Staged Hatred.

A massive 3-D representation of the US and Israel depicted as falling bombs, or fragile eggs about to crack open and falling through an hourglass like their time is up - behind Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad when he said that Israel "must be wiped off the map.". The statement was delivered in a keynote speech to a so-called “World Without Zionism” conference in Tehran attended by 4,000 hardline students.

Found on BAGnewsNotes.

If you wonder why this did not create more of an upraor in Israel, well, it is probably because (other than having had another bomb attack at that time) they have known about this for years as explained in the NYT, these types of comments are regularly issued by Iranian leaders. So when the Isreali say that many Arab states want to wipe out their country, well, they're not just paranoid, in this case, they clearly have a point.

The whole show may be dismissed as insignificant and purely rhetoric but it isn't. While Ahmadinejad’s speech is from another age (i.e. isn’t it a strange reminder of Hitler’s staging and rhetoric?), we should keep in mind that the Iranians are also good at using modern technology to convey their message. Not only powerful 3-D images but also possibly one day powerful nuclear bomb.s And this is no spin - this time, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and other specialists have expressed concern.

And as the Times reported, there is mounting propaganda all over Iran (and even, if I may add, in the whole region - most other Arab states were silent after Ahmadinejad's hatred speech). It looks like the new regime is taking the country back in time:

Diverse the Iranian press may be (though you take a considerable risk), but reports from the Iranian capital during the anti-Israel demos there suggested that the state-controlled radio and TV did sterling service by showing non-stop pictures of Israeli atrocities, then covering a state-sponsored event at Tehran University, while suppressing all mention of the international response to Ahmadinejad’s remarks.

And this:

....one of the President’s first acts, completed last week, was to ban all foreign films from being shown in Iran. They were said to contain seeds of a dangerous and corrupting culture, which could influence Iranians in the directions of drug-taking (as if!), feminism, liberalism and secularism

The Bush administratin was apparently wating for the "new" generation of Iranian politicians for things to get better... but they (again) misconstrued the situation - in the end, they may have attacked the wrong country if (Inter)national security was really their concern. The new generation? Well here they have it. The guy is only 50. Quite promising.