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IRAN targets ISRAEL
THE FATEFUL CONFRONTATION
BY DR. HAROLD BRACKMAN
a simon wiesenthal center report
wiesenthal.com
HOLOCAUST DENIAL, GLOBAL JEW HATRED, AND NUCLEAR INTIMIDATION:
IRANIAN LEADERS IN THEIR OWN WORDS
AYATOLLAH RUHOLLAH KHOMEINI:
1970:
“Jews . . . wish to establish Jewish domination … Since they are
a cunning and resourceful group of people, I fear that . . . they may
one day achieve their goal … Jews have grasped the world with
both hands and are devouring it with an insatiable appetite; they are
devouring America and have now turned their attention to Iran and
still they are not satisfied.”
1979:
“[Israel is] the enemy of humanity throughout the world.”
SUPREME LEADER ALI KHAMEINI:
2001:
“There is evidence which shows that Zionists had close relations
with German Nazis and exaggerated statistics on Jewish killings.
There is even evidence on hand that a large number of non-Jewish
hooligans and thugs of Eastern Europe were forced to emigrate to
Palestine as Jews . . . to install in the heart of the Islamic world
an anti-Islamic State under the guise of supporting the victims of
racism.”
2011:
“This gentleman [Muammar Qaddafi] wrapped up all his nuclear
facilities, packed them on a ship and delivered them to the West and
said, ‘Take them!’ Look where we are, and in what position they are
now.”
2012:
“The Zionist regime is a true cancer tumor on this region that should
be cut off. And it definitely will be cut off.”
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HOLOCAUST DENIAL, GLOBAL JEW HATRED, AND NUCLEAR INTIMIDATION:
IRANIAN LEADERS IN THEIR OWN WORDS
FORMER PRESIDENT AKBAR HASHEMI RAFSANJANI:
December 14, 2001:
“Jews . . . wish to establish Jewish domination … Since they are
a cunning and resourceful group of people, I fear that . . . they may
one day achieve their goal … Jews have grasped the world with
both hands and are devouring it with an insatiable appetite; they are
devouring America and have now turned their attention to Iran and
still they are not satisfied.”
PRESIDENT MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD:
October 26, 2005
“Our dear Imam [Khomeini] ordered that this Jerusalem-occupying
regime must be erased from the page of time [alternative translation:
wiped from the map]. This was a very wise statement . . . . Soon
this stain of disgrace will be cleaned from the garment of the world
of Islam, and this is attainable.” (In a Program Entitled “The World
Without Zionism”)
October 27, 2005
“Anybody who recognizes Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic
nation’s fury.”
December 14, 2005
“Today, they [Europeans] have created a myth in the name of
Holocaust and consider it to be above God, religion and the prophets.
This is our proposal: give a part of your own land in Europe, the
United States, Canada or Alaska to them [Jews] so that the Jews
can establish their country.” (At the Opening of the “Support for the
Palestinian Intifada” Conference in Tehran)
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HOLOCAUST DENIAL, GLOBAL JEW HATRED, AND NUCLEAR INTIMIDATION:
IRANIAN LEADERS IN THEIR OWN WORDS
PRESIDENT MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD:
October 26, 2005
“Our dear Imam [Khomeini] ordered that this Jerusalem-occupying regime must be erased from
the page of time [alternative translation: wiped from the map]. This was a very wise statement .
. . . Soon this stain of disgrace will be cleaned from the garment of the world of Islam, and this is
attainable.” (In a Program Entitled “The World Without Zionism”)
October 27, 2005
“Anybody who recognizes Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation’s fury.”
December 14, 2005
“Today, they [Europeans] have created a myth in the name of Holocaust and consider it to be above
God, religion and the prophets. This is our proposal: give a part of your own land in Europe, the
United States, Canada or Alaska to them [Jews] so that the Jews can establish their country.” (At
the Opening of the “Support for the Palestinian Intifada” Conference in Tehran)
April 14, 2006
“The Zionist regime is an injustice and by its very nature a permanent threat. Whether you like it or
not, the Zionist regime is heading toward annihilation. The Zionist regime is a rotten, dried tree that
will be eliminated by one storm. If there is serious doubt over the Holocaust, there is no doubt over
the catastrophe and holocaust being faced by the Palestinians. Holocaust has been continuing in
Palestine over the past 60 years.”
April 24, 2006
“We say that this fake regime [Israel] cannot not logically continue to live. Open the doors (of
Europe) and let the Jews go back to their own countries.”
