It is astonishing how world leaders and those in charge of shaping public opinion miss the point about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. They totally ignore this man and his state of mind. Not that the criticism directed at him isn’t tough. It is. Following the Iranian leader’s hateful and inciting remarks at the U.N. racism conference in Geneva, where Ahmadinejad called Israel a “racist entity,” there was a firestorm of criticism.
Alejandro Wolff, the deputy U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, denounced the “Ahmadinejad spectacle” as “vile and hateful speech.”
But what Wolff and others don’t seem to understand is that Ahmadinejad is perfectly willing to cross the line from hate speech to hateful acts, from rhetoric to violence.
The evening after Ahmadinejad’s U.N. fiasco, an Iranian opposition member who has spent 12 years in the Islamic republic’s jails for his political views, told the local Geneva television of Ahmadinejad’s biography. Mostapha Naderi remembered being whipped on the soles of his feet in 1983 while he was spending time in the notorious Evine prison in Tehran.
The torturer, who kept his face hidden, was known by an alias, Mirzai. Naderi later found out that the man’s true name was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
“A lot of people in Evine knew his true name,” he said. “That is why Ahmadinejad’s biography says nothing about 1981, 1982 and 1983. That is exactly the period he was serving as a torturer in Evine.”
When asked about other possible witnesses, he named a few who were all executed during the famous prison massacre of 1988, when some 30,000 opponents of the regime serving time in prisons were massacred following the end of the Iran-Iraq war.
Apart from the prison, Ahmadinejad has had a record of participating in extraterritorial commando operations against political opponents abroad.
Naderi had a specific adjective for Ahmadinejad: “He is dangerous. Seriously dangerous.”
That is the point everybody seems to be missing. This man is dangerous. This regime is dangerous, because such a dangerous man has been its president for four years, and he seems on his way to be elected for four more years.
It is astonishing to see people worrying about the United Nations being humiliated by him or about eventual talks with the United States being torpedoed by his behavior. That is fine. But that is not enough. That is far from enough. They should worry about the same person with nuclear arms capacity.
It is most irrelevant to say that other countries in the region have nuclear capacity. Cynics say no other country having nuclear capacity has called for the elimination of another nation. I would add, no other country, with or without nuclear capacity, has massacred political prisoners serving time on grounds of still sticking to their political views.
On May 1, Delara Darabi, a 23-year-old female artist, was executed in Iran, accused of a crime she was said to have committed when she was under 18 years old. In fact, they kept her in jail for seven years to be old enough to be executed.
During only six days in the month of May, the Iranian regime has hanged 16 prisoners in six cities. Last year some 400 public executions were announced by the regime. No other regime does that to its people.
If anything, Geneva’s incident shows how naively the Iranian danger is being dealt with.
Nooredin Abedian taught in Iranian higher-education institutions before settling in France as a political refugee in 1981. He writes for a variety of publications on Iranian politics and issues concerning human rights.
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