donderdag 23 april 2009

A malicious smile


The most significant moment in the TV-account of Ahmadinejad’s performance in Geneva was that intensely lustful smile when he sat down again. He must have enjoyed very much his most recent denial of the Holocaust and the uproar he caused at the UN Conference on Antiracism. Apparently it makes him feel good to know you are hitting something, exactly because you deny it.

It reminds me of that other malicious laugh, the one laught by Gretta Duisenberg – the wife of the former Dutch National Bank’s president. On the question in a radio-interview how many signatures she hoped to collect for a petition against Israël, she replied “six million”, and then burst into a laughter.

What message exactly is being conveyed by such laughing?