May 28, 2006
“I believe the German people are prisoners of the Holocaust. More than 60 million were killed in
World War II. . . . The question is: Why is it that only the Jews are at the center of attention?”
July 13, 2006
“The Zionists and their protectors are the most detested people in all of humanity, and the hatred
is increasing every day. The worse their crimes, the quicker they will fall. [Israel] has blackened
the pages of history.”
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HOLOCAUST DENIAL, GLOBAL JEW HATRED, AND NUCLEAR INTIMIDATION:
IRANIAN LEADERS IN THEIR OWN WORDS
PRESIDENT MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD:
July 16, 2006
“The Zionists think that they are victims of Hitler, but they act like Hitler and behave worse than
Genghis Khan.”
July 27, 2006
“The occupying regime of Palestine has actually pushed the button of its own destruction by
launching a new round of invasion and barbaric onslaught on Lebanon.”
October 4, 2006
“A new Middle East will prevail without the existence of Israel.”
October 19, 2006
“The Zionist regime is counterfeit and illegitimate and cannot survive.”
November 13, 2006
“Israel is destined for destruction and will soon disappear. [It is] a contradiction to nature. We
foresee its rapid disappearance and destruction.”
December 12, 2006
“Thanks to people’s wishes and God’s will the trend for the existence of the Zionist regime is
downwards and this is what God has promised and what all nations want. Just as the Soviet Union
was wiped out and today does not exist, so will the Zionist regime soon be wiped out.” (Comments
to Iranian Holocaust Conference)
February 28, 2007
“The Zionists are the true manifestation of Satan. . . . Many Western governments that claim to
be pioneers of democracy and standard bearers of human rights close their eyes over crimes
committed by the Zionists and by remaining silent support the Zionists due to their hedonistic and
materialistic tendencies.”
March 27, 2007
“It is quite clear that a bunch of Zionist racists are the problem the modern world is facing today.”
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HOLOCAUST DENIAL, GLOBAL JEW HATRED, AND NUCLEAR INTIMIDATION:
IRANIAN LEADERS IN THEIR OWN WORDS
PRESIDENT MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD:
June 3, 2007
“With God’s help, the countdown button for the destruction of the Zionist regime has been pushed
by the hands of the children of Lebanon and Palestine. . . . By God’s will, we will witness the
destruction of this regime in the near future.”
August 18, 2007
“The Zionist regime is the flag bearer of violation and occupation and this regime is the flag of
Satan.”
August 28, 2007
“Zionists are people without any religion. They are lying about being Jewish because religion means
brotherhood, friendship and respecting other divine religions. They are an organized minority who
have infiltrated the world. They are not even a 10,000-strong organization.”
October 5, 2007
“After the Second World War, they created a scenario called ‘pogrom against Jews’. All over
Europe and the countries under Western rule, an anti-Jewish movement has been concocted. The
climate of propaganda and psychological warfare on the one hand and on the other hand using the
issue of ovens burning human beings, they have concocted a myth of deprivation and innocence
for the Jews of Europe. They use this pretext of the innocence of Jews and the suffering of some
Jews during the Second World War. Riding on the crest of a wave of anti-Jewish sentiments,
they have laid the foundations for the Zionist regime. . . . You cannot tolerate the presence of
Zionists in Europe but want to inflict them on the people of our region? You have so much land
in your possession. This vast land of Canada and Alaska can be used to resettle the Jews. Save
yourselves.” (Al-Quds Day Speech)
January 30, 2008
“I warn you to abandon the filthy Zionist entity, which has reached the end of the line. It has lost
its reason to be and will sooner or later fall. The ones who still support the criminal Zionists should
know that the occupiers’ days are numbered. Accept that the life of Zionists will sooner or later
come to an end.”
February 5, 2008
“A people falsified, invented. [Israel] will not last.”
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HOLOCAUST DENIAL, GLOBAL JEW HATRED, AND NUCLEAR INTIMIDATION:
IRANIAN LEADERS IN THEIR OWN WORDS
PRESIDENT MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD:
February 20, 2008
“The world powers established this filthy bacteria, the Zionist regime, which is lashing out at the
nations in the region like a wild beast.”
May 8, 2008
“Those who think they can revive the stinking corpse of the usurping and fake Israeli regime by
throwing a birthday party are seriously mistaken.”
August 23, 2008
“About 2,000 organized Zionists and 7,000 to 8,000 agents of Zionism have dragged the world into
turmoil. The powerful hand of the nations will clean these sources of corruption from the face of
the earth.”
