[Buddha-l] Re: buddha-l Digest, Vol 32, Issue 17

[Dan Lusthaus]

Richard,

>If
> Ahmadinejad is aggressive (a claim for which I see no evidence
> whatsoever, but I'll let that pass),

I won't let that pass. Which is it: bad memory, willful blindness, or just
dumb ignorance?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4378948.stm


27 October 2005
Iran leader's comments attacked

The European Union and Russia have joined condemnation of the Iranian
president's public call for Israel to be "wiped off the map".
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's remark has already been condemned by individual EU
states and Canada who all summoned Iranian diplomats for an explanation.

[... for a reminder that hypocracy is not the exclusive property of the US
govt.]

"Those who insist on transferring the Iranian nuclear dossier to the UN
Security Council have received an additional argument for doing so," Russian
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said during a trip to Jordan.

"What I saw on television was unacceptable," added the minister, whose
country has been supplying civilian nuclear know-how to Iran, and he
promised Moscow would bring its concern to Iran's attention.

[...]
Mr Ahmadinejad told some 3,000 students in Tehran that Israel's
establishment had been a move by the West against the Islamic world.

He was addressing a conference entitled The World without Zionism and his
comments were reported by the Iranian state news agency Irna.

"As the Imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map," he said, referring to
Iran's late revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

In 2001, former Iranian president Hashemi Rafsanjani speculated that a
Muslim state that developed a nuclear weapon might use it to destroy Israel.

His comments were part of a critique of what hew called American imperialism
in the region.

Such calls are regular slogans at anti-Israeli or anti-US rallies in Iran.



(read the rest at the url above)

I guess now that you're living in the States again, you've acquired the
current American inability to remember any news item not concerned with
Paris Hilton or Brittney Spears for even two years. The other possibility is
that you don't consider wiping Israel off the face of the map to be
"aggressive."

Dan