Strategery

"Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian-American Council, says Ahmadinejad disinterred the Holocaust denial comment to draw UN attention away from Iran's deteriorating human-rights climate."

Ahmadinejad has long denied the holocaust--he invited Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke to a "conference" in Iran to provide expertise--because he wants people to deny that Jews came to Israel as persecuted refugees.

Some parts of the left are being sucked in by the theocratic, pro-Nazi semi-elected President of Iran, to wit:

"The Bolivarian government of Venezuela expresses its firm rejection of the ferocious and unfounded campaign to discredit, from abroad, that has been unleashed against Iran, with the objective of muddying the political climate of this brother country," said the statement issued late Tuesday. "We demand the immediate end to maneuvers to intimidate and destabilize the Islamic Revolution."

Real leftists want the Islamic Dictatorship to fall.

Think Harper, climate change conference, Tim Horton's, and Liberal reaction.

It has certainly occurred to me that it is always in Israel's interests to keep the world's attention focused on the debate at this level, since the military-economic realities of the Israeli state are much less easy to manipulate sentimentally.

In my reading of political realities in Iran, Ahmadinejad is next to irrelevant -- certainly the rhetoric that North Americans hyperventilate over is. Iran itself is much more complicated, as people who are genuinely interested in Iran itself will know.

The worry here remains propaganda aimed at justifying an Israeli and/or American attack on Iran, which is clearly not in the interests of the Iranian people and which opposition groups there have said over and over again they do not want. Still, there have been American black ops groups entering the country from Baluchistan for years (a Cheney project), and the sentimental demonizing campaign just plays so well on North American TV. Memories of 2002-03.

Nobody liberates anyone else, certainly not with bombs and fire. People free themselves, and anyone genuinely concerned about Iranians should be looking for ways to support them, not feeding into the rhetorical escalation of the imperial powers. The white man's burden is an even greater obscenity now than it was in the C19, since when we have seen so much so often of the destruction and horror that pompous Westerners wreak on the nations they presume/pretend to be "liberating."

In my reading of political realities in Iran, Ahmadinejad is next to irrelevant

It's my understanding that he has been somewhat successful in consolidating power into the presidency during his time in office so he's not entirely irrelevant. That said, he's certainly not running the country and I believe his authority is limited to domestic affairs.

Where Israel and the Holocaust is concerned, I think he demagogues the issues as much as anything. He may well be a genuine anti-semite but I think he also uses the issue for his own purposes.

As I understand it, Israel's approach to his UN address was to simply stay away while it was the Canadian delegation's idea to actually stage the walkout which included Cannon, who wasn't scheduled to attend in the first place, coming in simply so he could walk back out. Leaving Ahmadinejad to address an empty hall is a statement but not nearly as dramatic as the bit of theatre the Canadians provided and as I suggested in the original post, I wonder if it didn't just play into Ahmadinejad's hands.

Well, all the stagey actors play into one another's hands in different ways. Our idiots probably help Ahmadinejad domestically, whereas Ahmadinejad is undeniably risking a lot internationally to provoke a reaction he can use at home.

I was overstating the case to say that he is irrelevant in Iran itself. I think that the regime finds him useful because he does have a strong appeal domestically, and as long as that's true, they'll keep him.

I doubt, though, that he's the one gauging how immediate the threat of an Israeli attack might be, or what sort of indirect diplomacy should be going on now to stop that. I hope that someone clever is in charge of that -- otherwise, this not bode well.

I agree with you that Canada is just looking sillier and sillier in these situations, always taking that one clumsy step further than anyone else in order to prove to the big guys (the Israelis and the Americans) that they're still relevant. It's embarrassin'.

Especially when you consider that Israel is basically a tiny little country with few natural resources and a modern but not exceptional economy.
You gotta hand it to those guys, for such a small tail they wag a whole shitload of dogs. I wonder what the world would be like if Israel was where it is, but most of the world's easy-access oil had turned out to be in a different region and so the Middle East wasn't strategically important. Probably the whole situation would be a lot less tense and the Palestinians would be getting treated way better. Israeli society would be less militarized, slightly less prosperous but that prosperity less precarious. But there'd be some really horrible situations wherever the oil turned out to be.