Iran

The not-so-mad mind of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad [Excerpts]

Iran's president may be evil, but he understands the Western postmodern mind all too well

"The skirmishes in the occupied land are part of a war of destiny. The outcome of hundreds of years of war will be defined in Palestinian land. As the Imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map."

Given his apocalyptic rhetoric, we can understand why President Ahmadinejad might want an arsenal of nuclear missiles. He'd be able to shake down a constant stream of rich European emissaries, threaten the ArabGulf states to lower oil production, neutralize the influence of the United States in the region -- and, of course, destroy Israel.

Impotent European diplomats will always defer to such an important global figure, "ruling out" force to stop the Iranian nuclear industry as they offer money and trade deals if Tehran will just act sanely.

The United States has a growing anti-war movement, and 180,000 of its troops are busy birthing democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq. And the unpredictable George Bush has less than three years in office anyway.

True, the Middle East's secular gospel is anti-Semitism, broadcast hourly from Syria, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. In these places, state-run media boom out tired sermons about "pigs and apes." And, again, Russia and China don't much care what happens to Israel, as long as its demise does not affect business.

[Ahmadinejad] has studied the recent Western postmodern mind, nursed on its holy trinity of multiculturalism, moral equivalence and relativism. As a third-world populist, Ahmadinejad expects that his own fascism will escape scrutiny if he just recites enough the past sins of the West. He also understands victimology. So he also knows that to destroy the Israelis, he -- not they -- must become the victim, and the Europeans the ones who forced his hand. To quote Ahmadinejad:

"So we ask you: If you indeed committed this great crime, why should the oppressed people of Palestine be punished for it? If you committed a crime, you yourselves should pay for it."

Ahmadinejad also grasps that there are millions of highly educated but cynical Westerners who see nothing much exceptional about their own culture. So if democratic America has nuclear weapons, why not theocratic Iran? "Your arsenals are full to the brim, yet when it's the turn of a nation such as mine to develop peaceful nuclear technology you object and resort to threats."

Moreover, he knows how Western relativism works. So who is to say what are "facts" or what is "true" -- given the tendency of the powerful to "construct" their own narratives and call the result "history." Was not the Holocaust exaggerated, or perhaps even fabricated, as mere jails became "death camps" through a trick of language to take over Palestinian land?

We laugh at all this as absurd. We should not (http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0106/hanson011906.php3?printer_friendly).