The Daily Background

I’m hardly the President of the Ahmadinejad fan club, but likening the Iranian President to Adolf Hitler is just ridiculous. Reuters:

Ahmadinejad — I call him Ahmad-in-a-head — I think he’s a Hitler type of person,” Ohio Republican Sen. George Voinovich said during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing.

“He has made it clear that he wants to destroy
Israel. He has made it clear he doesn’t believe in the Holocaust. He’s a, he’s a — we all know what he is,” the senator added.

I’m not sure he’s made clear that he actually wants to destroy Israel, rather that he doesn’t recognize it as a legitimate entity and doesn’t think it should exist. But to compare him to a man who wanted to wipe out an entire group of people just because of their religion is just not analogous. Jewish people in Iran have surprisingly little problems compared to say, Baha’i people. My father is from Iran, and his family is Baha’i and they’ve encountered a lot more discrimination under the US-supported monarchist regime from 1953-1979 and then later under the present Islamic Republic of Iran– than most Jewish people do in Iran. I’ll write more about this some time.

I think this pattern of exagerating the bad things about the current Iranian government (which is bad, but not as terrible as some people would like you to believe), fits into a pattern of demonizing them so later military action will be supported by the public. Sort of like Saddam was demonized, compared to Hitler, etc, before the Iraq war.

Filed under: Iran Related, Z-TDB Blog