Another Step

Just one more time, in a practice which spans decades, a middle-east leader calls for Israel to be wiped off the map. In fact, it seems he said this:

"The establishment of the Zionist regime was a move by the world oppressor against the Islamic world. The skirmishes in the occupied land are part of a war of destiny. The outcome of hundreds of years of war will be defined in Palestinian land. As the Imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map."
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2005-10-26): speaking at a conference "The World without Zionism"

It's hardly difficult to see why the practice is so common, as Israel was re-created by the USA by seizing land from the Palestinians, a practice which Israel has continued ever since. Even the BBC reporter observes:

"Such calls are regular slogans at anti-Israeli or anti-US rallies in Iran. "

But this leader was the Iranian leader, and this is the period in which Messrs Bush and Blair are trying to paint Iran as an unstable, war mongering, terrorist-supporting regime which is is trying to develop Weapons of Mass Destruction and is hence ripe for attack.

With his current role as the Head of State presiding over the EU and on a day with a major EU meeting in London, Tony Blair seems to have effectively prompted international condemnation. He turned around the guarantees the government had given that there would be no war against Iran, pronouncing:

"I have never come across a situation of the President of a country saying they want to wipe out, not that they have got a problem with, or an issue with, but want to wipe out another country. This is unacceptable. And their attitude towards Israel, their attitude towards terrorism, their attitude on the nuclear weapons issue, it isn't acceptable. [...] I haven't said in precise terms what we can do, but this is a discussion that we will be having with our allies. And you know there has been a long time in which I have been answering questions on Iran, with everyone saying to me: "Tell us you are not going to do anything about Iran." If they carry on like this, the question people are going to be asking us is: When are you going to do something about this? Because you imagine a state like that, with an attitude like that, having a nuclear weapon?"
- Tony Blair 2005-10-27: Press conference at EU informal summit Hampton Court

I have several problems with Blair's remarks:

• As so often, Blair crucially misrepresents his protagonist, to suit his argument:
  Ahmadinejad: "Israel must be wiped off the map."
  Blair: "they want to wipe out, [...] want to wipe out another country."
  Modern-day Israel was put on the map, by force of imposition by the USA. Ahmadinejad says it must be wiped off the map. He did not say that Iran would be the country to do it; he didn't say that it had to be done by force of war.
• Blair said "their attitude towards terrorism [...] isn't acceptable".
  This is about the British government's allegation that Iraq is supplying bombs to insurgent groups in Iraq. Not only does Iran deny this, but on a "Sunday AM" interview, Defence Secretary John Reid staggers back a mile from suggesting the Iranian government had anything to do with it. (I'll attach the text as a comment to this post.)
• Blair said "their attitude towards Israel [...] isn't acceptable".
  We've covered this one.
• Blair said "their attitude on the nuclear weapons issue".
  Iran has denied any intention to gain nuclear arms, and the IAEA and independent inspectors have both found no evidence of an intention to gain nuclear arms. This is about Iran's intention to use nuclear energy (its right under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty). For more information, see this post.

One of the reasons I maintain this Blog, is that in the run-up to the Iraq war many things were said which later disappeared without a trace, many things which were clearly of significance were given scant or no attention by the media. But after the event the quotations are difficult to find, and the size of the task is too huge for me to carry out. I am desperately unhappy about the extent to which the media follows the Anglo-US governments' point of view. It tends to question individual points of a policy, but take for granted the underlying premise as if they were obvious. I'm particularly concerned when this happens (as it regularly does) on the BBC.

In the Sunday AM programme, mentioned above, Andrew Marr makes two basic errors - he slips towards the rhetoric of the government by suggesting that Iran *is* an alarming problem, that it *does* have links to extremists, that it *is* trying to develop a nuclear [implied 'weapons'] capacity, that the Iranian president said 'he wanted to wipe Israel from the map' rather than simply that Israel was imposed by the USA and 'must be wiped from the map'. On this occasion I decided to write a complaint to the BBC. I'll include the text as another comment. I'm interested to hear the BBC's response.