Ahmadinejad and the four-letter word

Petra Marquart-Bigman
The Warped Mirror/JPost
20 December 09

"Ahmadinejad is, believe it or not, a very childlike man. [...] He giggles like a little boy. [...] there's an innocence about his eyes." That's how The New Yorker's photographer Platon described his impression of Iran's president after he photographed him and other world leaders last September at the UN. The portrait series is featured on the magazine's website, and you can click on each of the alphabetically arranged pictures and listen to the photographer's commentary.

Does it matter that the New Yorker's photographer wanted to capture the "innocence" he perceived in the eyes of a politician who suppressed protests against his disputed re-election with savage brutality? Ahmadinejad is also a political leader who doubts that the Holocaust has been properly researched, and who talks about Israel like the Nazis talked about Jews. He is a leading member of a regime that for years has subordinated the welfare of Iranians to the overriding priority of developing nuclear technology, and now the regime seems close to realizing its ambition of having nuclear arms.

The New Yorker's photographer Platon certainly knows all this; yet, he wanted to capture the "innocence" in the Iranian president's eyes.

Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, thinks this matters, because it says something about our time:

We have become too smart and too sensitive for indignation. We regard the hatred of evil, even the talk of evil, as a preparation for war. We are beyond good and evil and we are beyond zero sum. To be sure, hatred is not quite an analysis; but still a word must be said on its behalf. Hatred may be a sign that something has been properly understood. If you do not hate racism, then you do not understand what it is. If you do not hate Ahmadinejad, then you do not understand who he is. In Washington, however, indignation is scorned as impractical."

But Wieseltier is not entirely right, because fierce political partisans often don't hesitate to denounce their opponents' worldview as evil, and it wouldn't be particularly difficult to find people who would happily condemn America or Israel as evil, but would be outraged to hear Ahmadinejad described so.

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