September 23, 2008
“The dignity, integrity, and rights of the American and European people are being played with by a
small but deceitful number of people called Zionists. Although they are a miniscule minority, they
have been dominating an important portion of the financial and monetary centers as well as the
political decision making centers of some European countries and the US in a deceitful, complex
and furtive manner.”
December 30, 2008
“The real Holocaust is now taking place in Gaza Strip and Palestine.”
April 21, 2009
“Wasn’t the military action against Iraq planned by the Zionists and their allies in the then U.S.
administration in complicity with the arms manufacturing companies and the owner of the wealth?”
(Remarks before UN Conference on Racism)
September 18, 2009
“They [the Western powers] launched the myth of the Holocaust. They lied, they put on a show,
and then they support the Jews.” (Al-Quds Speech)
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HOLOCAUST DENIAL, GLOBAL JEW HATRED, AND NUCLEAR INTIMIDATION:
IRANIAN LEADERS IN THEIR OWN WORDS
PRESIDENT MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD:
September 21, 2010
“The question is, why don’t we allow this subject [the Holocaust] to be examined further. . . It is
incorrect to force only one view on the rest of the world. How come when it comes to the subject
of the Holocaust there is so much sensitivity?” (News conference in New York City)
September 23, 2010
“The Zionists have imposed five all-out wars on the neighboring countries and on the Palestinian
people. The Zionists committed the most horrible crimes against the defenseless people in the
wars against Lebanon and Gaza. The Zionist regime attacked a humanitarian flotilla in a blatant
defiance of all international norms and kills the civilians. This regime which enjoys the absolute
support of some western countries regularly threatens the countries in the region and continues
publicly announced assassinations of Palestinian figures and others, while Palestinian defenders
and those opposing this regime are pressured, labelled as terrorists and anti-Semites. All values,
even the freedom of expression, in Europe and in the United States are being sacrificed at the altar
of Zionism.” (Speech before UN General Assembly)
August 27, 2011
“The Zionist regime is a center of germs and cancerous cells and if it exists in even one small part
of (Palestine it will mobilize again and hurt everyone. . . . The goal of all believers and seekers of
justice should be the disappearance of the Zionist regime. . . All of the foundations for the creation
of this [Israeli] regime were based on a lie and deception, and the Holocaust was one of these big
lies,” he said. (Al-Quds Day Address)
September 22, 2011
“Who imposed, through deceits and hypocrisy, the Zionism and over sixty years of war,
homelessness, terror, and mass murder on the Palestinian people and on countries of the region?
. . . . Who used the mysterious September 11 incident as a pretext to attack Afghanistan and Iraq,
killing, injuring, and displacing millions in two countries with the ultimate goal of bringing into
its domination the Middle East and its oil resources? . . . If some European countries still use the
Holocaust, after six decades, as the excuse to pay fine or ransom to the Zionists, should it not be an
obligation upon the slave masters or colonial powers to pay reparations to the affected nations?”
(Speech before UN General Assembly)
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HOLOCAUST DENIAL, GLOBAL JEW HATRED, AND NUCLEAR INTIMIDATION:
IRANIAN LEADERS IN THEIR OWN WORDS
PRESIDENT MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD:
December 13, 2011
“[The US administration is under control of] Zionists whose survivals are tied to war and bloodshed
and plundering the wealth of other nations.”
January 3, 2012
“Zionists, who have no faith in religion or even God, now claim piety and intend to take away the
Islamic identity of the Holy Quds.”
July 1, 2012
“It has now been some 400 years that a horrendous Zionist clan has been ruling the major world
affairs. And behind the scenes of the major power circles, in political, media, monetary, and banking
organizations in the world, they have been the decision-makers, to an extent that a big power
with a huge economy and over 300 million population, the presidential election hopefuls must go
kiss the feet of the Zionists to ensure their victory in the elections.” (Speaking to Ambassadors of
Islamic Countries)
September 9, 2012
“Arrogant powers and enemies of nations are trying to manage the developments in the region so
as to save the Zionist regime [from obliteration]. We should not downplay and underestimate the
plots and actions of the enemies...they may pretend to rebuke the Zionist regime, but their main
objective is to save this regime,” the Iranian president said. . . . We have to be more vigilant in a bid
to be able to neutralize their conspiracies.” (Meeting with senior Hamas official Mahmoud Zahar
in Tehran)
September 24, 2012
“Israel will be eliminated”
FATEMEH BOLOURI KASHANI:
(WIDOW OF MOSTAFA AHMADI ROSHAN, ASSASSINATED DEPUTY DIRECTOR OF
THE NATANZ URANIUM ENRICHMENT FACILITY)
February 21, 2012
“Mostafa’s ultimate goal was the annihilation of Israel.”
