Because it's definitely time enough to start looking at the other side.
I'm not usually one for the political blogs round these parts, mostly because my mind is pretty made up, I feel like all of my friends have seen the light, and very little can surprise me at this point. However, something I read on Daily Kos today really threw me for a loop... and just when I thought the right-wing mind-warping couldn't shock me anymore. Why I thought that, I do not know.
I've been paying more attention to the issues of universal health care and the Employee Free Choice Act, largely because after twenty-eight years of being a pacifist (twenty-eight? Well, considering I've never been anything else...) I just can't even dip my toe into our current foreign policy issues without getting extremely agitated and angry while still unable to do a darn thing, and at a certain point it's not worth it.
So no, I did not know much about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's 2005 speech about wiping Israel off the map. Heard a little about it here and there, I kinda knew it had been said, but since I tend to fall more in the camp of "most of the so-called evil in the Middle East will turn out to be widely misinterpreted by our press and right-wing government", I didn't get worked up about it or make any assumptions. Ever since I saw The Power of Nightmares I've been quite the skeptic with just about everything inflammatory and Middle Eastern, whether or not it was warranted.
And still, even with all that cynicism, I was startled to actually read the apparent truth behind that speech.
According to John McCain and most of the right-wing pundits and actually most of the media, Ahmadinejad is a threat and the next Hitler because he told the UN that Iran's goal is to wipe Israel off the map. Granted, not a goal I could really get behind so much, but also not something that lights a fire under me and gets me onto the "Hey let's bomb those guys in the turbans!" train, because you'd have to really show me the money to get me onto that train just cause somebody said something bad.
What really shocked me, though, was what he actually said, quoting Ayatollah Khomeni:
"The Imam said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time."
Word by word translation:
Imam (Khomeini) ghoft (said) een (this) rezhim-e (regime) ishghalgar-e (occupying) qods (Jerusalem) bayad (must) az safheh-ye ruzgar (from page of time) mahv shavad (vanish from).
Okay.
There is a HUGE GIGANTIC HONKING DIFFERENCE between regime change and wiping the entire nation of Israel "off the map" (and if you noticed, dude never even actually said "map", come to think of it.)
Now, as a pacifist of Jewish descent, I remain somewhat ambivalent about Israel's current policies myself. I would definitely not be down with wiping it off the map or giving it all back to the Palestinians entirely, but at the same time I can't quite fully endorse the policies of the current Israeli regime.
So does that quote make me want to put on an Ahmadinejad t-shirt and invite the guy to dinner? Well, no, not so much. I'm not taking his side per se here. But at the same time, there's a world of difference from what's being widely reported as fact here in the media, and just a blatant, deliberate, obvious use of propaganda. Nothing that should surprise me at this point, I guess - and yet somehow it does.
And it's shit like this that is going to give us four more years of this crap.
I've been paying more attention to the issues of universal health care and the Employee Free Choice Act, largely because after twenty-eight years of being a pacifist (twenty-eight? Well, considering I've never been anything else...) I just can't even dip my toe into our current foreign policy issues without getting extremely agitated and angry while still unable to do a darn thing, and at a certain point it's not worth it.
So no, I did not know much about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's 2005 speech about wiping Israel off the map. Heard a little about it here and there, I kinda knew it had been said, but since I tend to fall more in the camp of "most of the so-called evil in the Middle East will turn out to be widely misinterpreted by our press and right-wing government", I didn't get worked up about it or make any assumptions. Ever since I saw The Power of Nightmares I've been quite the skeptic with just about everything inflammatory and Middle Eastern, whether or not it was warranted.
And still, even with all that cynicism, I was startled to actually read the apparent truth behind that speech.
According to John McCain and most of the right-wing pundits and actually most of the media, Ahmadinejad is a threat and the next Hitler because he told the UN that Iran's goal is to wipe Israel off the map. Granted, not a goal I could really get behind so much, but also not something that lights a fire under me and gets me onto the "Hey let's bomb those guys in the turbans!" train, because you'd have to really show me the money to get me onto that train just cause somebody said something bad.
What really shocked me, though, was what he actually said, quoting Ayatollah Khomeni:
"The Imam said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time."
Word by word translation:
Imam (Khomeini) ghoft (said) een (this) rezhim-e (regime) ishghalgar-e (occupying) qods (Jerusalem) bayad (must) az safheh-ye ruzgar (from page of time) mahv shavad (vanish from).
Okay.
There is a HUGE GIGANTIC HONKING DIFFERENCE between regime change and wiping the entire nation of Israel "off the map" (and if you noticed, dude never even actually said "map", come to think of it.)
Now, as a pacifist of Jewish descent, I remain somewhat ambivalent about Israel's current policies myself. I would definitely not be down with wiping it off the map or giving it all back to the Palestinians entirely, but at the same time I can't quite fully endorse the policies of the current Israeli regime.
So does that quote make me want to put on an Ahmadinejad t-shirt and invite the guy to dinner? Well, no, not so much. I'm not taking his side per se here. But at the same time, there's a world of difference from what's being widely reported as fact here in the media, and just a blatant, deliberate, obvious use of propaganda. Nothing that should surprise me at this point, I guess - and yet somehow it does.
And it's shit like this that is going to give us four more years of this crap.