They Do Love Conspiracy Theories
The website of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting agency today published an article casting doubt about Neil Armstrong’s 1969 moonwalk. Now, I am well aware that there are assorted bozos in the United States who think the moon landing was all Hollywood. Wasn’t there actually a movie made back in the ‘70s to that effect? But for the website of an official government news agency to drag up that old story is, in my mind, fairly lame. Maybe they think the Hollywood director was the same guy who made all those bogus holocaust flicks?
My favorite moonwalk story involves the grandmother of the girl I was dating that summer. I was sitting in the family living room waiting for my date when her grandmother, who lived with the family, came into the room and plopped down on a sofa. The conversation went something like this:
Granny: “You a smarta boy. You thinka dey landa ona da moon?”
Me: “Yea, they did.”
Granny, shaking her head: “I noa thinka dey landa ona da moon. I noa believe it. Anda youa noa why?”
Me: “No, why?”
Granny: “Lasta night, ita be a fulla moon, and I look up ata da sky and I don’t seea noa flag.”
I place this latest official Iran news report in the same class with my discussion with an ex-girlfriend’s totally uneducated and not-so-quick (sorry Paula) grandmother. But at least she had an excuse.
We have to get it through our heads that we are dealing with people who inhabit an alternate universe where Jews run the world and Bush toppled the twin towers using his buddy Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda organization. (If you are new to this blog, see my post of 10 July 2006.) The sad part is that because we are unwilling to see this reality, and face it head-on, we keep egging these poor people on, and in the end they are going to pay the steepest price, just as the Lebanese paid the highest price for Hezbollah’s actions. The leaders of the jihadist movements (both Sunni and Shi’a), Syria, and Iran think that they smell victory. In fact, they smell the fool’s gold of opportunism, the same scent that led the Japanese down the road to Pearl Harbor, and beyond.
