Defending Ahmadinejad

Last week marked the third straight year in which the United States led a walkout during a speech by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the United Nations.
 
The U.S. delegation wanted to show their utter disdain for the opinions and policies of President Ahmadinejad. They were joined by the member states of the European Union.

However, they did nothing but reveal themselves as children playing at political theater, afraid that the world might begin to listen to the truths expressed by President Ahmadinejad.

Let us be clear: President Ahmadinejad is the legitimately elected representative of the Iranian people, despite electoral irregularities exaggerated by the Western media. Iran has nearly 78 million citizens, and their leader deserves to be treated with decency and respect.

Further, President Ahmadinejad has skillfully articulated a variety of complaints and truths about the global order, not only in his most recent UN speech but every time he has addressed the world body.

His remarks focused on criticizing the United States, so it is natural that our delegation to the UN would lead a walkout, hoping to disrupt the speech and draw attention away from accurate criticisms of our economic and imperial policies.

President Ahmadinejad attacked the way the U.S. used the 9/11 attacks as a flimsy pretext to invade multiple Middle Eastern nations. He accused Western nations, particularly Europeans, of continuing to support Israel’s occupation of Palestine out of lingering guilt about the Holocaust.

Most importantly, he lambasted the failed economic policies of the U.S. and the European Union, policies which have left the global economy a shattered ruin.  These appear to be reasonable attacks against a global order which favors the wealthy, militarily powerful Western nations above the subjugated people of the third world.

Yet, because President Ahmadinejad called the Holocaust a myth in 2009, the UN has since labeled all of his speeches as “odious, hateful, anti-Semitic, unacceptable.” This is propaganda at its purest. Legitimate criticisms of our nation are warped into racist creeds and reported as such. There was no anti-Semitism in President Ahmadinejad’s speech.

He argued that using the Holocaust as an excuse to support Israel was unfounded. “If some European countries still use the Holocaust, after six decades, as the excuse to pay fine or ransom to the Zionists, should it not be an obligation upon the slave masters or colonial powers to pay reparations to the effected nations?” 

After all, more than 350 members of our own Congress attended a gala thrown by the pro-Israel lobby earlier this year. 

President Barack Obama recently gave a speech deeply critical of the Palestian cause, and the U.S. is preparing to veto Palestinian statehood. Our government is deeply connected with the Israeli occupation of Palestine, but when President Ahmadinejad points out that the emperor has no clothes, we respond by belittling his points and calling him a racist. This is what is truly odious and unacceptable.

Remember that it was not the oppressed people of the world who walked out during President Ahmadinejad’s speech. It was the U.S. and the European Union, the wealthy, white states which have dominated global affairs for hundreds of years. The oppressed people of the world, those with representation and those without, stayed in their seats and listened.

Let us take this as a sign of hope for the coming century.

­— atcrane@indiana.edu