September 21, 2006
In the dazzling display of bizarre reasoning with which Iran’s president regaled us during his UN visit, perhaps nothing surpassed in absurdity his explanation of why Iran has no hidden nuclear intentions. Nuclear bomb, he told us, is un-Islamic; and Iran being an Islamic country, it obviously does not want any nukes.
Which would have served as a reasonable explanation – reasonable enough for the gullible, at least – if not for one highly relevant fact: Pakistan is an Islamic country too – and it does have the nukes. Whatever the Iranian Islamic theory of nukes, in Pakistani Islamic practice nukes are squared with Islam all right.
One might object – and fairly too – that Pakistan is a different sort of an Islamic state – it is not ruled by the clerics, like Iran. Pakistan’s nukes are secular nukes, not Islamic nukes.
But take a closer look, and you will see that this is not so at all. Suppose Pakistan‘s government did something unequivocally un-Islamic – like ordering the Pakistanis to eat pork at least once a week Wouldn’t there be demonstrations by the Moslem clerics? Rioting by the populace? Mass protests?
We hear of no such protests from Pakistan’s clergy with regard to the presumably un-Islamic Pakistani nuclear bomb. There are no loud and vehement demands from Pakistani Moslems that this un-Islamic, porky abomination – the Pakistani nuclear bomb – be immediately dismantled. On the contrary, the infamous developer of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, who was happily selling the deadly technology and parts to anyone with cash, is far from being cursed by the religious Pakistanis as a satanic perverter of Islam. He is, no less, Pakistan’s national hero.
Which means that, contrary to what president Ahmadinejad told us in New York, the nuclear bomb can be quite easily reconciled with Islam. And that, in turn, means that when he told us that it was not so, he lied – and lied not just about something trivial, but about Islam. And if he could go so far as to be hypocritical about something that is presumably extra-super-sacred for him, there can be no reason at all why he would not be ready to lie to us about something far less holy – like Iran’s nuclear intentions.
And he confessed he did not know what else he could do to ease the suspicion that Iran was aiming for the nuclear bomb. Here is a word of advice: stop enriching uranium. This may just do the trick.