Why Iran? Give Iran A Break!
By Debbie Menon
27 February, 2010
Salem-News.com
(MELBOURNE, Aust.) - Iran has not attacked another country militarily. The track records of the US, Israel, the UK and France are very different.
These so called “democracies” have a bloody history of invading other countries on flimsy excuses.
There are parallels, between the western media rhetoric about Iraq’s nuclear threat prior to the US invasion and the rhetoric about Iran’s nuclear programme today. In repeatedly misinterpreting the statements of Iran’s Ahmadinejad, the US-Israel media paints him as the Hitler of the Middle East. There was no reality check before Iraq and there is no reality check now.
Iran has been a consistent supporter of the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and called for a nuclear weapons free Middle East.
The comments of Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad against Israel have been repeated by some of Iran ’s leaders since 1979 and constitute no practical threat. A tit-for-tat response.
The statement attributed to him that “Israel should be wiped off the map” is a distortion of the truth and has been determined by a number of Farsi linguists, amongst them, Professor Juan Cole, to be a mistranslation.
What he actually said was that “the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time”.
Ahmadinejad has made clear that he envisions regime change in Israel through internal decay.
The classic lie in the western Media, of course, is the lie that he had stated that: “Israel must be wiped off the map.”
Most media groups in the west fall in line with that thinking.
Janet Daly of the London Telegraph repeated this lie on a BBC programme when it has been exposed as such for well over two years. Larry King did the same, during his interview with Ahmadinejad, then cut to a commercial break before giving him time to respond, then, of course, he moved on to another subject, after the break. This has been their way for decades.
If you do not already know, Ahmadinejad was quoting Ayatollah Khomeini who actually said:
…this regime occupying Jerusalem (een rezhim-e eshghalgar-e qods)
must [vanish from] the page of time (bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad).
Iranian leaders have said consistently for two decades that they will accept a two-state solution in Palestine if a majority of Palestinians favour that option. This is in sharp contrast to the explicit threats by Israel and the US leaders against Iran, including aid to separatist movements to disintegrate and wipe Iran off the map, as reported by Seymour Hersh and Reese Elrich.
There is considerable evidence of clandestine operations by the US, British and Israeli agents who are arming, training and funding terrorist entities such as Jundollah in Baluchistan, Arab separatists in Khuzestan, and PJAK in Kurdistan.
These concrete attempts at disintegration of Iran, as well as the 100 million dollars congressional funding for ‘democracy’ promotion in Iran, constitute aggression and are interference in Iran’s domestic affairs and the Iranian people’s rights of sovereignty.
They violate the bilateral Algiers Accord of 1981, in which Washington renounced any such actions in the future.
Iran is no match for Israel, whose security and military needs are all but guaranteed by US taxpayers, most of whom are not even aware of this fact. Iran is surrounded on all sides by the US Navy and American bases. Iran has not invaded or threatened any country for two and a half centuries.
Give Iran a break!
Debbie Menon is an independent writer based in Dubai. She can be reached at [email protected].
