This Wednesday, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will make his first visit to Lebanon as president of Iran. There are dozens of billboards and hundreds of smaller placards of the Iranian president’s image dotted along Lebanese highways. With a smiling Ahmadinejad, the pictures read “welcome” in Farsi and Arabic.
The visit itself is simultaneously being labeled as “historic” and a “provocation,” depending on where you obtain your international news affairs from. His trip will include visiting the strongholds of the Shiite militia Hezbollah in the Southern suburbs of Beirut as well as the mountainous south. Due to the delicate and sensitive nature of Lebanese politics and Iran’s close ties to the Hezbollah, Ahmadinejad’s visit has set the stage for geopolitical theater with a bite.
Tiny Lebanon often finds itself as a battleground for regional disputes. Power is shared among shifting political alliances of Shiite, Sunni, Christian and Druze political camps grouped roughly into a pro-western, Saudi-backed faction led by Prime Minister Saad Hariri, and an Iranian-and-Syrian-allied camp led by Hezbollah. More than 400,000 Palestinians, many of them packed in squalid refugee camps also live in Lebanon.
Some observers see Ahmadinejad’s visit as a victory lap as well as a slap to Israel, the United States and their Arab allies in the region, as well as Lebanon itself. Pro-western Lebanese government officials privately complain that Iran is trying to turn their country into an Iranian base on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea.
Iran has tried hard to portray the event as a routine state visit, but the trip is hardly routine. The Islamic Republic has invested heavily in Lebanon over the past 30 years and the visit gives a rare chance for a high profile Iranian figure to bask in the glory that is the fruits of his nation’s labor.
Many Lebanese, especially those close to Hezbollah, say Iran plays a constructive role in the country, especially in helping to rebuild areas of southern Lebanon and southern Beirut damaged in the fighting with Israel in 2006.
“At the very least, we have to thank the Iranians for the roads,” Said Hussein Rumeiti, a local official in the Southern Lebanese town of Burj Qalouway. “The people of Southern Lebanon really appreciate Iran. It was the only country that really took care of them.”
Ahmadinejad plans to make a speech in the town of Bint Jbeil, where he will inaugurate an Iranian-built park complete with a replica of the golden-domed Al-Aqsa Mosque that sits in Jerusalem. The town stands as a symbol of resistance. It was reduced to rubble in the 2006 war with Israel and has been rebuilt largely with money from Iran and Qatar.
Such praise for the Iranian president is hard to come by in Western media. A month ago Ahmadinejad was in New York attending the United Nations General Assembly meeting and he made his rounds. From Larry King to the Associated Press, it seems like Ahmadinejad gave more interviews than all the other world leaders who were in town that week combined. Unfortunately the interviews were a media-merry-go-round of fear mongering and ignorance.
This is Ahmadinejad’s sixth-year as the Iranian president, and his skills in utilizing the press to his advantage have never been more on point. According to the New York Time’s Rodger Cohen, for Ahmadinejad it’s all about double standards.
Ask about the Iranian nuclear program, he’ll retort with Israel’s undeclared nuclear arsenal. Ask about Iran’s economic difficulties and he drops the United States’ economic meltdown of 2008. Ask about rampant capital punishment and he’ll raise you a Texas. Ask about Iranian lying, he’ll counter with human rights and Abu Ghraib.
How can a man deemed dangerous and Hitler-like be able to secure the large amount of camera time that he receives? The media uses terms such as fanatical, threatening and genocidal to describe him and the government he represents. Yet when he is interviewed, he is soft spoken and eloquently states his reasoning. Some people genuinely might find him dangerous; but many more I’d say, find it convenient to find him dangerous. He is the perfect post-modern media star and villain.
Hanif Zarrabi is a history graduate student and a columnist for the Daily 49er.
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