The official blog of Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinajed is up and running in four languages: Persian, French, Arabic and English. Whether the translations are verifiable only MEMRI knows. For now, web browsers or blog bums can become giddy all over with the knowledge that one of the great demagogues of our times, a man with admiration for the tactics and strategies of old time despots and charlatans, is a member of the cyber cult.
The last couple of weeks in my annual summer doldrums, watching feats of moral equivalency rearing its ugly head in response to the ugliness that has been going on in southern Lebanon and Israel, I could only help but think that we don’t have enough warring ideologues creeping around the net.
So here we have it–a modern day Saladin meets Hitler–the son of a poor artisan from the sticks who overcame adversity to place 132nd out of 30,000 in state entrance examinations. What we don’t have–because such would undermine rules of concealment–is a transparent web blogger, a man that owns up to some of the most perniciously anti semitic rants of modern times. Ahmedinajed the Populist, preaching from his Friday afternoon pulpit the grand strategy of the Islamic caliphate is not Ahmadinajed Sane Member of the International Order. So it goes.
The only fair response to this budding internet scribe is for our own G. Dubya to drop handlers and sit down for some serious net shmooze. He could set up shop at ‘Transparency Central’. Maybe even embark on a campaign to change that bufoonish image of his as the blundering tex-arcane grammarian. The race of ideas is on as the everpresent hype mongers like to say. And who will win the hearts and minds of cyberspace hinges on this ever necessary fireside chat.
the pecking order: big ideas for ambitious minds 