Ahmadinejad blames "certain big powers" for the plight
of a large share of humanity, but
his own government's repressive policies have left him
open to criticism [GALLO/GETTY]
It was quite a week for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the
Iranian president.
First he faced down the president of Columbia
University and a host of hostile questioners in
Harlem.
Then he headed down to Midtown Manhattan, where for 45
minutes he held the world's attention at the United
Nations, before heading farther south, to Caracas,
Venezuela, for talks with his close ally, President
Hugo Chavez.
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Local papers, such as the Daily News and The New York
Post, featured headlines announcing that "The Evil has
Landed" and lambasting the "Mad Iran Prez" for his
past denials of the Holocaust, refusal to
unequivocally renounce a quest for nuclear weapons,
and call to have Israel "wiped off the map" (an
inaccurate translation of the Persian "bayad az
safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad," which is better - but
less violently and therefore less usefully - rendered
in English as "erased from the page of time" or
"fate").
Even Lee Bollinger, the president of Columbia
University, introduced him with an unprecedented - and
to the minds of many academics, not to mention
Iranians, uncouth - verbal attack, accusing him of
being little more than a "petty dictator".
In its critiques of Ahmadinejad' s speech at Columbia,
the mainstream US press focused most of its attention
on Ahmadinejad' s tendentious claim that "there are no
homosexuals in Iran" (belied by an evening stroll
through Tehran's famous Daneshjoo Park), and his
attempt to redefine his position on the Holocaust (it
happened, but more research is needed to know its true
extent).
At the UN, his criticism of "widespread human rights
violations" elicited the expected derisive response in
light of his own government's increasingly repressive
policies, while his declaration that the nuclear case
against Iran "is closed" suggested, to most
commentators, continued intransigence by Iran in the
face of supposedly universal opposition to its nuclear
programme.
Discourteous treatment
Few commentators considered how Ahmadinejad' s words
were heard outside of the US media circus.
And those who did, such as Timothy Rutton of the LA
Times, focused purely on the reaction in the Muslim
world, arguing that, as a "totalitarian demagogue",
Ahmadinejad gained legitimacy because of the
discourteous treatment by Columbia's president.
Ahmadinejad speaks to a wider audience
than just his western listeners [Reuters]
Rutton wrote: "Bollinger's denunciation was icing on
the cake, because the constituency the Iranian leader
cares about is scattered across an Islamic world that
values hospitality and its courtesies as core social
virtues."
"To that audience, Bollinger looked stunningly
ill-mannered; Ahmadinejad dignified and restrained."
Underlying Rutton's argument is the still-widespread
belief, whose roots lie deep in Europe and America's
histories as imperial powers, that Muslims and the
other formerly colonised peoples value "honour",
"pride" and "hospitality" far more than they do issues
of substance.
Indeed, they remain incapable of making well-reasoned
and documented criticisms of a West, and the United
States in particular, that remains by definition
technologically, politically, and morally superior to
the developing world.
'Poverty and deprivation'
It's no wonder, then, that almost no one in the
American media focused on the substantive claims of
Ahmadinejad' s speech at the UN.
Chief among them were his argument regarding the
"alarming situation of poverty and deprivation" .
"Let me draw your attention to some data issued by the
United Nations," he said, before calling to the
attention of the world's leaders the fact that close
to one billion people live on less than $1-a-day and
that there is a rapidly increasing gap between the
world's rich and poor.
He mentioned the continued disgraceful figures for
infant mortality, schooling and related human
development indicators in the developing world.
Perhaps wanting to be courteous, Ahmadinejad blamed
"certain big powers" for the plight of a large share
of humanity - he might have added that according to UN
estimates almost half the world lives on less than $2
per day.
But he didn't need to name names; most of the
developing world, including the Muslim world, share
his belief that their plight is linked to a world
economic system whose goal, for more than half a
millennium, has been to exploit the peoples and
resources of the rest of the world for the benefit of
the more advanced countries of the West.
Few considered how Ahmadinejad' s words were
heard outside of the US media circus [AFP]
That is precisely why so many people in the developing
world remain opposed to Western-sponsored
globalisation, which for most critics, including in
the Arab/Muslim world, is little more than imperialism
dressed up in the rhetoric of "free markets" and
"liberal democracy".
It is this much wider audience, from the favelas of
Rio De Janeiro and the shanty towns of Lagos as much
as the slums of Casablanca, Sadr City or Cairo, to
whom Ahmadinejad was speaking.
His discourse was strikingly similar to that of his
biggest ally, Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president,
who in his speech before the assembly last year had
fewer qualms (perhaps because he's neither Arab nor
Muslim) about pointing fingers at whom he considers
responsible for the sorry shape of so much of the
world.