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HOLOCAUST DENIAL, GLOBAL JEW HATRED, AND NUCLEAR INTIMIDATION:
IRANIAN LEADERS IN THEIR OWN WORDS
IRANIAN VICE PRESIDENT MOHAMMAD-REZA RAHIMI:
June 26, 2012
“The Islamic Republic of Iran will pay for anybody who can research and find one single Zionist
who is an addict. They do not exist. This is the proof of their involvement in drugs trade. . . . [The
Talmud teaches to] destroy everyone who opposes the Jews. . . . [There is a difference between
Jews who] honestly follow the prophet Moses” [and the Zionists who are] the main elements of the
international drugs trade. They think God has created the world so that all other nations can serve
them.” (Before a UN Forum in Tehran on Fighting Drug Addiction. The English-language Iranian
news agency falsely translated Rahami’s use of “Jews” to “Zionists.”)
IRANIAN REVOLUTIONARY GUARDS GENERAL:
AMIR ALI HAJIZADEH
HEAD OF AEROSPACE DIVISION IN CHARGE OF MISSILE SYSTEMS
July 1, 2012
“If they [Israel] take any action, they will hand us an excuse to wipe them off the face of the earth.”
(Announcing new Iranian tests of missiles with 2,000-kilometre range.)
MAJOR GENERAL HASSAN FIROUZABADI
CHIEF OF STAFF OF THE IRANIAN ARMED FORCES
August 5, 2012
“The Iranian nation is standing for its cause that is the full annihilation of Israel.”
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INTRODUCTION
This year, the United Nations scheduled Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to
speak before the General Assembly on Yom Kippur. Nothing could more starkly represent
the world community’s failure to confront the global evil posed by a man and a regime
deserving indictment under international law for inciting and planning genocide against
Israel.
A few months ago, Foreign Affairs, the prestigious journal of the Council on Foreign
Relations, featured an essay—”Why Iran Should Get the Bomb: Nuclear Balancing Would
Mean Stability”—by Harvard University Professor Kenneth N. Waltz. Also the coauthor
of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (2007) arguing that a Jewish cabal controls
American Mideast policy, Waltz in his new essay went further: “It is Israel’s nuclear arsenal,
not Iran’s desire for one, that has contributed most to the current crisis”—the “solution”
to which is to allow Islamic Republic of Iran to develop nuclear weapons! 2
Not since ancient times—when Queen Esther foiled Haman’s genocidal designs—has
Iran constituted such a threat to the Jewish people. The difference is that, in those days,
there were no apologists for Haman occupying tenured positions at Harvard’s Kennedy
School of Government.
Recently in Foreign Affairs, James Traub suggested that Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu’s mind occupies “a zone of insanity.” Of course, geopolitical madness has
a very different address in the Middle East. A nuclear-armed Iran would contribute to
regional “stability” in the same way that supplying a mad bomber living next door with
nitroglycerin would make your neighborhood safer. If you have any doubts—don’t ask
the Israelis—just ask King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia who has repeatedly said the only
“solution” to the Iranian bomb is to “cut off the head of the snake” that is Iran’s ruling
mullahtocracy. 3
Long before the current nuclear crisis, Islamist Iran’s blood feud against the survival of
the Jewish state was a horrific fact of life for the region and the world. This report traces
its origins back four decades to the Ayatollah Khomeini’s overthrow of the Shah, to the
creation of an Iranian terror network with links stretching from Syria and Lebanon as far
as North Korea and Venezuela, to the evolution of Holocaust Denial and Jew hatred as the
cornerstone of Iranian statecraft, and to emergence of the current Iranian nuclear threat.
Israel and those in the western world sharing its democratic values and commitment
to freedom and tolerance—as well as the Arab countries threatened by Iran—face a
terrible dilemma with deep roots in recent Mideast history and a long shadow that now
overhangs the twenty-first century. There are no easy answers to the question: What To
Do About Iran? The only certainty is that to do nothing—retreating into wishful thinking
and anti-Israel scapegoating, will produce catastrophic results akin to those that befell
the world during World War II and the Holocaust.
