February 7, 2006: Iran's President: Europe's leaders are “prisoners of a bunch of blood-sucking Zionists"

by Laura Mansfield

The madman of Tehran, Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad, is now accusing the leaders of Europe as “prisoners of a bunch of blood-sucking Zionists”.

This statement was reported in Persian on the state-run news agency IRNA in Tehran. But unlike most of the bizarre statements Ahmadinezhad has made recently, IRNA is not reporting the statements in English.

A comparison of the English and Farsi language coverage of the statements made at the book awards ceremony shows the duplicity:

IRNA's Persian service quotes Ahmadinezhad as saying, while referring to the leaders of those countries who had justified the "insults" of the cartoons on the grounds of freedom of expression: "You are prisoners of a bunch of blood-sucking Zionists. Otherwise, if there was (true) freedom of expression in your countries, you would have allowed expressions about the rights of the Palestinians."

But the English language service reports that the president told those at a book awards ceremony that those who resorted to "desecration of sanctities and tarnishing the illuminating domain of the prophets had embarked on retrospective path of ignorance and misery of the dark medieval style reactionaries."

Until now Iran has not been shy about reporting the racist and hate-filled statements spewed by its president. It’s curious to see that in this case, they have broken the pattern.