Monday, April 20, 2009

A Picture, and a Thousand Words   [Mark Steyn]

Here is a picture of Switzerland's president meeting Iran's president. Not quite as much Friars Club kibbitzing as Obama and Chavez, but presidents Merz and Ahmadinejad dined together last night in Geneva, and apparently very sociably.

Here are some of the words Mr. Merz's fellow head of state has uttered in recent years:

"They have invented a myth that Jews were massacred . . ."

"The real Holocaust is what is happening in Palestine where the Zionists avail themselves of the fairy tale of Holocaust as blackmail . . ."

"As the Imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map."

"As it has lost its raison d'etre, Israel will be annihilated."

"Israel is a tyrannical regime that will one day will be destroyed."

"Israel is a rotten, dried tree that will be annihilated in one storm."

The mainstreaming of Mahmoud by Merz & Co is worse than what Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax did. It is in the face of far more public and more explicit eliminationist threats. And, unlike Chamberlain's generation, this crowd will not be able to plead that what was being planned was so unprecedented it was beyond their capacity to imagine: Every time Ahmadinejad denies the reality of the last Holocaust, he reminds the Merzes of the world that the apologists for those planning its sequel won't have the excuse that they didn't know it was coming.

Every photo-op, every admission to every global schmoozefest is a victory for this man — and teaches a dangerous lesson to civilization's enemies.

PS I like this headline:

US Calls Iranian Speech Vile, But Open To Dialogue

Good to know the U.S. is willing to go the extra vile.

04/20 07:20 PMShare