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When the "Israel Lobby" started taking heat for cheerleading the invasion of Iraq, Abe Foxman gave a speech at Barnes & Noble/NYC in which he said that, in the 2002-early-2003 run-up to the invasion of Iraq the ADL and other Jewish groups tried to make the case to the administration that IRAN, not Iraq, was the problem.
In 2003 Ahmadinejad was mayor of Tehran. According to Yossi Melman, neither Mossad nor CIA nor MI5 had Ahmadinejad in their radar; they knew little about him when he won a surprise bid for the presidency in 2005.
Getting the propagandists to move past the "wipe Israel off the map" schtick is probably not possible, and Ahmadinejad's provocative statements, even when correctly translated, don't make it any easier to refute the organized and systematic demonization campaign that US groups sympathetic to Bibi Netanyahu have financed and rolled out.
But Americans who are not ideologically blinded should try to shut out(or shut down!) the propaganda and understand that the Iranian people, 70 million of them, are young, educated, sophisticated, and are the best friends the US has in the Middle East.
Iran is geographically positioned to thrive in the next 30 years; the US can either share the wealth and progress by investing with and in Iran, or the US and its ideologues can shoot itself in the foot by venting its spleen on Iran.
The US administration and the ideologically blinded propagandists seem determined to take the latter course.
The major grievance the Netanyahu acolytes lodge against Iran (after the weak claims that "Iran is killing US soldiers in Iraq" and "Iran intends to destroy Israel" are swept into the dustbin) is that Iran finances Hamas and Hezbollah. Israel could solve those problems by stopping the human rights abuses against Palestinian Arabs, stopping its meddling in Lebanon, stepping back from its nuclear as well as settlement-building defiance, and starting to behave like a serious and just player in the world.
