I like Bill Maher, I really do. But toward the end of this clip about Ahmadinejad’s visit to Columbia, he remarks on the Iranian president’s Holocaust denial and belligerence toward Israel. Terrible stuff, Maher says:
But those are things he says to get elected. There are Jews in the Iranian parliament. He can’t be that anti-Semitic.
Actually he said those things after he got elected.
There are Arabs in the Israeli parliament, Kurds in the Turkish parliament, African-Americans in the U.S. Congress. This doesn’t mean there is no ethnic prejudice among the leaders of these countries.
That said, I’m put off by hysterical comparisons of Ahmadinejad to Hitler in the NY tabloids and elsewhere. Ahmadinejad is not the foremost leader in Iran and does not command anything close to the adoring support in his country that Hitler did in Germany. At a time when maniacs in the Bush administration are trying to sell a war against Iran, unhinged rhetoric like this is particularly troublesome. But let’s acknowledge the outspoken and explicit bigotry of the Iranian president, not fashion lame excuses for it.
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