Genocidal fantasies in Iran

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Good news. On Thursday, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran, who recently called for wiping Israel off the map, moderated his position. In a spirit of statesmanlike compromise, he now wants Israel wiped off the map of the Middle East and wiped onto the map of Europe.

"Some European countries insist on saying that Hitler killed millions of innocent Jews in furnaces," President Ahmadinejad told Iranian TV viewers. "Although we don't accept this claim, if we suppose it is true," he added sportingly, "if European countries claim that they have killed Jews in World War II," Mr. Ahmadinejad told Iranian TV, "why don't they provide the Zionist regime with a piece of Europe? Germany and Austria can provide the regime with two or three provinces for this regime to establish itself, and the issue will be resolved. You offer part of Europe and we will support it."

Big of you. It's the perfect solution to the "Middle East peace process": out of sight, out of mind. And given that Mr. Ahmadinejad's out of his mind, we're already halfway there.

So let's see: We have a Holocaust denier who wants to relocate an entire nation to another continent and he happens to be head of the world's newest nuclear state. (They're not 100 percent fully fledged operational, but happily for them they can drag out the pseudo-negotiations with the European Union until they are. And Washington certainly won't do anything, because after all if we're not 100 percent certain they've got weapons of mass destruction -- which we won't be until there's a big smoking crater live on CNN -- it would be just another Bushitlerburton lie to get us into another war for oil, right?)

So how does the United States react? Well, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Mr. Ahmadinejad's comments "further underscore our concerns about the regime."

Really? But wait, the world's superpower wasn't done yet. The State Department moved to a two-adjective alert and described Mr. Ahmadinejad's remarks as "appalling" and "reprehensible." "They certainly don't inspire hope among any of us in the international community that the government of Iran is prepared to engage as a responsible member of that community," said spokesman Adam Ereli.

You don't say. Mr. Ahmadinejad was speaking in the holy city of Mecca, head office of the "religion of peace," during a meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference. There were fiftysomething other heads of government there. How many do you think took their Iranian colleague to task?

Well, what's new? But, that being so, it would be heartening if the rest of the world could muster a serious response. How one pines for a plain-spoken tell-it-like-it-is fellow like, say, former U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali? As he memorably said of Iran, "It's a totalitarian regime." Oh, no, wait. He said that of the United States. On Iran, he's as impeccably circumspect and discreet as the State Department.

"Diplomatic" language is one of the last holdovers of the pre-democratic age. It belongs to a time when international relations were exclusively between a handful of eminent representatives of European dynasties. Today it's all out in the open -- President Ahmaddasanatta proposed his not-quite-final solution for Israel on TV. Messrs. McLellan and Ereli likewise responded on TV. So the language of international relations is no longer merely the private code of diplomats but part of the public discourse -- and, if the U.S. government learns anything from the last four years, it surely ought to be that there's a price for not waging the war as effectively in the psychological arenas as in the military one. What does it mean when one party can talk repeatedly about liquidation of an entire nation and the other party responds that this further "underscores our concerns," as if he had been listening to an E.U. trade representative propose raising some tariff by a half percent?

Well, it emboldens the bully. It gives him an advantage, like the punk who swears and sprawls over half the seats in the subway car while the other riders try not to catch his eye.