It's amazing how ridiculously easy it is to create an Emmanuel Goldstein in the USA.

[mhatrw]

Let's summarize the totality of the "charges" against Ahmadinejad so far:

1) He is a figurehead in a country that executes gays.

2) He said, "In Iran we don't have homosexuals like in your country."

3) He questions the scope of the Holocaust just like Holocaust deniers and his country coddles hardcore Holocaust deniers.

4) He said, "The regime occupying Jerusalem (een rezhim-e eshghalgar-e qods) must vanish from the page of time (bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad)."

Now consider which of these charges of utter depravity, barbarity and insanity are actually anything but mainstream among your average hardline right wing Middle Eastern Islamic fundamentalist. The answer is exactly none. It's as if we suddenly just noticed for the first time ever that Islamic fundies hate Israel and persecute homosexuals.

Note: I am not defending antisemitism or homophobia of any sort. I find both utterly disgusting. As should go without saying, Holocaust denial is heinous and executing homosexuals is beyond heinous. However, I am simply stating facts. Gays are executed in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. And the number of RW Middle Eastern Islamic fundamentalists who deny the scope of the Holocaust and promote the ultimate destruction of Israel far exceeds the number of RW US Christian fundamentalists who contend that homosexuality is a lifestyle choice.

http://www.prwatch.org/books/tsigfy10.html

Wirthlin's job, Alsop explained, was "to identify the messages that really resonate emotionally with the American people." The theme that struck the deepest emotional chord, they discovered, was "the fact that Saddam Hussein was a madman who had committed atrocities even against his own people, and had tremendous power to do further damage, and he needed to be stopped."

Americans don't like to get involved in wars. However, the most effective way to break down American resistance to entering an armed conflict with another country is to make a blatant emotional appeal -- demonizing the leader of the enemy target as a dangerous, deranged super-villain. This is now a proven, tried and true, focus group certified right wing PR strategy.

I get on my knees and pray that we don't get fooled again.

[Bicoastal]

1. A quick question...

A DU'er just told me that A) Iran doesn't not execute gays (just a false rumor spread by war-mongering LGBT activists) and that B) Ahmadinejad did NOT deny that there were gay people living in Iran--only that the gay people in Iran were "not like," i.e., not similar to the gays in this country.

This DU'er then accused me of wanting to nuke Iran.

Is this person a total moron?

[mhatrw]

3. Sodomy is punishable by death in Iran.

The number of gays who have actually been executed for simply being gay is debatable, but the Iranian Penal Code is clear that death is the recommended punishment for penetrative male on male sex.

Ahmadinejad's translator said that he said, "In Iran we don't have homosexuals like in your country." What Ahmadinejad meant by that is open to interpretation. My personal take is that he was saying that the behavior of Iran's homosexuals quite understandably resembles the behavior of Larry Craig far more than that of Jack McFarland.

[piesRsquare]

15. Is it just me, or

is Ahmadinejad the most unfairly mistranslated speaker on the friggen planet?

This is bullshit. The number of executions of Gays/Lesbians in 2005 was at over 4,000. The link to that info has been posted on multiple threads this past week. Ahmadinejad wanted to "talk up" Iran, and thinking it would make Iran sound like such a wonderful country, he said (essentially), "We got no Gays." It was a piss-poor and disgusting attempt to sweep something shameful about his country under the rug, because it's not that "something" (aka Gays/Lesbians/Bisexuals/Transgendered) that is shameful, but rather it's his country's treatment of "that something" that's shameful!

Hence, the laughter; he made himself look like the total ass that he is! One can't help but laugh when someone declares himself to be an ass just by trying hard to not look like an ass!

[Tesha]

17. As is typical...

As is typical with Ahmadinejad, Democrats, or anyone
else the media wants to frame, we're usually not even
given the translation, let alone the actual original
speech.

Instead, we're *TOLD* what he said by pundits and news-
readers. And what we're told he said is strictly the
text approved by MiniTru.

That's why Denis Kucinich, BTW, never says anything.

Tesha

[mhatrw]

20. Yes, that 4,000 number has been bandied about a lot.

But is it true?

http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/pourzal220507.html

[Warren Stupidity]

12. Search is not your friend here

Here is what dailykoff actually said to you.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=1918843&mesg_id=1918937

1) Ahmadinejad is quoted as having said "In Iran we don't have homosexuals like in your country." He did not make "a flat denial that a gay population exists in Iran" as you state in your OP.

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5hATGOzv6YSmgeMY1zdY...

2) Apparently some deceptively named "LGBT activists and websites" are making false claims about a hanging that recently took place in Iran, which appears not to have been punishment for simply being gay, but for far more serious crimes including murder:

“It was not a gay case,” said Paula Ettelbrick, executive director of the International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission, taking issue with the Human Rights Campaign’s statement that was quick to condemn the execution as anti-gay.

http://washingtonblade.com/print.cfm?content_id

But don't let facts interfere with our right to nuke Iran.

Both points may in fact check out. Ahmadinejad being deliberately misquoted is standard practice in our media. I did not know that there was any controversy about the infamous hanging case whose picture we have seen repeatedly, but it seems that there is. Why would Paula Ettelbrick, executive director of the International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission be on the record taking exception to the portrayal of that execution as a gay rights issue?

I don't see DailyKoff accusing you of wanting to nuke Iran in that post, but it has been edited and perhaps you were referring to a different post.

What most of us on the other side of this debate are saying is not that you want to nuke Iran, but that you are being used in a coordinated hate fest as part of the propaganda effort to take us to war with Iran.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

2. I Don' t Like Folks Who Hang Gays

It disturbs me...

Sue me...