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INTRODUCTION
As Rabbi Marvin Hier, Dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, warned in his recent Rosh
Hashanah message: “Israel cannot wait like America or England. She is not separated by
an ocean or sea. She has nowhere to hide. The Ayatollahs will not change their minds. It
is we who must change ours. The leaders of the Western world should tell Iran, in plain
language, ‘give up your nuclear weapons program or we will join Israel in wiping out
your nuclear capacity’.”
FROM THE SHAH TO THE AYATOLLAH:
ROOTS OF IRAN’S ANTI-ISRAEL PSYCHOSIS
The 1979 Iranian Revolution that resulted in the power seizure by a theocratic regime
under the iron fist of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini came as a rude shock to the Israelis
because of the contrast between the mullahs’ new anti-Israel hardline and what came
before. Under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Iran became the second Mideast nation
after Turkey to extend Israel implicit recognition in 1950. Between the 1950s and 1970s,
not an Israeli-Iranian formal alliance, but a de facto partnership developed. The Iranian
Jewish community was left in peace to prosper for the most part (in contrast to being held
as virtual hostages subsequently under the Ayatollah). Israel trained four hundred Iranian
pilots, paratroopers and artillery men, and sold Iran high-tech military equipment. Claims
that the Mossad also trained the Iranian Savak in torture and investigative techniques are
based on anonymous, unsubstantiated allegations. 4
David Ben Gurion’s “peripheral strategy” to outflank Israel’s Arab enemies with Turkish
and Persian allies—Iran being “the jewel in the crown of the alliance of the periphery”—
did not go altogether smoothly. Even before 1979, Israel and Iran always did not see
eye-to-eye. The Shah sought to play both sides during the 1973 War, supplying Israel
with oil and weapons, but also selling oil to Egypt and acting as conduit for Soviet arms
to Iraq. Ostensibly acting as an “honest broker” during the postwar Egyptian-Israeli
negotiations, the Shah in fact insisted that Israel return all occupied territory, and voted
for UN resolutions for a “nuclear free” Mideast and branding “Zionism as racism.” In a
fateful move that compromised Iran’s position during its future war with Iraq, the Shah
also signed the 1975 Algiers Agreement with Saddam Hussein ending Iranian support
for Iraq’s Kurdish insurgents. Even so, as late as 1977, Iran and Israel cooperated on the
missile development “Project Flower.” 5
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FROM THE SHAH TO THE AYATOLLAH:
ROOTS OF IRAN’S ANTI-ISRAEL PSYCHOSIS
All this problematic history paled in comparison with the dramatic reversal of Iranian
policy toward Israel beginning in 1979. When Yasser Arafat with a large party appeared on
February 11, the day that the Islamic Republic was declared, they were given control of
the Israeli trade mission, designated “the Embassy of Palestine” on “Palestine Avenue.”
Arafat set up PLO offices were established in Ahvaz in Khuzestan, and the Ayatollah called
for Israeli to be expelled from the UN and driven into the sea by an Islamic Army. The last
Friday in Ramadan was also declared Quds or Jerusalem Day by Ayatollah Khomeini.
Rooted in Shiah Islam’s traditional disparagement of Jews as ritually impure, Khomeini’s
obsession with Israel as a “cancerous growth in the Middle East” was first expressed as
early as 1963; it was reaffirmed in 1970 “Programme for the Establishment of an Islamic
Government” accusing “cunning and resourceful” Jews—”may God curse them”— of
conspiring to undermine “the very foundations of Islam”; and it was memorialized in his
1979 official declaration that Israel is “the enemy of humanity throughout the world.”6
Despite the mullahs’ ongoing suspicions of the PLO—too secular for their tastes and
accused of plotting to manipulate Iran’s Arab minority—their new policy of hostility tothe-death toward Israel was in place in 1979, only to grow more extreme with time. Only
the imperatives of regime survival partly muted this hostility for half a decade when
back-channel contacts between Israel and Iran continued during Iran’s war with Iraq until
the Iran Contra Affair of 1985-1986 because when the Iranians were in desperate need of
military resupply (particularly, for Hawk ground-to-air missiles). 7
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IRAN’S GLOBAL TERROR NETWORK
The 1980s and 1990s witnessed the creation by Iran—”the most active sponsor of terrorism”
in a 2008 U.S. State Department assessment—of a globe-spanning terror network: first
primarily to outflank Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, but then after the Iran-Iraq War ended and
Saddam was cut down to size with Israel, the Jewish Diaspora, and ultimately the U.S.
