Kucinich Watch: Dennis Kucinich on the Ahmadinejad Comment and Health Care

Presidential candidate and Member of Congress Dennis Kucinich has done it again. To his great credit, he has embraced the unpopular, righteous side of a controversial issue because he actually does his research and finds out what the real story is, instead of assuming that the media spin is accurate.

The only two dissenting House members were Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul and Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich when the House recently voted on a non-binding resolution, H. Con. Resolution 21, to request the UN Security Council to charge Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with violating the 1948 Genocide Convention for "incitement to commit genocide" because he allegedly called for Israel to be "wiped off the map". The problem is that Ahmadinejad never said any such thing. What he actually said, translated directly from Farsi, was: "The Imam said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time." He stated this in a 2005 speech entitled "The World Without Zionism" and he was in turn quoting from the late Ayatollah Khomenei, known as the father of the Islamic Revolution.

According to Arash Norouzi of antiwar.com, the statement actually calls for regime change, not war. He explains that the mistranslation was originally disseminated by IRNA, the Islamic Republic News Agency, in their own news releases and immediately picked up by the world's media, who apparently never bothered to verify it or give credit to its true author, the late Ayatollah Khomenei. Even though Iran tried to rectify the error, it was too late. The media had gotten hold of it and wasn't going to let it go. The mistranslation was later further altered to "wiped off the face of the earth", which sounded even more threatening. Ahmadinejad himself insisted in interviews that he wanted Palestinians to have a "fair and free referendum" to decide their fate because they had rights too.

All sorts of prominent people picked up on the mistranslation and used it to further inflame the public, including British Prime Minister Tony Blair, former UN Chief Kofi Annan, and Israel's Ariel Sheron, Shimon Peres, and Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as well-known warmonger President George W. Bush.

What has been forgotten in all this brouhaha is that Ahmadinejad is not even the true spokesman for Iran. That distinction goes to Iran's supreme leader, the ultra-conservative cleric Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who recently said that Iran was not a threat to the world and would not incite war with anyone. But that's not a sexy statement, so nobody paid attention to it. Instead, the media ran with the more provocative statements of Ahmadinejad, the second in command. It appears that few have learned from the Iraq debacle, and despite anti-Iraq war rhetoric on the right and the left, many politicians seem eager to leap into yet another unnecessary war in the Middle East.

But not Dennis Kucinich. On June 21^st he inserted into the Congressional record alternate translations of the quote from the New York Times Tehran Bureau and the Middle East Research Institute. He said they suggested to him that Ahmadinejad was referring to the regime, not the country or people of Israel, and that the Iranian president meant that he wanted the regime to end through a democratic process, not war. He further stated: " . . . this debate, even if unintentional, could be used as still another cause for a U.S. attack on Iran, and because the International Atomic Energy Agency has not established that Iran is developing nuclear weapons and because we went to war against Iraq on the basis of misinformation, disinformation, and because I stand for peaceful resolution of all international disputes in the Middle East, in the region, and because I do share the concern that Israel would be in peril, which is why I did the research. . . That is the basis of my wanting to submit a translation . . . I am questioning whether or not this person (Ahmadinejad) is trying to destroy Israel."

Representative Ron Paul weighed in with these words: "Does anyone believe that dropping nuclear weapons on Iran will not wipe a people off the map? When it is said that nothing, including a nuclear strike, is off the table on Iran, are those who say it not also threatening genocide? And we wonder why the rest of the world accuses us of behaving hypocritically, of telling the rest of the world 'do as we say, not as we do'. . . . We need to engage the rest of the world, including Iran and Syria, through diplomacy, trade, and travel rather than pass threatening legislation like this that paves the way to war."

In the same week, the big guy, Michael Moore, director of the new film SiCKO about the broken American health care industry, thanked the little guy, Dennis Kucinich, for running for president, and endorsed HR 676, the health care bill of John Conyers cosponsored by Kucinich. This bill is designed to cover medical as well as dental, mental health, vision, long-term and vision care at no additional cost. In a speech to supporters of the bill, Michael Moore said: "I so appreciate the work that you are all doing with this bill, and I ask Americans across the country, who are asking me, 'What can we do?' This is something we can do. Write to your Member of Congress and say, 'Get behind HR 676.'"

I couldn't agree more. And please get behind Dennis Kucinich for president as well. He is constantly proving that he's the best choice for creating a better America.