Ahmadinejad Kicks Diversion Efforts into High Gear

In the lead-up to his speech at the UN General Assembly in New York on Wednesday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is up to his old tricks. And sadly, the global community seems to be falling for them.

Ahmadinejad has managed to divert attention from his disputed re-election in June and the human rights abuses his government has carried out since those elections by publicly engaging in what appears to be his favorite pastime: bashing Israel and denying the Holocaust.

Last Friday, thousands of protesters poured into the streets of Tehran to show their continued opposition to Ahmadinejad and what many consider a stolen election.

The protesters made it a point to call Ahmadinejad out on his hypocrisy on Friday, which marked Quds Day, the Iranian government's annual show of solidarity with the Palestinian people. In speaking out in support of human rights for Palestinians while continuing to deny them to his own people, Ahmadinejad provoked the largest opposition protests since mid-July.

Amid the greatest unrest Iran has seen since the Islamic Revolution, the world's attention is not on the false arrests, show trials, torture and illegal detentions in Iran. Rather, the central issue that the international community has chosen to focus on, apart from Ahmadinejad's persistent holocaust denial, has been that of the Iranian government's nuclear capacities.

Given the fact that the US and Israel combined have at least a thousand times as many nukes as Iran could potentially be hiding, the possibility of a nuclear attack by Iran, no matter how misguided its president, is highly unlikely.

What is likely, however, is a continued crackdown on opposition leaders, activists and journalists inside Iran. The international community would be better served to concern itself more with these internal Iranian developments than with uranium enrichment today because the best hope for a non-nuclear Iran is a free Iran.

And the greatest assets the world has in ridding the country of hard-liners such as Ahmadinejad are the Iranian people themselves. Foreign intervention, military or otherwise, cannot hold a candle to the potential power of the Iranian people to bring down this regime.

The best way for the international community to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of the Iranian regime is to refuse to fall into Ahmadinejad's trap. The world has a lot more to gain by focusing on the plight of the Iranian opposition, rather than the empty threats and rhetoric of their illegitimate leader.

The sanctions of the past 30 years and Iran's present resolve on the nuclear issue are proof that the Iranian government does not respond well to the winds of international pressure, especially when they're blowing in from the west.

But the regime cannot last long without the support of its own people, and by continuing to restrict the basic civil liberties of Iranian citizens, the allegedly Islamic Republic is digging its own grave.

When Ahmadinejad takes the stage on Wednesday in New York, I expect to hear a lot of the same rhetoric that has made him infamous around the world. But by focusing on his moronic holocaust denials and tirades against the West instead of his brutality toward his own people, world leaders will only be playing into the hands of a desperate dictator.

 

 

Follow Melody Moezzi on Twitter: www.twitter.com/MelodyMoezzi

Comments

[Patricia DeGennaro - Huffpost Blogger]

Excellent point! I especially agree that "The world has a lot more to gain by focusing on the plight of the Iranian opposition, rather than the empty threats and rhetoric of their illegitimate leader." We must not forget whose really paying the price in these political power games. It is the people. It is up to us to stand with the Iranians who are being oppressed and not give Ahmadinejad the satisfaction of listening to his disillusional rhetoric. Thank you Ms. Moezzi!

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/melody-moezzi/ahmadinejad-kicks-diversi_b_294074.html

[cmgirgis]

Excellent article, thanks for discussing what is a very important topic to many people!

[MosheDayanHero]

Last Friday, thousands of protesters poured into the streets of Tehran to show their continued opposition to Ahmadinejad and what many consider a stolen election.

[eileenflemingWAWA]

In 2006, Virginia Tilley, Professor of political science wrote: "Ahmadinejad never used the word 'map' or the term 'wiped off.' According to Farsi-language experts like Juan Cole and even right-wing services like MEMRI, what he actually said was 'this regime that is occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time'...He was citing Imam Khomeini, who said this line in the 1980s-a period when Israel was actually selling arms to Iran, so apparently it was not viewed as so ghastly then...Ahm­adinejad had just reminded his audience [of] the Shah's regime, the Soviet Union, and Saddam Hussein...­So, too, the "occupying regime" in Jerusalem would someday be gone."

IMAGINE a media that would report on what Mordechai Vanunu offered in 1986 about Israel's WMD Program.

In 2005, he told me:

"President Kennedy tried to stop Israel from building atomic weapons. Prime Minister Ben Guirion said, 'The nuclear reactor is only for peace."

"When Johnson became president, he made an agreement with Israel that two senators would come every year to inspect. Before the senators would visit, the Israelis would build a wall to block the underground elevators and stairways.

"Nixon stopped the inspections and agreed to ignore the situation.­..In 1986, there were over two hundred bombs. Today, Israel may have enough plutonium for ten bombs a year."

Excerpted from: "President Obama's Nuclear Opportunity: Dialogue with Iran and Blow Israel's Ambiguity"

http://www.wearewideawake.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1426&Itemid=224

[MosheDayanHero]

Ahmadinejad has managed to divert attention from his disputed re-election in June and the human rights abuses his government has carried out since those elections by publicly engaging in what appears to be his favorite pastime: bashing Israel and denying the Holocaust.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/melody-moezzi/ahmadinejad-kicks-diversi_b_294074.html

[MosheDayanHero]

A Red Herring is a fallacy in which an irrelevant topic is presented in order to divert attention from the original issue.

Sorry, your herring bait isn't working.

[StJames]

Amahdinejad could be the best thing that ever happened to Iranian-American relations. If he and the ayatollahs continue their oppressive ways, the Iranians will oust them themselves. The 1979 Islamic revolution started out slowly with demonstrations sporadically over a period of time...The fact that people are still making their displeasure known is good. Iran has a long, long history or regime changes.