as prime targets. The network has continued to evolve and expand in the twenty-first
century, waging according to the latest U.S. State Department Report a terror campaign
“at the highest levels in more than a decade” on five continents and in countries ranging
from Thailand, India, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Cyprus, and Bulgaria where a bus-bombing
killed eight and wounded 37 in July, 2012. 8
Even when bogged down in a war for survival with Iraq decades earlier, Iran had created an
Islamic Revolutionary Council to export its apocalyptic brand of Shia Islam to its immediate
neighbors, Iraq and Afghanistan (both targets of Iranian terrorist outreach), to the Gulf
states, to the Mediterranean, and beyond. Like Leninists earlier, Iran’s mullah assumed
that their revolution must expand—or die. The same impulse thrives today, reflected in
reports of high-level meetings between Iranian spy agencies and the intelligence head
of post-Mubarak Egypt whose President Mohamed Morsi recently visited Tehran and its
Bushehr nuclear plant. 9
GLOBAL REACH OF LEBANON’S “PARTY OF GOD”
Initial attempts to ignite Shia uprisings in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and southern Iraq
failed, but the Ayatollah immediately switched focus to Lebanon. There, he could rely on
Iran’s anti-Iraq partnership with Syria where Hafez al-Assad’s dictatorship, based on the
minority Alawite sect, shared Saddam’s secular Baathist ideology but feared and loathed
him for his ruthless ambition and Sunni faith. 10
Iran’s vehicle in Lebanon was Hezbollah—”the Party of God.” Modeled on a Khomeini
political-military auxiliary of the same name, Hezbollah chose as a symbol a globe with
an upraised arm brandishing an AK-47. Even before Khomeini came to power in 1979,
a budding alliance between Iranian and Lebanese Shia led the Ayatollah, then in exile,
to have his two sons find haven in Lebanon. A key figure in Hezbollah’s rise to terrorist
prominence was Hezbollah’s first operational military leader, Hussain Mussawi, a chemist
turned terrorist educated in Iran under the tutelage of Khomeini’s Defense Minister.
Mussawi’s transnational, pan-Islamic credo—”We are her [Iran’s] children. . . . The Islamic
revolution will march to liberate Palestine and Jerusalem, and the Islamic state will then
spread its authority over the region of which Lebanon is only a part”—led him to form a
strongly pro-Iranian faction of the Syrian-backed Amal Militia that evolved into Hezbollah
in 1982-1983. 11
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GLOBAL REACH OF LEBANON’S “PARTY OF GOD”
Contrary to the usual view that Hezbollah was “a Frankenstein monster” emerging among
southern Lebanese Shias in spontaneous reaction to Israel’s June, 1982, attempt to root
out the PLO’s state-within-state in southern Lebanon, Hezbollah’s founding leaders like
Mussawi were already establishing training bases in Baalbek in eastern Lebanon’s Bekaa
Valley where as many as 1,000 Iran Revolutionary Guards (Pasdaran) became active with
Syrian authorization by July, 1982. Regarding car bombings, it should also be noted that
the November, 1982, attack against the Israeli military headquarters in Tyre was preceded
by a 1981 attack on Iraq’s Beirut Embassy showing that Lebanese terrorists put the priority
on striking out against Iran’s enemy: Saddam Hussein. 12
Mussawi was a leader in the kidnapping of Americans and other foreigners that became
the Lebanon Hostage Crisis, a few years after the occupation of the U.S. Embassy in Iran.
So too was Imad Fayez Mughniyah, aka Abu Dokhan (“the father of smoke”). He was
involved in the 1980s in the kidnapping of William Francis Buckley, CIA Beirut station chief
who was beaten to death. Growing out of crossborder attacks during the 1990s were the
kidnappings of Israelis in 2000 and in 2006, planned by Mugniyah, that precipitated the
Second Lebanon War. A mastermind of car bombings including suicide bombings inspired
by Iran’s cult of “sublime martyrdom,” Mugniyah was dubbed by Israeli intelligence “a
triple Hezbollah-Iran-Al Qaeda and terrorist executive.” A Lebanese who joined Yasser
Arafat’s student bodyguard, he then studied engineering as the American University in
Beirut before gravitating toward Iran’s rising star in Lebanon despite the fact his early
secular politics. 13
Credited with the deaths of more Americans than any other terrorist before the 9/11 attacks,
Mughniyah helped plan 1983’s Beirut Marine Barracks and U.S. Embassy bombings, killing
over 350 people. The FBI put a $5 million bounty on his head for the deadly 1985 airline
hijacking of TWA Airliner 847. He set up Hezbollah Unit 1800 which worked with Irans alQuds Force—Iran funds Hezbollah with $200 million a year—in global terror operations.
