Ahmadinejad: We are Not a Threat to Any
Country, Including Israel
Believe it, don't believe it, that's up to you. But at least we should know
what exactly he said, which is not something our US newspapers will tell us
about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's speech on Saturday:
Kayhan reports that
[Pers.] Ahmadinejad said, "Iran is not a threat to any country, and is
not in any way a people of intimidation and aggression." He described
Iranians as people of peace and civilization. He said that Iran does not even
pose a threat to Israel, and wants to deal with the problem there peacefully,
through elections:
"Weapons research is in no way part of Iran's program. Even with regard to
the Zionist regime, our path to a solution is elections."
Ahmadinejad seems to be explaining what his calls for the Zionist regime to be
effaced actually mean. He says he doesn't want violence against Israel, despite
its own acts of enmity against Middle Eastern neighbors. I interpret his
statement on Saturday to be an endorsement of the one-state solution, in which
a government would be elected that all Palestinians and all Israelis would
jointly vote for. The result would be a government about half made up of
Israeli ministers and half of Palestinian ones. Whatever one wanted to call
such an arrangement, it wouldn't exactly be a "Zionist state," which
would thus have been dissolved.
The schlock Western pundits, journalists and politicians who keep maintaining
that Ahmadinejad threatened "to wipe Israel off the map" when he
never said those words will never, ever manage to choke out the words
Ahmadinejad spoke on Saturday, much less repeat them as a tag line forever
after.
Supreme
Jurisprudent Khamenei's pledge of no first strike against any country by
Iran with any kind of weapon, and his condemnation of nuclear bombs as
un-Islamic and impossible for Iran to possess or use, was completely ignored by
the Western press and is never referred to. Indeed, after all that talk of
peace and no fist strike and no nukes, Khamenei at the very end said that if
Iran were attacked, it would defend itself. Karl Vicks of the Washington Post
at the time ignored all the rest of the speech and made the headline, 'Khamenei
threatens reprisals against US." In other words, on Iran, the US public is
being spoonfed agitprop, not news.
Although Iran's protestations of peaceful intentions are greeted cynically in
the US and Israel, in fact Iran has not launched a war of aggression in over a
century. The US and Israel have launched several during that period of time.
Ahmadinejad made the remarks in a speech inaugurating work on a heavy water
nuclear reactor in Arak. I don't think that work is very advanced. The Iranians
maintain that it is for peaceful energy generation.
Much of the electricity produced in France, South Korea and Japan is generated
by nuclear plants.
posted by Juan @ 8/27/2006 06:36:00 AM 0