid?’

“But the resistance of Mousavi and his backers to a partial or complete recount prevented the uncovering of solid evidence that might have proven that Ahmadinejad did rig the election, a point that has become conventional wisdom in the Western media but which lacks solid proof (unlike, for instance, the widespread evidence of fraud in the recent Afghan election.)

“Mousavi’s rigging case rests primarily on the argument that Ahmadinejad ran up large majorities in poor districts because he had distributed food and raised pay, tactics that may be criticized as the workings of ‘a political machine,’ but normally don’t fall under the definition of electoral fraud. [For more on the Iranian election, see Consortiumnews.com’s ‘Taking Sides on Iran.’]

“As tensions with Iran mount, it is easy for U.S. news organizations to cast aside journalistic principles in favor of looking tough and patriotic. In a similar context, when America’s top enemy was Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein, the Times and other major U.S. news outlets helped whip up a war fever and contributed to a political climate that equated questioning U.S. government claims with a lack of patriotism and even sympathy for Hussein. The chief consequence of that violation of journalistic standards was an aggressive war that has left more than 4,300 U.S. soldiers dead and hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis.”

I agree with Parry that Ahmadinejad should avoid provocative Holocaust statements that seem to skirt denying them. I understand that Ahmadinejad understands these statements press a hot button that will never fail to flash red lights and sound sirens. In a way, it’s foolish to do this. Ahmadinejad would be wiser simply to point to the Jewish Holocaust as horrific as it was, and point out that Israel now has a like and ongoing Holocaust in Palestine. That is an indisputable fact.

In fact, as Jacques Hersh reports in the Monthly Review in his Inconvenient Truths about ‘Real Existing’ Zionism, “The celebrations on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel brought forth mixed feelings for those of us who survived the Holocaust. The reason for this ambivalence is that, while the survivors of the Nazi genocide celebrated the creation of a Jewish state in 1948, few were aware at the time of the human costs and injustices that had been, were being, and would be perpetrated against Palestinian Arabs in our name. The slogan ‘Never Again,’ which was the dominating thought in the Jewish psyche in those years, was mostly concerned with the fate of European Jews.” In Hersh’s opinion it should have applied to the Palestinians.

The fact is Hersh believes that Zionism itself was a philosophy of compromise that offered European countries the option of continuing anti-Semitism with the option also of having a place to send “their Jews,” Palestine. That is, so long as that land swindle could be swung with the political and military backing of the Imperial power of Great Britain and its Balfour Agreement and, post 1967, with the aid of the military colossus of the United States. This deal would provide both empires with a Western-style force to guard against “Asian” incursions.

As Hersh writes, “the thesis of the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ placed a new paradigm of international politics on the agenda that was readily adopted by neoconservatives in the United States and the Likud Party in Israel. Theoretically and ideologically the thesis drew a fault line between the ‘West and the rest’! In this projection, the West is considered to be the repository of Judeo-Christian civilization and thus includes the Jewish State.” And thus excludes Iran, Palestine, and the Muslim world.”

And so, there is the tale of two speeches at the center of Israel’s hypocritical aggression and Iran’s irritating responses. It is one of the most volatile scenarios in the world today. I believe it could be settled if Jews and Israelis around the world who frown upon Israel’s long-standing offenses against Arabs and Muslims would join with a more focused, tempered Hamas to become the political majority to turn out the Zionists and the Likud followers. This could bring about a lasting peace for all in Palestine. The pursuit of a militaristic/religious Zionist policy will only lead to more strife and disaster. Some combination of the sane on both sides ultimately will have to rise up and claim that peace before the current chaos becomes the world’s.

Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer living in New York City. Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net. His new book, “State Of Shock: Poems from 9/11 on” is available at www.jerrymazza.com, Amazon or Barnesandnoble.com.

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