Our Second Interview with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Churchill’s Parrot (CP): President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, we meet again.

Ahmadinejad (A): We’ve met before?

CP: I interviewed you last February. Don’t you recall? Or are you often doing interviews with birds?

A: I don’t seem to …wait a minute…YOU! I vowed I would never…

CP: Oh put a lid on it Moudy, you’re in our neck of the jungle now. So tell us, what have you got planned for this year’s UN performance? Wait, wait, don’t tell me, another 30 minute screed against the U.S. and Israel?

A: Is that sarcasm I detect in your voice?

CP: No actually it’s out and out contempt, but you’re getting better. Tell me will you at least this time drop the whole passive aggressive, “some nations this” and “some nations that” routine? Just come out and say, “The United States is the root of all evil.” “Israel is an illegal state.”

A: If you wish. For it is as you have said.

CP: Then why speak at all? I mean really why even come here? A blast text message to the General Assembly would suffice would it not?

A: The case for justice needs to be made clearly before all the world.

CP: Agreed. So what brings YOU here?

A: I speak for the oppressed, the downtrodden, the voiceless.

CP: I suppose you must as you’ve cut off their tongues and thrown them into your prisons. But you bring up an excellent point, in your 2005 speech before the UN, you declared, "The Islamic Republic of Iran is the manifestation of true democracy in the region. The discourse of the Iranian nation is focused on respect for the rights of human beings and a quest for tranquility, peace, justice and development for all through monotheism.” And by all accounts you said all this with a straight face. Absolutely Lettermanesque! Who writes your stuff?

A: I don’t know what you are talking about?

CP: Do you think your halo will re-appear this time?

A: My first speech before the General Assembly was a transformative experience for myself and the members of the assembly.

CP: Yes, so it would seem, at least in your own delusional Islamania infested brain. May I quote you regarding that experience? “I felt that all of a sudden the atmosphere changed there, and for 27-28 minutes all the leaders did not blink. I am not exaggerating when I say they did not blink; it's not an exaggeration, because I was looking. They were astonished as if a hand held them there and made them sit. It had opened their eyes and ears for the message of the Islamic Republic.” You don’t think maybe they were just stunned by the sheer preposterousness of your presentation?

A: “Preposterousness”?

CP: Oh sorry. Um … “absurdity”, “ridiculousness”, “incongruity”, “utter and complete rubbish”, “bullocks”.

A: Bird, you will make a fine meal for my cat.

CP: Moving on to your 2006 performance before the General Assembly, you opened things up with a quite a bang, so to speak. “O God, hasten the reappearance of the Imam of the times and grant to us victory and prosperity. Include us among his followers and martyrs.” Can you appreciate why this might give a whole lot of people the creeps, given the history of this whole Imam thing?

A: Be careful bird, you fly near the flames of blasphemy.

CP: Oh I haven’t even gotten started yet, Moudy. Allow me to read you something from a New Republic article dated April 2006.

“According to Shia tradition, legitimate Islamic rule can only be established following the reappearance of the Twelfth Imam. Until that time, the Shia have only to wait, to keep their peace with illegitimate rule, and to remember the Prophet’s grandson, Hussein, in sorrow. (Ayatollah) Khomeini, however, had no intention of waiting. He vested the myth with an entirely new sense: The Twelfth Imam will only emerge when the believers have vanquished evil. To speed up the Mahdi’s return, Muslims had to shake off their torpor and fight.

This activism had more in common with the revolutionary ideas of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood than with Shia traditions. Khomeini had been familiar with the texts of the Muslim Brothers since the 1930s, and he agreed with the Brothers’ conception of what had to be considered “evil”: namely, all the achievements of modernity that replaced divine providence with individual self-determination, blind faith with doubt, and the stern morality of sharia with sensual pleasures.”

You are a devout follower of Ayatollah Khomeini are you not?

A: I am.

CP: So you would concur with the above assessment?

A: I do.