[mhatrw]

4. Yes, it's very disturbing that Iran, Saudia Arabia, Pakistan, Yemen and Nigeria

all execute gays and that gays can be imprisoned just for being gay in Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, Bahrain, Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Grenada, Lebanon, Laos, Liberia, Kuwait, Libya, Malawi, Malaysia, the Marshall Islands, Mongolia, Morocco, Nepal, Oman, Papua New Guinea, Puerto Rico, Qatar, Saint Lucia, Samoa, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Singapore, the Solomon Islands, Somalia, Sri Lanka, the Sudan, Swaziland, Syria, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Trinidad & Tobago, Tunisia, Togo, Tuvalu, Uganda, the United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Zambia and if the Republican Party has its way, Texas.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

6. Does A Barbaric Practice Become Less Barbaric With Frequency?

eom

[annabanana]

11. The point is (I think) that making a SPECIAL kind of monster of

Ahmadinejad, as opposed to all the other monsters out there, is something that B*sh and the complicit media are doing deliberately to push their "great satan Iran" theme.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

13. I Know

But I don't need anybody to tell me to dislike homophobes; especially the violent kind...

[shadowknows69]

5. That cartoon is creepy because it's so true I'm afraid

Mob nationalism will back this war because we know we've lost Iraq so we want a big pretty air campaign to make us feel like winners again. Shock and awe explosions mean we're winning and we're the good guys.

[mhatrw]

21. I fear the same thing.

Certainly, Ahmadinejad deserves measured vilification for blithely minimizing his country's atrocious persecution of gays and trying to minimize the horror of the Holocaust. But that's not the same as calling him "our enemy", "that which we are up against", the "mind of evil", a dictator, a madman, "tyrannical", an "unbalanced hatemonger", a nut job, insane, etc.

First, the intense personalization is very problematic. He is just a spokesperson for the mullahs. So why the intense personalization of him as a totalitarian/tyrant/dictator/strongman if not to make the same calculated emotional appeal against an insane madman that worked so well to get the country to rally around two wars against Sodamn Insane? Second, the bizarre contention that Ahmadinejad's admittedly incendiary rhetoric -- rhetoric that is quite common among his hardline fundy Muslim cohorts -- somehow makes him a deranged megalomaniac and/or evil incarnate. Once again, why this incredible leap of logic if not to make the same calculated emotional appeal against an insane madman that worked so well in the focus groups when the famous Hill & Knowlton PR firm was first contracted to sell us the original Gulf War?

The first step is to have us all concede that Ahmadinejad is a legitimate proxy for Iran and that he's an insane menace. Once we are all there, only a small minority of us will put rationality above emotion whenever the first reasonably serious provocation occurs (or is invented). IMHO, the key is to critically assess the "news" we are being fed throughout the entire build up to war, not just when it's too late. The problem is that NOBODY wants put his or her ass on the line to stand up to "common knowledge" as created by our corporate media. It's far easier just to concede the PR battles you can't win ("What? Are you actually standing up for that gay murdering, Hitler-loving madman? Do you actually hate America THAT much?"), and hope that this Groundhog War Day will somehow end differently than the last three.

[spoony]

7. Thank God for your post, I was JUST about to support war with Iran!

:sarcasm:

You say we don't need reminders that Iran abuses human rights. I say we don't need a reminder that a war with Iran would be bad.

[JackRiddler]

9. It's not about you...

I'm sure you won't go bomb Iran.

It's about the three minutes of hate held for all 16,800 minutes of last week in this very country, with the design of justifying in the public mind anything that the Bush regime intends to do against Iran (from nuking to nothing, it's their call now, and every other power-base has granted consensus in advance).

If you weren't bitching about the terrible Ahmadinejad a month ago, but you were doing so in the last week, then you were not complicit in the proposed crime of Bush-Kyl-Lieberman, no. But you were raising your arm in response to the jolt from the media as surely as if you spent any time thinking seriously about OJ the week before, or Britney the week before that. Except this whirlwind of staged hatred was telling the rest of the world that 50 million Iranians are now "ours" to collectively rape and murder.

In a forum like this, supposedly dedicated to organizing for a change in the national conditions, it's incumbent on you to try to understand that point, even if your bitching about Ahmadinejad one way or another doesn't make a fart's difference this week or next.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

10. See

I don't see a nexus, even a tenuous one, between me or anybody, calling bullshit on a person who countenances the hanging of gays, and wanting to harm that person or the nation he represents...

[JackRiddler]

16. Fine.

Ahmadinejad is bad, for the reasons you state, which are obvious and true. We agree.

This "tenuous nexus" - actually an orchestrated P.R. campaign - did not exist quite in the same way in the preceding 51 weeks - can you show me your anti-Ahmadinejad threads from those, by the way? But it did last week - and you missed it, apparently. Maybe you don't have tabloids where you live, or you didn't watch TV, or catch the Congressional record for the week.

[spoony]

14. I thought it was two minutes of hate?

Did we add a minute? Shit, no one forwards me these memos.

[shadowknows69]

18. You need at least three these days

I'm introducing legislation for a fourth and fifth.

[mhatrw]

19. I can name 76 Senators who will vote for it.

Obama will probably abstain, though.

[PDenton]

8. I agree

The charges against Ahmadinejad are irrelevent and should not persuade anybody to think his country is deserving of military action. Bush used the same garbage against Hussein in 2002 when he talked about Saddam's rape rooms and torture chambers. It is nothing more than an emotional appeal to more liberal people.

Anti-iranian elements in the US, Britain, and France don't want to come forward and just say "Iran can't be a regional power because that would threaten Israeli hegemony". Now that would be true but they don't want that running through your head, because then you'ld have to acknowledge that Israel is the only middle-eastern nation that has evidence of weapons of mass destruction.