I previously posted about the latest rash of scandalous photos coming out of Afghanistan showing U.S. military atrocities under Obama’s command, and wondering if the media would pick up on it the way they did when it was Bush’s army… Well, here’s a twist I wasn’t expecting: yes, one of the U.S. media, Rolling Stone, [...]
Jeffrey Goldberg, a correspondent for the Atlantic, cast a spotlight on yet another disgustingly overt example of pure bias in the mainstream media, particularly at the anti-Semitic Reuters newswire. He points to a Reuters news item which contains the following despicable sentences: Police said it was a “terrorist attack” — Israel’s term for a Palestinian [...]
In the [sparse] reporting of the Palestinians’ massacre of the Fogel family, several newspapers stand out with their distorted sense of “balance”, i.e., where they feel overwhelmingly uncomfortable describing the barbarity of the Palestinians without at least taking a swipe or two at the Israelis, no matter how patently irrelevant or disgustingly disrespectful it comes [...]
More Thoughts On Iran: The Sham Democracy
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A friend of mine, DMB, was smart to point out one beneficial aspect of this attempted revolution that I overlooked: the fact that it exposes the “democracy” of Islamic Republic of Iran as completely fraud and, in the process, it more publicly delegitimizes Ahmedinejad as the democratically chosen president of Iran.
For a handful of well-informed followers of world politics, the whole concept of democracy in Iran has always been known to be a sham, and although Ahmadinejad was “elected”, the whole process is and, again, always has been, far from a democracy as we know it. Although a handful of informed people already realized it, the truth is that this attempted revolution has at least highlighted this fact to more people in the world, to those that were until now fooled by Iran’s “elections”.
DMB tried to argue the additional point that this could in fact be the start of a true democracy in Iran. This is where I disagree. That is not going to happen for a number of reasons.
First, there’s the obvious fact that this revolution is most likely not going to succeed. Setting that aside, though, even if it does succeed, you’re still talking about a region of the world where democracy is culturally a foreign concept that is frowned upon, a part of the world where the natural order is much different than what we’re used to, a part of the world where corruption is the norm, and a part of the world where religion is completely intertwined with politics. For all those reasons, you’ll never see a true democracy there until the people themselves change—something which would require at least a couple of generations of “UNdoctrination”.
As I pointed out in my last post, it’s important to keep in mind that the same masses you see swarming the streets today, calling for “revolution”, were swarming the streets recently shouting “death to America and Israel”. And, hey, that many people don’t just change their ideology overnight.
And, just to reiterate a point from my last post: as for Mousavi being a better alternative for the world, that’s just not believable. He is merely the quieter alternative to Ahmadinejad. But, his views are the same.
Regarding nuclear efforts he said in an interview, “What the West shouldn’t hope for is that Iran will abandon the [nuclear] technology”. Regarding Israel, his views here too are the same as Ahmadinehad’s, namely that he wants it gone and replaced with Palestine. In the same interview, he said, “The only way … is to refer to the true inhabitants of Palestine”.
Yaakov Katz of the Jerusalem Post put it best when he essentially said that at least with Ahmadinejad, we have the advantage of knowing who we’re dealing with and knowing Iran’s motives, which keeps the world on high alert. With someone like Mousavi, on the other hand, the world’s guard will be lowered as they are misled by his milder rhetoric when, in reality, his motives (with respect to foreign policy and nuclear technology) are the same.