Der Spiegel Interviews Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Here's an interview that Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, recently gave to the German magazine, Der Spiegel. I don't think there's any doubt, given his sustained anti-Israeli rhetoric, that Ahmadinejad is doing his best to derail any chance of peace between the Israelis and Palestinians.

SPIEGEL: Are you still saying that the Holocaust is just "a myth?"

Ahmadinejad: I will only accept something as truth if I am actually convinced of it.

Full interview here.

Ahmadinejad's persistent pandering to anti-Israeli elements in the Middle East makes sense when considering the intractable, ethnic strife within his own country, which has been building for longer than most realize:

During the last week of May, thousands of Iranians demonstrated in the northwestern city of Tabriz, and the previous week there were protests at universities in five cities. The protests were triggered by the official government newspaper - the Islamic Republic News Agency's Iran - publishing a cartoon which depicts a boy repeating "cockroach" in Persian before a giant bug in front of him asks "What?" in Azeri.

The recent incidents of ethnic tensions are only the latest examples of what has been escalating for more than a year. In mid-March in the southeast, which is home to many of Iran's 1.4 million Baluchis, a Baluchi group called Jundallah took responsibility for an attack on a government motorcade in which 20 people were killed. Jundallah seized a number of hostages and claimed that it executed one of them, a member of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps. At least 12 people were killed in a similar attack in the second week of May. Nobody has taken credit for explosions May 8 in Kermanshah, which is home to Iran's 4.8 million Kurds, but the July 2005 shooting of a young Kurd by security forces led to demonstrations in several northwestern cities and the deaths of civilians and police officers. Since April of last year, there have been a number of violent incidents - including bombings that have targeted government facilities and which also have killed innocent bystanders - in the southwest, where many of Iran's 2 million Arabs live.

Source

Basic political doctrine dictates that domestic turmoil is best subdued by focusing attention away from it, and onto an external threat.