Wednesday, April 16, 2008
The "9/11 Truthers" get a new convert
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad continues to cultivate his reputation as a complete fracking loon:
Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Wednesday reaffirmed his doubts about the accepted version of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, describing the strikes as a "suspect event".
"Four or five years ago a suspect event took place in New York," Ahmadinejad said in a speech to a public rally in the holy city of Qom broadcast live on state television.
"A building collapsed and they said that 3,000 people had been killed, whose names were never published."
"Under this pretext they (the United States) attacked Afghanistan and Iraq and since then a million people have been killed," he said.
This was the third time in just over a week that Ahmadinejad has publicly raised doubts about the September 11 airborne attacks on New York and Washington carried out by Al-Qaeda militants which killed nearly 3,000 people.
It is fashionable for the Islamic Republic's apologists to speak of Iran's ancient traditions and great pride as a country. Maybe so, but right now it is led by a cartoon character who denies historical fact -- the Holocaust, September 11 -- with a very troubling persistence.
This is more than mere evidence of sanity dislocation on the part of the man that would-be president Barack Obama has vowed to "meet with." It is very dangerous myth-making. Roger Kimball locates the problem:
[I]t is always wise to insist on the truth, however tedious the exercise becomes. Ahmadinejad’s statement is like an acid spill or a burst of deadly radioactivity. It contaminates and damages what it touches. We require, as Dr. Johnson reminded us, the reagent of truth if we are to escape unscathed.
Roger makes this sound like an aesthetic problem, and it absolutely is that. The wiping away of history for political purposes -- remember the Holocaust, September 11, the Rape of Nanking, the slaughter of the Armenians, the Cultural Revolution, and the many examples around the world of genocide against indigenous peoples -- degrades our humanity.
More practically, it is also very dangerous. The fires of war feed off the tinder of national myth. The most famous modern case is interwar Germany, which built an inverted pyramid of victimization and myth until it exploded internally and externally, but examples are legion. The other nations of Asia get incensed when Japan whitewashes its own imperial crimes, and the Middle East is a seething mass of national myths that are actually calculated to sustain violence rather than diffuse it. So we know that Ahmadinejad's erasure of the Holocaust and 9/11 is as dangerous as it ugly, whether his motivation is to sustain national will for his proxy war with Israel and the United States or merely to stoke Iranian resentments for his own advantage.
3 Comments:
By 
Andrew Hofer, at
Wed Apr 16, 12:24:00 PM:
"never been published"
What an amazing claim, given they are printed on flags, were on the walls of the site for years, read aloud on television every year, profiled in detail in the NY Times.....
I wonder how much of his audience knows he's fantasizing.
By antithaca, at
Wed Apr 16, 06:18:00 PM:
Isn't in interesting to see the 9/11 Troofer movement, the "million dead in Iraq" clan, and the Holocaust denier gang all join hands?
Someone (someone quite smart who I shall not name) once suggested in a very public forum at an Ivy League institution that racism (of whites towards others) under pinned all of this. To be fair, he made this suggestion more in the context of Pearl Harbor and 9/11...but still.
Hard to see his argument apply generally as people around the world glom onto these fantasies.
By randian, at
Wed Apr 16, 11:23:00 PM:
Iran actually seeks to destroy its history, if it's pre-Islamic or non-Islamic and therefore worthless trash:
Iranian authorities destroy seven ancient synagogues in Tehran
http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/020688.php
