Whatever kind of drugs Iran’s vice-president is on, I don’t want them.

Iran has a major drug problem, with opium spilling over the border from Afghanistan.  So who’s to blame?  Jews, of course!  Thus vice-president Rahmini’s speech yesterday at a United Nations anti-drug conference, saying that the Talmud is responsible for the spread of illegal drugs around the world.  And that Zionists control the international drug trade.

His “proof”?  He seems to think there are no Jewish drug addicts.  Which of course only means he’s never been to Tel Aviv.

And you thought it was just president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, with his rantings about the Holocaust being a myth invented by the West (a claim all the odder since it was perpetrated by “the West” — i.e. Germany — but who’s quibbling about details?).

My first impulse is to laugh.  I mean, this is almost a caricature of anti-Semitism.  But then I think “poor Iran, with people like this in charge.”

And Iranians know it.  Mass protests for democratic reform were brutally put down in both 2009 — remember what you thought was the unforgettable image of the dying Neda Agha-Soltan? — and 2011.

Iranians know that the Zionist bugaboo, the “right” to bear nuclear arms, and the “defense-of-Islam” posture are all ways of trying to distract them from a leadership so appalling that it barely merits the term “government.”

Rahmini’s speech is the desperate flailing of failure.  If all else fails, the thinking goes, blow smoke in their eyes.  But the only ones blinded are the smokers.