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UNITED NATIONS ― Even by the politically paranoid standards of his past speeches, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s address to the U.N. General Assembly, brought the term bizarre to a whole new level.
His venomous rant to assembled delegations, accusing those countries “who used the mysterious Sept. 11 incident as a pretext to attack Afghanistan and Iraq,” prompted a walkout by diplomats from the U.S. as well as 29 delegations, from Canada to the European Union states.
One could pass this off as merely hateful political theater, a Middle Eastern dictator seeking the limelight in New York, and holding the rostrum before an uneasy audience.
His rambling address exhibited a rhetorical melange of crackpot theories, mysticism, and tub-thumping hate speech mired in the political pornography of Holocaust denial and Sept. 11 innuendo.
Yet more significantly, his address was notable for what it failed to say. There was only a passing reference to the Palestinians, no mention of the tumultuous Arab Spring political movements which have swept the Middle East from Tunisia to Syria, and perhaps most notably not about the Islamic Republic of Iran’s emerging nuclear weapons capacity.
Why? Tehran-backed terrorist proxies such as Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon oppose the mainstream Palestinian political efforts to achieve statehood.
Moreover, the Arab Spring popular protests are buffeting the parapets of the Syrian regime, and it’s not to be forgotten that Tehran and Damascus share cozy political kinship. And as for the nuclear issue, the U.N.’s IAEA watchdog group openly warns about Tehran’s growing capacity to achieve a nuclear weapons capacity.
Most importantly, the president’s speech laid down a calculated rhetorical smoke screen to hide the deep internal troubles inside Iran itself, masked a percolating political resistance to his disputed rule, and obscured the popular wider opposition to the Islamic Republic’s rigid theocracy.
Ahmadinjad’s caustic comments spoke of the West’s “sinister goals,” while launching the rhetorical offensive basically blaming the West for just about everything short of an evil alliance with space aliens.
He stressed, “By using their imperialistic media network which is under the influence of colonialism they threaten anyone who questions the Holocaust and the Sept. 11 event with sanctions and military action.”
Speaking shortly after Ahmadinejad, British Prime Minister David Cameron countered, “They do everything they can to avoid the accountability of a free media … they violently prevent demonstrations, and they detain and torture those who argue for a better future.”
Outside the U.N., thousands of Iranian-Americans from all political persuasions protested the Iranian ruler’s speech. Former American U.N. Ambassador John Bolton addressed the crowd calling for an overthrow of the Islamic regime.
Sadly since the onset of radical theocratic rule in 1979, what later emerged as the Islamic Republic of Iran has deliberately debased the ancient Persian culture and ruined socioeconomic prospects for two generations by turning what should be a prosperous land into a place of penury for most of its 76 million citizens. If it were not for high petroleum prices, Iran’s economy would have collapsed long ago.
So in what now has become a sordid annual ritual, President Ahmadinejad’s diatribe from the marble rostrum of the U.N., looking for legitimacy where he has little, and making baseless accusations, and lifting the debate to the theater of the absurd does little to solve global crises.
Darkness at noon has descended on the proud Persian nation; one can only hope that a new light of Persia will soon again shine.
John J. Metzler is a United Nations correspondent covering diplomatic and defense issues. He is the author of “Transatlantic Divide; USA/Euroland Gap” (University Press, 2010). He can be reached at jjmcolumn@earthlink.net. The views expressed in the above article are the author’s own and do not reflect the editorial policy of The Korea Times.
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