Goodbye, Ahmadinejad

As we get to know Iran's new prez,  Juan Cole over at Informed Comment has some reasons why we shall not miss the old president. One of the most interesting - and informative as a good example of how our news is babble - is below:

http://www.juancole.com/2013/08/departure-ahmadinejad-neocons.html

I will never again have to hear some uninformed pundit or politician drone on about how Ahmadinejad threatened to wipe Israel off the face of the map, which he did not. This stupid debate was only possible because the journalists in Washington and New York apparently do not trust me (I’m looking at you, Ethan Bronner) to know the difference between a transitive and intransitive verb or accurately to translate Persian into English.

The late Christopher Hitchens even managed to convince himself that he knew Persian better than I. It is a profound mark of contemporary America’s anti-intellectualism that a professor of Middle Eastern history with numerous refereed works to his name on Iran and Shiite Islam at prominent academic presses should be assumed not to know the grammar every Iranian schoolchild does.

This whole ‘wiped off the face of the map’ mania among Western journalists was just war propaganda, in which they seem unashamed to join, and which causes them to vilify anyone who stands in their way.

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