Iran

An aura of mad bile
Andrew Bolt
05may06

THE bad news is that you won't believe the bad news. Not when it's more stuff about another mad Muslim leader and his nuclear bomb.You once swallowed all that about Saddam, right?

So I won't say the same-old about Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. I'll just tell you instead what he's been saying lately.
Of course, you may still conclude he's kidding -- and not just being as frank as was young Hitler in 1925, when in he wrote in Mein Kampf that he truly did loathe Jews, those "satanic" beasts who "stifle in filth and offal", and if ever he won power he'd show them...

But judge for yourself the words of Ahmadinejad since he won last June's rigged election, exulting: "Thanks to the blood of the martyrs, a new Islamic revolution has arisen and the Islamic revolution of 1384 (2005 in Iran's calendar) will, if God wills, cut off the roots of injustice in the world."

Only weeks later he told Iranians that martyrdom in this cause was the "most gracious, most divine and longest lasting kind of artmanship".

They heard him. Some 50,000 have now signed with Iran's Committee for the Commemoration of Martyrs of the Global Islamic Campaign to wage suicide attacks in any war with the West or Israel.

Ahmadinejad then went to the United Nations to explain why the United States and Israel were not just his enemies but ours, and became so excited that he had a religious vision.

He said the US was the true terrorist, having created Saddam Hussein, the Taliban and even, perhaps, the September 11 attacks, since "it was never explained how such huge intelligence gathering and security organisations failed to prevent such an extensive and well planned operation".

He added: "Terrorism and WMDs are two major threats before the international community . . . Today, the most serious challenge is that the culprits (read: the US and Israel) are arrogating to themselves the role of the prosecutor."

And that ecstatic vision of his?

Said Ahmadinejad later: "When I was speaking before the assembly, one of our group told me that when I started to say 'In the name of God the almighty and merciful,' he saw a light around me, and I was placed inside this aura.

"I felt it myself. I felt the atmosphere suddenly change, and for those 27 or 28 minutes, the leaders of the world did not blink . . . It seemed as if a hand was holding them there and had opened their eyes to receive the message from the Islamic republic."

Whose mystic hand did that? In fact, the President follows a end-of-days cult that worships Islam's missing "12th Iman", who vanished in 941. And he's said "our revolution's mission is to pave the way for the reappearance of the 12th Imam."

In October he explained how that might be done, saying the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had "said that the occupying regime (Israel) must be wiped off the map and this was a very wise statement".
He criticised Muslims who dreamed too small "in the struggle between the Islamic world and the infidels".

"They say it is not possible to have a world without the United States and Zionism.

But you know that this is a possible goal and slogan."

In December, he again urged Iranians to become martyrs when he thanked 108 people who'd died in a plane crash near Tehran, saying:
"What is important is that they have shown the way to martyrdom which we must follow." Must?

And again and again he has told Muslims to see Israel and the US as demons.

"Today several powerful countries have polluted the world atmosphere by ignoring the rules of morality," he said in March. In April he added: "The Zionist regime is a rotten, dried tree that will be eliminated by one storm." Oh, and the Holocaust is a "myth".

Words are one thing, but Ahmadinejad also has sticks and stones. Iran not only has 10 per cent of the world's crude oil reserves, but has for two decades run a secret nuclear program widely believed to be developing a bomb.

YOU'LL reassure me that even this man can't be so crazy as to use a nuke when he knows the US could hit him back even harder. But it's always a mistake to imagine your enemy sees things as you do -- especially when he's gripped by some totalitarian faith or creed.

Be warned by China's Mao Zedong, who not just slaughtered as many as 70 million of his people, but in 1958 wrote to the Soviet Union's Nikita Khruschev to boast he could handle a nuclear war with the US.

As Jung Chang records in her superb biography Mao, he declared: "For our ultimate victory, for the total eradication of the imperialists, we are willing to endure the first strike. All it is is a big pile of corpses."
Ahmadinejad is luckily no Mao. He has starved no one, and still has Iran's powerful Ayatollahs to placate and some crowds to please.

But, unlike Mao, he does seem to think death is sweeter than life.

But, yes, you're right. He can't mean all this. Can he?