February 12th, 2006


(no subject)

A round of applause for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad! Whatever shreds of credibility he may have previously had (ha!), he's well and truly set fire to them now. Ooo, the pretty colours! And we thought George Bush was a crackpot who couldn't get facts straight.

I couldn't help but burst into laughter during the this evening's news coverage of his latest rant about Zionists, the West, and the "Muhammad cartoons". The particular part that really got me? This idiot who's supposed to be a world leader vividly proved he knows nothing about what he's ranting against. In his big spiel against the Muhammad cartoons, he's blasting the concept of freedom of speech and tries to point out supposed Danish hypocrisy by alleging that in Denmark, you're free to blaspheme Islam but it's illegal to deny the Holocaust. If he'd taken even the briefest amount of time to actually familiarise himself with the facts, he would've noticed that while a few European countries have laws against Holocaust denial, Denmark does not. You are perfectly free to deny the Holocaust in Denmark! And this isn't even getting into how you can't legitimately compare cartoon depictions of a prophet to the slaughter of six million people. It's just nice to know that people like Mr Ahmadinejad care so much about the facts that they are happy to promote blatant misinformation to their people, many of whom don't know otherwise, just to encourage anger and to solidify his own support. Who cares about facts when we have the West to combat!

(It's also worth noting that there are historical examples of Muslims depicting Muhammad in art. But let's not let difficult facts like that get in the way of self-righteous anger and a convenient reason to blast the West ...)