I'm going out on a liberal limb here to make this statement. I'm not going to argue about it and I don't care what CarolC wants to clobber on a regular basis. It's just an opinion:

It is the habit and the business of leaders of smaller states at odds with big nations like the U.S. to say things that piss off the leaders of those big nations.

I happen to agree with A. about the Palestinians--they are a colonized people, their land taken by a spontaneous influx of Jews from around the world, and the "nation" of Israel happened with little reference to their preferences. (Whose bright idea was this to begin with, anyway?) The Jewish "natives" had been away for over 2000 years and the current occupants got kind of used to living an autonomous life there. Then the new western-leaning U.N. lets a nation form on top of them. Guess what? It pisses off the Palestinians and their neighbors. Duh. They're still angry.

I'm not saying Israel shouldn't exist, it's there now, but it's too big and too pushy. They are bad neighbors to everyone around the area and remind me of the saying one sees on booklets for new parents in the U.S.--"Children learn what they live." Israel's Jews were mistreated in Europe, so they have turned around and mistreated the Palestinians they encountered in the new land they chose to occupy, creating lots of prisons and ghettos. There is a simple reason why Israel is as solid and prosperous and inflexible as it is --it is the U.S.'s defacto 51st state. They are propped up by the U.S., defended by the U.S., and their currency is the U.S. dollar. What do you think the neighbors are going to see when they look at the relationship, except that this is a huge American colonizing imposition on the Middle East?

It seems that what Israeli Jews learned in Europe is what they're doing now to Palestinians, minus the concentration camps. Their leaders don't seem to see this. Every time things start to calm down, some wag in Israel thinks of some new law or wall or resource restriction or settlement policy to set it all off again. It's like they must continually inspire violence in order to portray themselves as "victims" in the world, to justify their existence (and current behavior of the last 60 years). This isn't anti-Semitic, by the way, this is anti colonization in this context. As a resident of a nation that sits uncomfortably on top of land taken from colonized Indians, I am well aware of the ironic parallels.

Translations are very important, and if carefully nuanced versions of Ahmadinejad's words had been available, perhaps it would be harder for people to uniformly dismiss him as a Persian zealot. I don't agree with a lot of what is going on in Iran, or the Middle East, and there are Arab/Moslem/Persian cultural blinders in place that appear ridiculous to U.S. residents. But hey, look at Bush. His blinders are so huge, this fool would continue to blow Iraq to wee bits, pumping in billions to do it, to support oil and Israel, but he won't pay for health care for American children. He simply doesn't have a grasp on reality, he's totally into this stupid war of his. I wonder if editorials appear in the foreign press that look at this strange habit of expenditure? War first, poor citizens' needs a distant second. I'll probably have to keep wondering, because the American media isn't doing anything to help us understand the viewpoints of the rest of the world. They hardly matter.

SRS