Deafening Silence (on Iran)
Deafening Silence
By DANIEL JOHNSON | September 25, 2008
LONDON — This time he went too far. If a Western head of state had echoed Adolf Hitler, as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did this week, would Europeans have shrugged their shoulders and dragged their feet over sanctions?
Yet it seems that the Iranian president is now licensed to blame “Zionists” for everything from the economic crisis to “the whole world order,” to threaten Israel’s existence and to use words like “cesspool” to describe its people. There was a deafening silence in Britain. Prime Minister Brown was too preoccupied with his own survival, making yet another “life-or-death speech” at his Labor party conference. The Conservative leader, David Cameron, also ignored the scandal.
For the press, too, this was old news, and not even the intended victims raised much of a protest. The Times of London, determined to impress its readers with the gravity of the story, ran the story accompanied by a fetching photograph of Carla Bruni.
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The downplaying of the scandalous nature of Iran’s open threat to destroy Israel is itself a scandal. Only in America and in Israel itself is the threat taken seriously. Even there, some people miss the point. Barack Obama said that he was sorry that Mr. Ahmadinejad “had a platform to air his hateful and anti-Semitic views.”
The best that can be said about this is that the senator has a lot to learn. It’s not the platform but the views that matter — and Mr. Obama has still not explicitly ruled out meeting the Iranian president, reversing his notorious offer to do so earlier this year.