Iranians Ironically Protest Lack of National Acknowledgement

Sometimes hypocrisy is just so basic, so fundamental, that when it comes to light all you can do is point and laugh. So is the case when several Iranians created the website Hello Yahoo! Mail, where they protest the removal of Iran as a nation to be picked on Yahoo! Mail. While I would naturally be inclined to agree that we need to omit any nation from a drop down menu or to refuse to acknowledge their existence is by itself childish and petty, the context of this particular outcry is perhaps just too amusing to pass up.

Ever since the formation of Israel in 1947 - going through painstaking legal practices that no other nation had really needed to go through - it has been fashionable for Middle Eastern nations to refuse to recognize Israel's right to exist. In fact, in many "diplomatic summits", the only thing Israel's enemies are willing to bring to the table is that, for territorial concessions, they will "recognize the state of Israel". Grand Ayatollah Khameini referred to Israel as a "cancer" that had to be removed. Ahmadinejad himself all but refuses to acknowledge Israel, simply referring to it as the "Zionist regime" which he promises will be "wiped from the page of time".

In Bahrain, a teacher was heavily criticized and threatened for having their students color a picture of the Israeli flag in a lesson about countries of the Middle East. The government was urged to get involved, as mosques became incensed at the notion that they should recognize "Zionist entities".

While we're on the topic of refusal to acknowledge realities, it goes without saying that Ahmadinejad has, on several occasions, outright denied the Holocaust - only finally being tempered into calling it an exaggeration. Amusingly, in his zeal to protest Zionism and Israel, he doesn't seem to realize that he's also calling into question the deaths of gypsies, homosexuals (wait, he doesn't care about that Western phenomenon that clearly doesn't exist in the East), Jehova's Witnesses, Blacks, and any other ethnic minorities. Or were Jews the only ones not targeted by the anti-Semitic Nazis?

With all this in mind, it becomes dutifully ironic that, in Iran's preeminent declaration that other nations don't exist, an organization as "small" on the political scale as Yahoo! should outright deny Iran's existence. Whether or not they do is not particularly relevant, as the great humor comes from the incredible indignation of the Iranians, that they feel compelled to write angry letters and websites devoted to the search engine.

"We, the nation of Iran, assume it contrary to professional ethics to deny a nation and violate fundamental human rights for any reason, including the so-called political tensions between states and governments," the letter says.

But apparently, that concept doesn't apply to a bunch of "Apes and Pigs occupying Jerusalem".