The first thing that comes to mind when hearing the name of Iranian ex-president Ahmadinejad is “a Holocaust denier.” Infamously, he organized cartoon contests mocking the Holocaust, and at every opportunity denied that it ever happened.
Why? Not because he was a historian who studied the Nuremberg trials and the Eichmann case, who delved in the archives and interviewed the eye-witnesses, coming as a result to the conclusion that the Holocaust never happened. O, not at all.
His was not a truth-seeker’s, but a politician’s approach. Seeking to destroy Israel, and perceiving that much of the European support for Israel was due both to the sorrow over the fate of the European Jewry, and the feeling of guilt over their countrymen’s wartime contribution to Hitler’s “Final Solution,” Ahmadinejad figured that the memory of the Holocaust stood in the way of depriving Israel of whatever European support it enjoyed.
And so remove that support, he declared that there never was a Holocaust! Problem solved!
Facts are no impediment for a politician; the convenient ones are trumpeted, the inconvenient ones are either ignored, or substituted with lies: the ends justify the means.
Which approach is true not just of Ahmadinejad, but of our own federal judges too. They do not let such minor, insignificant, pesky little thing as a “fact” to get in a way of deciding the case the way they want. While it may not be convenient for federal judges – at this time at least – to deny the Holocaust, facts adduced by the parties in support of their position are if no import to the federal ,judges, and are routinely substituted by them with their exact opposite, or by those invented by judges themselves out of thin air. The ends justify the means after all; the desired outcome is just too important to be derailed by an honest procedure that entails evaluation of facts and law contained in parties’ argument.
So is there a difference between America’s federal judges, and Iran’s Ahmadinejad? Certainly in the specifics of their declarations, but by not in the overall approach, and the methods employed. Fact-denial and brazen fraud were vital to Ahmadinejad’s modus operandi, and continue to be the most indispensable tools in the arsenal of our federal judiciary.
So is it fair to call our federal judges “American Ahmadinejads?”
Absolutely!