Iran's President - An Embarrassment to the Persian-Speaking World
Although I was initially dismayed when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a hard-line Islamist, was elected president of Iran, I harbored hopes that perhaps he was not quite as extreme as he was reputed to be. Or, I thought that maybe even if he was personally very extreme, the existence of a large, mostly moderate post-revolution Iranian population would temper his views. Needless to say, I was totally incorrect. Although not from Iran, I feel a deep sense of shame as someone of Persian heritage that this individual is the face of Iran to the world, as Iran and Persian-speakers (even those from Afghanistan and former Soviet Central Asia) are inextricably linked. That this narrow-minded, hateful, ignorant person represents a nation with such a glorious and ancient history as Iran is an absolute travesty. First, there were his absolutely abhorrent comments about Israel, in which he described it as a "tumor" to be "wiped off the map." This is tantamount to a call to genocide, and a real cause for concern coming from the leader of one of the more formidably armed nations in the region. This angered me even more, considering that in principle, Iran has nothing to do with the Arab-Israeli conflict, despite the false attempts to cast the conflict into a Muslim-Jewish war - more on that later. For now, suffice to say that as Persians, it has nothing to do with us, and nothing to do with Mr. Ahmadinejad. Another disturbing trend has been his zeal to pursue the nuclear program. Official Iranian protests that it is simply for an energy source are laughable coming from an oil and gas-rich country that also has ample hydroelectrical resources. The fact is, they are developing weapons at enormous cost, despite the fact that the money could be better directed towards alleviating the poverty that is widespread in Iran, particularly rural areas. It is part of the larger tragedy, where Iran's wealth has been squandered by incompetent, corrupt, fanatical mullahs who have used Islam as a means to entrench themselves in the seat of power. If anyone continued to have doubts as to whether Ahmadinejad was a total fanatic zealot, he soon dispelled them in the infamous video that is circling Iran and the world. In this, he describes to another cleric how he was surrounded by divine light and filled with an unearthly power as he addressed the United Nations, transfixing the world's leaders in the glow of Islam. I consider myself a Muslim, and I am personally repelled whenever I see him speak, so I thought that was a particularly off-putting thought. Most recently, he has banned all Western music from Iran, which supposedly corrupts its people. Does he think that Iranians are so stupid and malleable that the mere sound of an American song will drive them to debauchery? I would think that a greater threat to Iranian society is the cheap heroin and opium that floods over the nation's border with Afghanistan. Perhaps instead of spending millions on nuclear weapons, he would be better advised to directing his energy and money into developing both his own country (so that the hopeless, unemployed youth will have something to do besides consume drugs), and providing increased targeted aid to Afghanistan, to achieve greater stability and the rule of law there. I highly doubt he will do this though - far easier to allow Iran's economic and societal problems to fester and blame them on the United States and Israel, as Ahmadinejad and other hypocritical Muslim leaders prefer to do.
Photo credit: www.kashar.net
posted by TojikYor @ 2:08 PM
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