He met with Osama bin Laden in Khartoum around 1990. He was indicted in Argentina
for his role in the bombing of Israel’s Buenos Aires Embassy in March 17, 1992, with 29
fatalities. That crime was followed by the bombing of the AMIA cultural building in in
Buenos Aires in July, 1994, leaving 86 people dead. Mughniyah may have been involved
in the deadly Khobar Towers Bombing in Saudi Arabia in 1996. He was a point man in the
Karine A ship incident in 2002, in which Iran attempted to supply the Palestinian Authority
with fifty tons of weapons. He was finally killed in a car bomb blast in Damascus in 2008.
The Israelis were blamed but disclaimed responsibility. His legacy lived on in the foiled
Iranian-Hezbollah plot in April, 2009, to attack Egyptian tourist spots. 14
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GLOBAL REACH OF LEBANON’S “PARTY OF GOD”
Mughniyah’s career personified Hezbollah’s global reach. This stretches from Syria and
Iran to Palestine—where Hamas terrorists deported by Israel to Lebanon in the 1990s
trained in Hezbollah camps—and to Africa where Sudan’s Hassan al-Turabi was a patron of
Hezbollah and Hamas as well as Al Qaeda and Hezbollah. Hezbollah raises funds from the
West African “blood diamonds” trade. In Europe, Hezbollah’s followers ritually celebrate
Al-Quds (Liberation of Jerusalem) Day in London and particularly Germany where its
terrorist cells are entrenched. Hezbollah’s influence also extends to Latin America where
the lawless Tri-Border region of Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil serves as resourceand-recruitment center, Then there is their U.S. presence—including a North CarolinaMichigan crime circuit specializing in immigration and credit card fraud, counterfeiting,
and cigarette smuggling with proceeds divided between remittances to Lebanon and
American terrorist training, and allegations of drug running and human trafficking
across the Mexican border. Globally, Hezbollah was responsible for nine anti-Israel or
anti-Jewish terrorist plots from January to September, 2012. Finally, there is Hezbollah’s
projection of genocidal ideology into cyberspace through its satellite television station,
Al-Manar (“The Beacon”), which has been designated a “Specially Designated Global
Terrorist entity” by the U.S. Treasury Department, and reaches Western Europe, Canada,
and Australia with programming demonizing “Talmudic Jews” and popularizing The
Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In 2002, in response to Israel’s Operation Defensive Shield
in the Palestinian territories, Hezbollah fired 600 missiles and rockets and 300 anti-tank
missiles into Israel—a prelude to the 4,000 missiles it fired into Northern Israel during the
2006 Lebanon War. 15
Given Hezbollah’s impact before the 2006 Lebanon War and even more since—current
estimates of its arsenal include 40,000 rockets and missiles such as the medium range
Zelzal (Earthquake) 1 and 2, Fahr (Dawn), Fateh 110 with a range up to 155 miles, and the
hi-tech Chinese-made C-807 ship killer—it is easy to understand why Former U.S. Deputy
of State Richard Armitage called it global terrorism’s “A team” compared to Al Qaeda’s “B
team.” In November, 2009, Israeli naval commandos boarded the MV Francorps, a cargo
ship carrying thousands of tons of weaponry from Iran to Hezbollah. Politically even more
than militarily, Hezbollah’s power waxed following the 2005 Cedar Revolution, forcing
Syria to withdraw troops from Lebanon. Its genocidal intent toward Jews as well as Israel
remains unmistakable in current secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah’s declaration: “If we
searched the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in
psyche, mind ideology, and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew. Notice I do
not say the Israeli.” 16
IRAN targets ISRAEL THE FATEFUL CONFRONTATION 15
IRAN’S PALESTINIAN PROXIES
Revolutionary Iran has masterfully deployed surrogates or proxies to extend its influence.
