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“They were out for blood. They didn’t want the holocaust denier to speak in the first place. He was a sponsor of “terror,” unlike, of course, the United States and its 160,000 troops plus mercenaries in Iraq. Also, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was an anti-Semite because he did not approve of the state of Israel, which had inhaled Palestine, as the Nazis had the ghettos of Lodz, Krakow and Warsaw, not to mention most of Europe.”
COMMENTARY By Jerry Mazza
Online Journal Associate Editor | Dateline: Sep 26, 2007
[The Ahmadinejad visit to New York provided the media and its associated political class with yet another feeding frenzy to exercise their well developed talent for high-handed hypocrisy. Obviously it helps when the target is long preceded by and shrouded in obstinate ignorance and consequent confusion in a culture where history is only of peripheral interest, and where vociferous Zionism has a de facto chokehold on almost all critical institutions—from Congress to the media, and certainly academia. It also doesn’t help matters much that the Iranian leader—like most US imperial targets—is scarcely adept at juggling the symbols of American propaganda, and is often quite skilled at shooting himself in the foot. Like many smaller-power leaders who stand in defiance to probably the most hypocritical empire on record, they do not seem to fully understand the importance of communicating clearly and forthrightly with the US public above and through the curtain of thick distortions certain to be deployed by the corporate media and professional politicians (two sides of the same coin). And therein they miss fine opportunities to neutralize at least some of the poison being continuously spread around by these agents of imperial propaganda as they character assassinate the leaders and cultures marked for eventual physical attacks. It’s high time these leaders made an effort to understand and master this very special but essential language that could—up to a point—lessen the probabilities of such an attack.—Eds.]
As I walked up Broadway towards Columbia University, a dozen blocks from my apartment, I was amazed to see crowds of students cramming into the campus, protesting outside the gates, and ample numbers of New Yorks finest, who already had locked down the campus to anyone who didn’t have a student ID card. Eureka, it almost felt like the Columbia protests (riots) of 1968.
But then students were battling a military-oriented think tank from the Rand Corporation, starting in 1967. Discovery of the Institute for Defense Analyses presence in 67 and 68 lit the firecracker for SDS’s (Students for a Democratic Society) anti Vietnam War campaign. Also, too many armed forces recruiters on campus fanned the BOOM to come.
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