Dear "Noble Americans"

Investor's Business Daily:

While Mahmoud Ahmadinejad tries to woo "Noble Americans," a smuggled video shows how truth and justice actually fare in his country.

The Iranian president is back to writing letters, this time a five-page missive directly to the American people. A longer letter to President Bush in May fell flat. Maybe Ahmadinejad figures that if he steals enough lines from the Democratic Party and the New York Times' editorial page, ordinary Americans will see him as a regular liberal guy.

So he says things like: "If the U.S. government meets the current domestic and external challenges with an approach based on truth and justice, it can remedy some of the past afflictions and alleviate some of the global resentment and hatred of America." That's the sort of thing he might say to a softball question from Mike Wallace.

But he can't quite pull off the mainstream act. Get him going on Israel, and he's an anti-Semitic conspiracy nut. Presumably sober, he sounds like Mel Gibson drunk: "What have the Zionists done for the American people that the U.S. administration considers itself obliged to blindly support these infamous aggressors? Is it not because they have imposed themselves on a substantial portion of the banking, financial, cultural and media sectors?"

Try as he might, he can't quite get the tone right. From the "Noble Americans" salutation onward, the prose suggests Borat's evil twin. If he were harmless, he would be pleasantly ridiculous.

But he's far from harmless, and his rule is far from benign. His open letter could be seen as an attempt to paper over some embarrassing and ominous news that has come out of Iraq lately.

The embarrassing part is exemplified in a video being shown in the West by Iranian dissidents. As the London Observer notes, "the film shows the public hanging of Alireza Gorji, 23, and his friend Hossein Makesh, 22, in July in Broudjerd, Iran."

According to officials, the two were put to death for behaving "immorally." Opposition activists say they were political activists executed on trumped-up charges. As one human-rights observer noted to the British newspaper, "Both these men had been involved in anti-government protests in their hometown, and everyone who watched the hanging knew this."

The Iranian record on human rights is abysmal, and the U.S. is far from alone in pointing this out. The Observer noted that the United Nations has condemned the Tehran regime more than 50 times "for severe human rights violations," most recently in a General Assembly vote before Thanksgiving. Iran is an efficient police state and a "democracy" carefully purged of genuine dissent.

...

Democrats should consider a theft of intellectual property claim against this guy. However they are mostly silent in the face of this crude attempt at propaganda by an enemy that has been at war with the US since 1979. Those who think we should talk to these ideologues should study the letter for truth justice and the American way. While he may connect with Michael Moore, it is unlikely that he will connect with rest of America.

In response to the letter I would like to say:

Dear Mahmoud,

Willful ignorance of the Holocaust will not make it go away, nor make the Jews in Israel forget that it happened. Nor will your threats to cause another one make Americans think you are a voice of reason or sanity. Your religious bigotry and arrogance is really off putting. I just do not think a friendship with you would be either pleasant or productive.

Very truly and with justice for all,

Merv