Mick Hartley

An interesting contrast in the latest TV clips at MEMRI (so registration required to view). First up, on Iranian TV, an interview with Mohammad 'Ali Ramin, Ahmadinejad's "Holocaust advisor" and secretary-general of the so-called International Foundation for Holocaust Studies. It is, for those of us who've been paying attention, depressingly familiar stuff:

Mohammad 'Ali Ramin: The word "Holocaust" means the mass burning of people. This word appears, in one form or another, in the Koran, where it says: "The owners of the pit were killed." According to this story, when a Jew became the ruler of Yemen, he used to burn groups of people.

Interviewer: So it was carried out by the Jews?

Mohammad 'Ali Ramin: Yes, it was. Following the second European war, the descendants [of this Yemenite king] made this claim against the defeated German regime. After the war was over, they claimed that six million Jews… At first, they didn't talk about six million, but about a large number. Gradually, when they realized that the time was ripe, they inflated the figure, until they reached six million. At the Nuremberg trials, the leaders of the USSR, the US, and England did not make such an allegation. The issue was never even addressed in these trials. But later, in order to establish Israel, they raised the claim that six million Jews suffocated in gas chambers and were burnt in crematoria. This claim was used to depict the so-called Jewish survivors as oppressed, and use this as a pretext to say: "We must be compensated for the oppression we suffered." Consequently, the English and the Americans gave the Jews the land of occupied Palestine, which they had at they disposal at the time. This is how they established the State of Israel.  […]

In order to oppress the German people… England and the US did this in order to conceal what they did in Africa, in what is now the USA, and in many other countries. After all, the English perpetrated tens of millions of murders, and the Americans perpetrated many crimes in the world in the past century – for example, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and other horrifying crimes.  […]

By making the claim that six million Jews were killed by the Germans in the Holocaust, they have gained such global power that they control the Western governments. If the American administration or the English government would want to deny [the Holocaust], they would not allow it. In other words, this is a vicious circle, and as long as this vicious circle is not broken, and as long as this myth is not openly studied, this situation will continue.

Then, on Al-Jazeera, we have Iraqi MP Iyad Jamal Al-Din:

Iyad Jamal Al-Din: The Islamic movement that rules in Iraq lives in the past – especially the political forces that raise the banner of the martyrs, and base themselves on a history of being oppressed, without taking into consideration the bright future. The Iraqi people is a living people. It chooses life over death. The religious discourse in Iraq sanctifies death, the dead, and the martyrs, who are viewed as a cultural asset. This discourse does not sanctify the living. If you want to be sanctified, to become immortal, you must first be killed. This runs counter to the will and aspirations of the Iraqi public. It is also noteworthy that the religious forces ruling Iraq formed a coalition out of fear, not love. They are afraid of the "other" – sometimes this "other" is secular, other times Sunni, and sometimes… the "other."

Interviewer: Even though they are the rulers.

Iyad Jamal Al-Din: Yes. They did not become close out of love. They do not share any friendship and do not agree on joint political principles. The only thing they share is fear of the "other," and if there is no such "other," they create one in their imagination, in order to intimidate their followers and become close to one another.

And again:

Living nations produce living leaders, not martyrs. Only nations living in the past produce martyrs. They take pride in their past more than they look to the future.

Of course these are just two interviews taked from a mass of TV material. MEMRI select the items that they see as relevant: they have an agenda, as their detractors are quick to point out, and wouldn't claim to be providing a balanced view of the media output across the Middle East. Still, it does provide some indication of the direction the two countries are taking.