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Sept. 26, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
10:24
870 Current Events: Iranian President

Some thoughts on the current visit of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the US

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Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
Little plugs, little plugs.
My book, On Truth, The Tyranny of Illusion, is available at freedomainradio.com.
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It's a mere, it's under 20 bucks, a fabulous read, I think, that will really help you bring philosophical principles to bear in your own personal life.
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And the Lord knows many thinkers have dashed themselves against the height of this scaly beast, but I think I may have found a soft underbelly from which to approach it, which I hope you will have a look at, since I do consider that to be sort of the Holy Grail.
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For 17 bucks, it's 14 hours of really amazing philosophical conversations that I think will amuse, titillate, and stimulate you in that special way.
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You can come to the website for more information about that.
And with that having been said, let me throw out a couple of ideas about our good friend President Ahmadinejad from Iran.
We'll just call him Mahmoud so I don't have to stumble over his name every single time.
And as a guy with a soft X at the end of his name, I know it can be a challenge.
Mahmoud has come to the US and some listeners have asked me for what I think of it.
And of course, I don't want to tell anyone what to think.
I just want to give you some perspectives and some approaches on this.
So you may have seen him on the 60 Minutes interview.
He's been interviewed a number of other times.
There was great hullabaloo about him going to the 9-11 site in New York and whether this was allowed or good or bad and so on.
Now, of course, he's a Muslim and he's a member of a dictatorship, though he doesn't actually have the primary power in Iran.
That's the Ayatollah, who actually makes the decisions about nuclear, whatnot, and so on.
So he's not the primary power person in Iran.
Iran is a theocracy and a dictatorship, and he's a Muslim and so deranged, and this and that and the other.
But it's awful.
I mean, it's awful and it's tortuous just to see the moral righteousness of Americans with regards to this guy.
Because they hate him kind of deep down and perhaps even not so deep down.
But unfortunately, because there's just so little moral wisdom in the world.
Every time they attack him, they look freaking stupid, because what it is that they're attacking him for is all just such complete hypocritical nonsense that it is sort of embarrassing to listen to.
So let's just go through a few of them.
So a Holocaust denier, he denies the Holocaust, and of course he does not deny that the Holocaust existed, that the genocide of the Jews occurred in Western Europe and Eastern Europe in the 1940s.
But what he does say, which I find sort of hard to argue with, is he said, well, who killed the Jews?
And people say, of course, well, Germany was the chief architect, the German high command was the chief architect behind the final solution of the Jews, the final solution of killing the Jews.
And he says, so what does that have to do with the Palestinians?
Right? So why is it that Germany kills all the Jews and then the Palestinians have to give up their land?
That, of course, makes no particular sense.
It's like if I go and kill someone, my neighbor has to go to prison.
In fact, it's some guy in...
Afghanistan has to go to prison for my crime.
So what he's simply pointing out is that it is quite unjust to inflict Israel upon the Palestinians when the Palestinians were not the architects of the final solution, which kind of makes sense in a way.
They could have gone to Brazil, they could have easily hacked off a good portion of Germany for Israel, but of course the Jews wanted to go to Israel.
Because it is the Promised Land and it's their own mystical nonsense which puts them in the jaws of their enemies.
So, of course, the leaders of the Jewish community, as all leaders do, gain an enormous amount out of a situation of perpetual danger, lots of financial resources.
So, his argument is that, yeah, sure, the final solution existed and it was an abomination, but it is unjust to crush the Muslims in the Holy Lands, so to speak, for what the Germans did.
So, I mean, what can you say?
Clearly the Palestinians were not responsible for the final solution, so why are they driven off their land?
Blah, blah, blah. So... The second thing is that the UN has certified that Iran has only enriched uranium to 5%, which is what is permissible for peaceful technology, for nuclear power plants and so on.
And of course, it's Western companies that have shafted Iran in terms of energy, so they have every need and requirement to develop their own energy sources.
You have to enrich uranium to about 90% to make it weapons grade, and so they are complying with the sort of letter of the law there.
Who knows what's going on in the background, but, you know, that can't be determined anyway.
Now, another thing that they brought up in the interview on 60 Minutes was they said, well, Iranian weapons have been found in Iraq, and Iranian weapons are being used to kill American troops, and do you confirm or deny, and this and that and the other.
Anyway, this stuff is just...
And he laughed at this in the interview.
I mean, I understand that the murders are terrible and so on, but the moral hypocrisy is absolutely staggering.
Because, of course, why are the Americans being killed?
Well, they're being killed because a bunch of neocons said, go invade Iraq.
So why are the Americans being killed?
Not because of Iranian weapons, but because they're actually in, have occupied a country that had never threatened them.
So it's kind of funny for anybody to lay the deaths of American servicemen on this guy, on Mahmoud.
It doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
Secondly, of course, if a hostile power, such as the Soviet Union or Iraq, say, had invaded Canada and was currently killing Canadians by the millions, right, because that's really what it would translate to.
The population of Canada is roughly analogous to the population of Iraq, and over a million Iraqis have died.
So if Iran had invaded Canada, does anybody reasonably think that the U.S. would not send any troops or weapons over?
I mean, it's deranged.
I mean, there's no moral argument other than you are fighting for the opposite side.
But of course, that is exactly what America would do in this situation.
So again, it's just sort of ridiculous to look at.
As far as the ban on nuclear weapons, that also seems rather hard to imagine why that would be something reasonable for the Americans to be upset about.
And this is something that you don't really get much of a perspective on in the West, although in other parts, in other cultures, other parts of the world, you'll get far more reasonable questions with regards to this.
So basically the way that the rest of the world sees this as an issue is they say, okay...
So the one country that has ever bombed civilian targets with nuclear weapons is the one saying that other cultures should never have nuclear weapons.
The one country that has ever deliberately targeted for no military or diplomatic purpose has deliberately targeted civilians in Japan in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
The one country that has deployed nuclear weapons On civilian targets is the country that runs around the world saying it is evil for other countries to have nuclear weapons.
Say, well, it's going to destabilize the Middle East.
That's the argument. Well, how did America react when Israel developed?
I mean, they're an undeclared nuclear power, but how did America react when Israel was developing nuclear weapons?
With the same horror, you sons of Abraham, you're going to be destabilized in the Middle East.
Well, no, of course not, right? This hypocrisy is completely evident to everybody outside America and almost completely invisible to everybody inside America.
Of course, it's very tough for a country that is rapidly becoming a theocracy to criticize a Muslim theocracy.
It is impossible for them to say with any credibility, for the U.S. government to say with any credibility, That Iran is developing nuclear weapons because, of course, they've got the whole weapons of mass destruction thing so abysmally wrong, or right for Halliburton, you could say, in the last war, the current war.
It is completely ridiculous and hypocritical for America to say that Iran is arming insurgents.
Because, of course, America spent an enormous amount of time, energy, and billions of dollars arming Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran.
So it is completely ridiculous for them to make this claim from any kind of moral high ground.
And this kind of moral muck that you get into is inevitable when you look at things like statism and patriotism, which are absolute scourges and plagues upon humanity.
So we can't do anything about the situation in Iran other than speak the truth about religion.
But there is a lot that we can do to point out the endless hypocrisies of the power structures within America casting all this mud upon other people.
And we can, of course, look to get rid of a government in America through peaceful and philosophical means to simply stop the spectacle of this appalling moral hypocrisy that just seems to go on and on and on.
Thank you so much for watching.
I will mull over whether I'll do more of these current events.
I hope that they're helpful to you and interesting to you.
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