Ahmadinejad is benefitting from a number of factors:
The soft racism of low expectations, or, as Edward Said called it, Orientalism, which expects Orientals to be unreasonable, inscrutable and not worth the trouble.
And because, as Martin Amis eloquently put it in a recent article: “We are drowsily accustomed, by now, to the fetishisation of “balance”, the
groundrule of “moral equivalence” in all conflicts between West and East, the 100-per-cent and 360-degree inability to pass judgment on any ethnicity other than our own (except in the case of Israel).”
And he goes on to suggest: “Accordingly, given the choice between George Bush and Osama bin Laden, the liberal relativist, it seems, is
obliged to plump for the Saudi, thus becoming the appeaser of an armed doctrine
with the following tenets: it is racist, misogynist, homophobic, totalitarian,
inquisitional, imperialist, and genocidal.”
In this case, it is Ahmadinejad being coddled. A slight distinction without a real difference.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article2424020.ece
