‘Smug and placid denial’

There’s one of what we bloggers call a ‘meme’ that’s been bouncing around for a few years. It concerns President Ahmadinejad and his stated desire to ‘wipe Israel from the page of time’.

As Alan Johnson reports, commenters have jumped through flaming hoops to make out that Ahmadinejad didn’t mean what he said, or didn’t say what he appeared to have said – that when he talks about the ’black and filthy microbe called the Zionist regime’ he is really voicing a criticism of the occupation of Gaza, or perhaps Israel’s employment policies.

Writing on CiF, Johnson uses a metaphor from Albert Camus’s The Plague.

Camus’ great novel is set in the ’smug, placid air’ of Oran. The ‘banality of the town’s appearance and of life in it’ means that its citizens ‘go completely to sleep there’. So when a plague strikes the town – Camus’ symbol for totalitarianism – its dreamy citizens refuse to believe it. The Oranians are, after all, humanists who think they live in a reasonable world in which everything is up for negotiation. So they opt for denial.

Jean Bethke Elshtain draws out the moral of Camus’ tale. ‘There are no rats in Oran’. Why? Because there cannot be’.

Camus’ ‘humanists’ are unwilling or unable to peer into the heart of darkness. They have banished the word evil from their vocabularies. Evil refers to something so unreasonable, after all! Therefore, it cannot really exist. Confronted by people who mean to kill them and to destroy their society, these well-meaning individuals deny the enormity of what is going on.

Have some commentators responded to the Iranian regime’s threat to the state of Israel in the same way as Oranians? The question is raised in a new study (PDF) by Joshua Teitelbaum, an academic who lays out exactly what the Iranian president and other Iranian leaders have been saying about doing away with Israel, and how far it all is from the efforts among western commentators to exculpate and minimise.

From Dr Teitelbaum’s report:

Juan Cole of the University of Michigan argues that Ahmadinejad was not calling for the destruction of Israel, saying, ‘Ahmadinejad did not say he was going to wipe Israel off the map because no such idiom exists in Persian.’ The British Guardian’s Jonathan Steele argued that Ahmadinejad was simply remarking that ‘this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.’ Steele continues: ‘He was not making a military threat. He was calling for an end to the occupation of Jerusalem at some point in the future. The ‘page of time’ phrase suggests he did not expect it to happen soon.’

Scholars continue to soft-pedal the Iranian President’s words. Professor Stephen Walt, who previously served as academic dean of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and co-authoredThe Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy along with Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, told a Jerusalem audience during a joint appearance in early June 2008, ‘I don’t think he is inciting to genocide,’ when asked about Ahmadinejad’s call to wipe Israel off the map.

God knows why these intelligent and respected people waste so much time and energy downplaying the fanaticism of a member of the Arab ruling class. The CiF comments are the usual madness.

In reality, even if we take Cole’s explanation of the ‘page of time’ statement as a given, he still has to explain statements like ‘Soon this stain of disgrace will be cleaned from the garment of the world of Islam’. Teitelbaum adds:

In order to remove any doubt in the mind of the Persian reader that Ahmadinejad is referring to Israel, the Iranian president’s official site, www.president.ir, interpolates the word ‘Esraiil’ in its report on the speech to explain the expression ’stain of disgrace.’

Apologists also need to explain the similar rants made by the President’s colleagues, their reflection in official propaganda and why Iranian bloggers, pro and anti regime, tend to agree that Ahmadinejad’s statement relates to the destruction of Israel, not a call to free Palestine.

There are two major points from Teitelbaum’s report. In his words:

1) What emerges from a comprehensive analysis of what Ahmadinejad actually said – and how it has been interpreted in Iran – is that the Iranian president was not just calling for ‘regime change’ in Jerusalem, but rather the actual physical destruction of the State of Israel. When Ahmadinejad punctuates his speech with ‘Death to Israel’ this is no longer open to various interpretations.

2) There is an ample legal basis for the prosecution of Ahmadinejad in the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court for direct and public incitement to commit genocide and crimes against humanity.

Note: that second point reads ‘prosecution of Ahmadinejad under international law’ and not ‘war on Iran’.

It’s common sense really. This is a regime that rigs elections, oppresses women, imprisons and tortures trade unionists, hangs gay people (unless they agree to a sex change) has held a Holocaust denial conference and prefers theocracy to the rule of law. Why the surprise that it wants to invade other countries as well?