Mick Hartley

Simon Schama on Ahmadinejad (via):

Not the least repellent aspect of Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad’s reiteration, on the eve of the Rosh Hashanah Jewish holiday, that the Holocaust was a lie, was the muffled response to it by western media and governments. Statements were duly forthcoming in Berlin deploring the Iranian president’s speech, while in Washington it was left to Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, to do the official tut-tutting….

[T]he mere facts of the matter are unlikely to make much impression on a man and a regime lost in paranoid derangement. The pressing issue is how to contain the consequences of anti-Semitic fantasy and recover the moral credentials of a General Assembly that will have listened to someone in such flagrant contradiction of its own resolution. Besides, there is a practical urgency for abhorrence. Far from being some sort of antic sideshow to his regime’s ambition to acquire nuclear weapons, the obsession with annihilating Israel, it ought generally to be acknowledged, is the prime reason for it. A nuclear Iran, the theocracy may calculate, would be in a position to terminate Israel’s existence by merely threatening a strike unless its Jewish population departed forthwith for places the mullahs recommend as suitable for their deportation. Hence their creature’s cheerful optimism that the days of the Zionist entity are numbered and his cheerfulness that Iran will be honoured in Islam as the heroic enabler of that happy outcome.

The cowardice of embarrassment; the pragmatic humming and hawing about what to do about the buffoon frontman of a tyranny that endures through brutality and torture, is itself a depressing sign of moral collapse. The victims of Mr Ahmadi-Nejad’s onslaught on truth include not just the outraged memory of the murdered millions but history itself, the integrity of which is at the heart of the western political tradition.