CP: And under that rather generous umbrella of “evil” you place – just grabbing at straws here – Israel, the United States, Europe … feel free to stop me any time …

A: You’re doing fine.

CP: And you are sworn by God to vanquish this evil and have every intention of doing so? As your top advisor Hassan Abbasi boasted not long ago, “We have a strategy drawn up for the destruction of Anglo Saxon civilization. We must make use of everything we have at hand to strike at this front by means of our suicide operations or by means of missiles.”

A: And I have said that “If a storm begins, the dimensions will not stay limited to Palestine, and you may get hurt.”

CP: Very well then. So adding to all this your vow to eradicate Israel, your denial of the Holocaust, your funding and arming of Hezbollah, your fetish with hostage-taking, your efforts to kill American troops in Iraq, can you please explain to us why we in the West should not do our all to stop you? To deny you nuclear weapons? To not, as many have recommended, hand you – right here and now - an indictment under the Genocide Convention?

A: Can you please explain to ME how it is that America and Israel can have weapons of mass destruction but the rest of the world is denied them? You call this justice?

CP: No, I call it security. Unfortunately, thanks to unhinged nut-whistles like yourself, Moudy, devastating weapons in the hands of rational and responsible nations is our only means of preserving what justice remains in the world.

A: The United States armed Sadaam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction which he used against my people. The United States help create Al Qaeda whom you now call enemy number one. This is rational and responsible?

CP: Rational? Yes, given the circumstances. Responsible? In retrospect, probably not. But let us not forget your grand Ayatollah had declared “jihad” against the United States. And given that The Ronald was, at the time, somewhat preoccupied with a little something called the Cold War – the Soviet Empire, global nuclear annihilation et al -there was little choice in the matter. In war, hasty and unfortunate alliances are often made in addressing the threat most significant.

You might have noticed, however, that Sadaam is now dead, no need to thank us. And, according to our friends on the Left anyway, that whole “weapons of mass destruction” thing was just a myth. Why then do you not go about your business, making Iran the oil-rich sanctuary of Islamo-bliss you all so desire, and leave Israel and the rest of the bloody world alone?

A: We must make the way pure for the Mahdi, the Twelth Imam, so that Islamic justice will prevail over all the earth.

CP: And to do that you must purge the world of all modernity, free-thinking, Jews, women in thongs, homosexuals, all that, correct?

A: And insolent, arrogant, blasphemous parrots that do not know their place!

CP: Funny you know I’ve been told that before. In fact it was a little fellow - mustache, bad hair, nasty temper - much like yourself. Hitler was the name. You’re familiar with him? Have you read his Mein Kampf ? A real page-turner. What am I saying? Read it? You’re LIVING it!

A: Send for my driver. I am finished here.

CP: Oh that reminds me, I’d like to read you one last piece for you, an excerpt from a letter from Speaker Newt Gingrich to The Israel Project:

“In the 1930s, Winston Churchill read Hitler’s Mein Kampf and came to understand that Hitler meant exactly what he wrote and said. Churchill and his small group of parliamentary allies found themselves isolated as the British government refused to recognize the depth of Hitler’s evil and the seriousness of his statements.

The League of Nations found itself able to issue press releases and diplomatic condemnation but unable to do anything effective about the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and later China, the Italian invasion of Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) and later Albania, and Germany breaking the Versailles Treaty by remilitarizing the Rhineland and then absorbing Austria and occupying Czechoslovakia.

Each weak, paper response of the democracies simply increased the contempt and boldness of the dictators.

There are lessons to be learned from the 1930s and those lessons apply directly to the current government of Iran.”

A: Mr. Gingrich is an idiot. What would you expect from a man named, “Newt.”

CP: Unfortunately not a presidential bid. Newt, however, unlike Sir Winston in the 1930’s, is not alone in his assessment. The sane half of the world no longer lets lunatics amass weapons and power unchecked. You will be stopped.

A: Oh really? We shall see. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have an appointment at Columbia University to speak to the youth of America about the future of the world.