Outrage over the anti-Islam film reaches the UN as more serious issues plague the Middle East and Beyond
Priorities Must Be Reconsidered Immediately
 | - Corey Hunt (Bio and Archives) Tuesday, September 25, 2012 (0) Comments | Print friendly | Subscribe | Email Us |
Over the weekend I maintained hope that on Monday my words from last week’s column about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his visit to New York City for a United Nations summit would be rendered void.
A part of me trusted the human nature of the staff at the hotel – the Warwick, to be specific – that would receive him to say no and the decency of the United States Government, from President Obama down to the police officers on the street, to step in and either bar the dictator from entering the country or haul him off to the jail cell he so obviously deserves. I even hoped that maybe, somehow, he would use his last visit to sit down and say nothing at the UN. None of that happened though.
Instead, everything I feared came true, along with a new cacophony of outbursts and threats that the American delegation decided to sit through, breaking tradition with their past symbolism of walking out. He even made it for interviews with journalists, predictably praising the demonstrations against the “insulting” film Innocence of Muslims and joking about the bounty placed on Indian-born author and Islam critic Salman Rushdie – a bounty which Ahmadinejad’s masters, the clerics, increased to 3.3 million dollars. Although Rushdie was not involved in making the film, the Iranian Government has been seeking his death for decades and saw the outrage on the streets as a good opportunity to try and finish the job.
Even with all this, the greatest tragedy of Ahmadinejad’s visit is not the spineless behavior displayed by his American hosts or even the speeches he will give throughout the week. Its the fact that he is not just some distorted, delusional madman shunned by the rest of the world. Just days earlier in Pakistan, as the streets smoldered and the body count rose after a day of “Love for the Prophet” protests over the movie, Railways Minister Ghulam Ahmad Bilour came out with his own bounty (100,000 dollars out of pocket) for the assassination of the creator behind Innocence of Muslims. While the Pakistani Government distanced itself from its minster’s declaration, he has yet to fired or charged with attempting to incite murder. Take all this in for just a moment…a government official of a country that is supposed to be an American ally, one that has received billions of dollars in aid, goes on record invoking the assistance of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban to permanently silence someone in the United States for using his fundamental right to free speech. For those of you who don’t care about the filmmaker(s), Bilour’s threat included additional payments for the killing of anyone else who commits blasphemy against Islam in the future.
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