By Andrew L. Jaffee

I’m not sure what the West is willing to do about Iran’s maniacal President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But there were two notable events today, upping to pressure on Ahmadinejad, from the U.S. Congress, and another from within his own constituency. First, from the JTA:

A bipartisan slate of lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives proposed a resolution calling on the Iranian president to face genocide incitement charges.

The nonbinding resolution brought last week to the House’s Foreign Affairs Committee and initiated by Reps. Steve Rothman (D-N.J.) and Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) said statements by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad calling for the destruction of Israel amount to crimes according to the 1948 Convention on Genocide.

The convention not only provides for punishment for genocide, Rothman and Kirk wrote in a letter to their colleagues, but “also prohibits ‘direct and public incitement to commit genocide.’ …

Ahmadinejad’s hateful rhetoric calling for the elimination of Israel, a Member State of the United Nations, qualifies as inciting genocide.”

Second, from the BBC:

There are signs of growing opposition in Iran to the policies of hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

A group of reformist and moderate members of parliament have now started collecting signatures to summon him to answer questions about his policies.

Editorials in normally uncritical newspapers hardline have been criticising him for being too aggressive towards the west. …

Surprisingly some hard-line newspapers have started criticising the president in recent days, asking why he has spent so much of Iran’s foreign exchange and complaining about the confrontational language he uses on the nuclear issue.

There has also been criticism of the conference the president organised last month questioning the World War II holocaust which lost Iran much sympathy internationally.

Separately, 150 MPs have signed a letter urging the president to base his next budget on realistic assumptions - for example, about future oil prices which are key to Iran’s economic forecasts.

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Related: Israel, United States, Iran, War Against Islamo-fascism

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