Hoisting Noam Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival above his
head, he exclaimed that "the hegemonic pretensions of
US imperialism ... put at risk the very survival of
humankind".
America, not Iran, Chavez argued, is "the greatest
threat looming over our planet".
The Ahmadinejad- Chavez axis has been compared by
American politicians such as Florida Republican
Congressman Connie Mack to the relationship between
Fidel Castro and Russia.
Such analogies are far off the mark.
A more accurate historical comparison would be to the
relationship between Egypt's Gemal Abdel Nasser and
India's Jawaharlal Nehru, when both came together at
the Bandung conference in 1955 to attempt to build a
coherent bloc of nations that could protect its
interests against those of the two major superpowers,
the US and the Soviet Union.
'Human underdogs'
Writing after attending the Bandung Conference, the
American novelist Richard Wright exclaimed that it was
a meeting of "the despised, the insulted, the hurt,
the dispossessed - in short, the underdogs of the
human race".
It was this shared experience of oppression that
grounded the "Bandung Spirit", which leaders such as
Nasser used to develop the "pan-" ideologies (-Arab,
-African, -American, -Islamic) that proved a thorn in
the side of US policymakers for much of the Cold war.
The difference between Chavez and Ahmadinejad and
their "Third World" predecessors, is, in a word, oil.
Iran and Venezuela possess the third- and
seventh-largest oil reserves in the world, totaling
well over 200 billion barrels - that's not much less
than the proven reserves of Saudi Arabia.
At the UN General Assembly, Ahmadinejad
spoke for 45 minutes [GALLO/GETTY]
The two countries will earn well over $80bn in
revenues this year alone.
As important, both countries possess non-oil sectors
that are surprisingly robust, according to many
estimates, for the majority of both Iran's and
Venezuela's Gross Domestic Product.
This provides both countries with billions of dollars
to spend on foreign aid, as demonstrated by
Ahmadinejad' s stopover in Bolivia, where he pledged
$1bn in Iranian aid and development to the poverty
stricken country.
US policymakers' view of the world through the "you're
either with us or against us" prism divides the globe
into those who support the US and Europe (and the
"West" more broadly), and those who support al-Qaeda
and "Islamofascism" , a term which has been created
precisely to ensure that Americans conflate Osama bin
Laden with Ahmadinejad, and both with Hitler.
But few people outside of the West buy this
comparison, or the larger black-and-white world-view
it reflects.
Instead, in Africa and Latin America, Ahmadenijad' s
argument that "humanity has had a deep wound on its
tired body caused by impious powers for centuries"
resonates far more deeply than George Bush's
hollow-sounding calls for democracy and "ending
tyranny".
Colonial rule
The West advises Africa to "get over" colonialism, but
the pain of colonial rule is still felt by those
suffering under the policies imposed by the IMF and/or
the World Bank, or from the continued subsidisation of
American and European agribusiness while their
countries are flooded with below-market wheat, soy or
corn.
It is to those people whom Ahmadinejad promised - in
language that strikingly mirrors US President Bush's
often religiously- hued speeches - that "the era of
darkness will end" with the "dawn of the liberation
of, and freedom for, all humans".
Americans may not like Ahmadinejad' s or Chavez's
internal politics, ideological orientations, or
foreign policies.
But for most of the third world, which is tired of
centuries of domination by the West, the two leaders
are a breath of fresh air, who are coming not as
conquerors, but as comrades.
They are free of the condescending "civilising
mission" that, from Napoleon's invasion of Egypt to
the US invasion of Iraq, always seem to include war,
occupation, and the appropriation of strategic natural
resources under foreign control as part of their
mandate.
And because of this, most of the citizens of the
developing world, rightly or wrongly, couldn't care
less about Ahmadinejad' s positions on Israel, the
Holocaust, and nuclear weapons, never mind
homosexuals, none of which affect them directly.
They care only that he is sticking-it- to their old
colonial or Cold war masters, and offering "respect",
"friendship" and billions of dollars in aid with no
strings attached.
Americans, Europeans and Israelis can fret about it
all they want, but it will not change this reality.
Only a reorientation of the world economy towards real
sustainability and equality will dampen his appeal,
and that's not likely to happen soon.
Which means that Americans will be hearing a lot more
of Ahmadinejad and leaders like him in the future.
The question is, will they be listening?
Mark LeVine is professor of modern Middle Eastern
history at UC Irvine in California, US, and author and
editor of half-a-dozen books, including Why They Don't
Hate Us: Lifting the Veil on the Axis of Evil
(Oneworld, 2005) and the forthcoming Heavy Metal
Islam: Rock, Religion and the Struggle for the Soul of
Islam (Random House/Verso) and An Impossible Peace:
Oslo and the Burdens of History (Zed Books). He is a
regular commentator on Al Jazeera's The Listening
Post. www.culturejamming. org
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