acandrad - 08 August 2008 09:05 AM

How do you know that there were no WMD? Did you go to Iraq and check it? No, you know it from the press! The same press you say cannot be trusted.

Do you really think the Bush group would have failed to show us all what they found?

A Voice of Sanity - 08 August 2008 10:45 AM

acandrad - 08 August 2008 09:05 AM

How do you know that there were no WMD? Did you go to Iraq and check it? No, you know it from the press! The same press you say cannot be trusted.

Do you really think the Bush group would have failed to show us all what they found?

I totally agree with you. I wrote that as an answer to someone who stated that we cannot trust the press.

Balak - 08 August 2008 06:41 AM

...he [Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad] comes across as pretty reasonable.
...
In general it is good to be skeptical of assertions made by the ruling class and its mouthpieces regarding the views of the ‘official enemy’.
...
One can only hope that the Iranians are ready to defend themselves from the real crazies and criminals in Tel Aviv and Washington who are contemplating a nuclear holocaust - this time against Iran.
...
...the press also published the news of Saddam’s WMD’s all over the world… they simply turned out to be lies.
...
Another example of this phenomenon the Iranian president’s supposed call to ‘wipe Israel off the map’… Like the ‘Holocaust denier’ charge, this is repeated over and over by the press without evidence. But when you look into it, there is quite a bit of dispute as to what he actually said.

Let me get this straight.  You deny that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denied the Holocaust even though he said, “They have invented a myth that Jews were massacred…” and “The West has given more significance to the myth of the genocide of the Jews…”? 

Further, you (apparently?) believe that some massive world-wide conspiracy of people in Washington D.C., Israel, nearly every intelligence agency in the world, and most all of the press and media around the globe have concocted the exact same set of lies (and somehow all stayed consistent with their lies through the years) about Ahmadinejad, Saddam Hussein and other things.  And that we should all be skeptical of everything all of them say about past and current events.  But through it all, the one person we should give the benefit of the doubt to; the one person who is not a ‘real crazy’ or ‘criminal’; the one person we should not be skeptical of; the one person you say is “pretty reasonable” is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? 

Riiiiiiiiiiiiight!     

Balak - 08 August 2008 06:41 AM

Again, it is appropriate to show some skepticism before repeating the inflammatory claims of others as fact.

Keeping an open mind is good.  But not so open as to allow the brains to fall out.  Ahmadinejad’s brains fell out long before he denied the Holocaust.

Rocinante - 08 August 2008 01:16 PM

Keeping an open mind is good.  But not so open as to allow the brains to fall out.  Ahmadinejad’s brains fell out long before he denied the Holocaust.

Ahmadinejad plays to each audience. Where I come from people would say of him that, “He’s as cunning as a sh*thouse rat”.

acandrad - 08 August 2008 08:48 AM

I am sorry for not being clear enough. I thought it would not be necessary to explain what a fallacy is. The fallacy, in this case, is a logic error. For example:
“The Holocaust is used as an excuse to inflict suffering to the Palestinian people. Thus it is a myth” is a fallacy because there is no causal relation between the two statements.
Concerning the number of deaths, did you really read what I wrote?

I would argue that there is a definite relationship, though not causal, between the mythologization of the Nazi holocaust and its use as a justification for land-theft and other crimes by Israeli troops and settlers against the Palestinians. You seem unwilling to accept this, but it is well documented, by Finkelstein among others, not least in the chronology of how something called ‘the Holocaust’ first emerged as a unique, special object of reverence and study only in the 1970s. Prior to this point, the record of Nazi crimes against the European Jews were virtually ignored by zionists, and rescued from oblivion only by a handful of dedicated Soviet journalists, leftists scholars and marginalized researchers like Raul Hilberg in the West.

The main point I made earlier still stands:

What you need to do here is provide a direct quotation from Ahmadinejad denying the Nazi holocaust. I am not doubting the possibility, as Ahmadinejad is in my opinion a thorough reactionary; but it is a poor method to start from the expectation that the reader will accept this serious charge as fact on the say-so of politically-invested third parties.

Curious, where are you from Balak?

Balak - 08 August 2008 05:24 PM

What you need to do here is provide a direct quotation from Ahmadinejad denying the Nazi holocaust.

“They have invented a myth that Jews were massacred…” and “The West has given more significance to the myth of the genocide of the Jews…”
—President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Balak - 08 August 2008 05:24 PM

acandrad - 08 August 2008 08:48 AM

I am sorry for not being clear enough. I thought it would not be necessary to explain what a fallacy is. The fallacy, in this case, is a logic error. For example:
“The Holocaust is used as an excuse to inflict suffering to the Palestinian people. Thus it is a myth” is a fallacy because there is no causal relation between the two statements.
Concerning the number of deaths, did you really read what I wrote?

I would argue that there is a definite relationship, though not causal, between the mythologization of the Nazi holocaust and its use as a justification for land-theft and other crimes by Israeli troops and settlers against the Palestinians. You seem unwilling to accept this, but it is well documented, by Finkelstein among others, not least in the chronology of how something called ‘the Holocaust’ first emerged as a unique, special object of reverence and study only in the 1970s. Prior to this point, the record of Nazi crimes against the European Jews were virtually ignored by zionists, and rescued from oblivion only by a handful of dedicated Soviet journalists, leftists scholars and marginalized researchers like Raul Hilberg in the West.

The main point I made earlier still stands:

What you need to do here is provide a direct quotation from Ahmadinejad denying the Nazi holocaust. I am not doubting the possibility, as Ahmadinejad is in my opinion a thorough reactionary; but it is a poor method to start from the expectation that the reader will accept this serious charge as fact on the say-so of politically-invested third parties.

OK, here are the quotations again (I hope that neither the Arab nor the Iranian press are part of the international conspiracy):
http://english.aljazeera.net/archive/2005/12/200849154418141136.html
http://iran-daily.com/1385/2592/html/national.htm
Concerning the Holocaust:
“The word “holocaust” has been used since the 18th century to refer to the violent deaths of a large number of people. For example, Winston Churchill and other contemporaneous writers used it before World War II to describe the Armenian Genocide of World War I. Since the 1950s its use has been increasingly restricted, and it is now mainly used to describe the Nazi Holocaust, spelled with a capital H.” (Wikipedia)

Thank you for the aljazeera link with the direct quotation from Ahmadinejad’s speech.

Could you indicate where in the iran-daily.com link you provided there is something about the Nazi holocaust? I couldn’t locate it.

Balak - 09 August 2008 06:11 AM

Thank you for the al.jazeera link with the direct quotation from Ahmadinejad’s speech.

Could you indicate where in the iran-daily.com link you provided there is something about the Nazi holocaust? I couldn’t locate it.

It is in the article called “Jews Proud Of Nuclear Progress”:

“President Ahmadinejad described the Holocaust as a ’myth’ and suggested that those who sympathize with the alleged Jewish victims should be generous enough to give some of their territories to the Jewish state”.