State actors include Syria, Sudan, Venezuela (Iran’s “advance outpost” in the Americas),
and North Korea. Nonstate actors include the Dawa Party and Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi
Army in Iraq, Azeris among Afghani Taliban elements (though not the movement as
a whole), and of course Hezbollah (Iran’s “forward base” against Israel). Individual Al
Qaeda figures have received haven in Iran, but there has never been a formal alliance. On
the other hand, the Iranian and Syrian regimes have been joined at the hip, with Tehran
sending 150 senior Revolutionary Guard commanders to prop up the faltering Assad
regime and promising to step up terrorist attacks worldwide in support of embattled
Damascus. Yet increasingly important have been Palestinians—first Palestinian Islamic
Jihad (PIJ), then Hamas, and (to a lesser degree) Fatah. 17
Iran’s courting of Palestinian factions began with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad which,
despite its secularism, was inspired by Khomeini’s Revolution. The smallest and most
violent Palestinian terrorist organization, the PIJ continued to look to Tehran for money
and training after its expulsion in the late 1980s from Gaza, moving first to Lebanon and
then establishing headquarters in Damascus.18
Slower to blossom was Iran’s relationship with theologically Sunni Hamas, which opened
an office in Tehran in 1991. A turning point was Israel’s mistake in 1988-1992 by deporting,
after the murder of an Israeli policeman, Hamas activists to Lebanon, where they were
trained in bomb making at a special camp run by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. In
1993, 415 Palestinian militants mostly belonging to Hamas returned from Lebanon to
Gaza where they built new bridges with Iran in a common “rejectionist” front against
the Oslo Peace Accords. In 1995-1996, Iran gave Hamas $25-$30 million to finance its
bus-bombing campaign. In 1997, Hamas “spiritual leader” Sheikh Ammad Yassin visited
Tehran—a precedent for the subsequent frequent visits by Damascus-based Hamas
political point man Khaled Mashall.19
Iranian financial and military support of Hamas experienced a quantum leap forward
after Hamas won the January, 2006, Gaza elections and then staged a coup against Fatah
in June, 2007. “Hamastan has been formed, a proxy for Iran in the image of the Taliban,”
said Benjamin Netanyahu, then Israeli opposition leader. Disputed Palestinian Authority
Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, a Hamas member whose authority is limited to Gaza,
declared on a visit to Tehran that Iran is “the strategic depth of the Palestinians,” and
announced a $240 million grant by Iran. 20
Ahead of Operation Cast Lead—launched by Israel in December, 2008, to preempt Hamas’
growing missile threat—Iran supplied Hamas with 122m Katyushas like those used by
Hezbollah, IEDs of the same kind deployed against American forces in Iraq, and some
longer-range rockets capable of hitting Ashkelon, south of Tel Aviv. By 2012, Hamas was
believed to have rocket production lines and storage centers in the Sinai. 21
IRAN targets ISRAEL THE FATEFUL CONFRONTATION 16
IRAN’S PALESTINIAN PROXIES
Reciprocating Iran’s support, Hamas has reached out theologically to the Islamic Republic
by distributing to its activists a 2010 booklet arguing (as summarized by Ehud Yaari) “that
the Muslim Brotherhood—with Hamas as its Palestinian branch—is a natural partner of
Iran, with which it shares a common set of values and a joint vision of the revival of the
caliphate, despite the [historical] divide” between Sunni and Shia Islam. The author, Dr.
Ahmed Yousef, is director-general Hamas’ Foreign Ministry in Gaza with prior experience
as part of Mohammed Abu Marzook’s circle in the U.S. where, based in Virginia, he headed
“a think tank.” Hamas PM Ismail Haniyeh attended the recent –Non-Aligned Movement
summit in Tehran.22
Finally, Iran—despite strained relations with Yasser Arafat going back to his meeting with
Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979—reached out to Fatah, especially after the Second Intifadah
was declared in 2000. Tehran hosted a “Support for the Palestinian Intifadah” Conference
in 2001, attended by Fatah representatives. In 2002, a new stage in support was reached
when Iran chose direct rather than indirect aid through Hezbollah by loading 50 tons
of armaments on the Palestinian-chartered ship, Karine A, which Israeli commandos
intercepted in the Red Sea.) In 2010, Iran attempted the same thing through a more
circuitous route when Nigerian authorities intercepted 13 tons of Iranian weapons, headed
for Gambia, to be trucked through Chad and Sudan, and ultimately through Egypt to
Gaza. In February, 2012, Iran sent a destroyer through post-Mubarak Egypt’s Suez Canal. 23
EMERGING TRIANGLE: NORTH KOREA-IRAN-VENEZUELA
Until 2000, Iran relied mostly on Hezbollah—responsible for the 1992 and 1994 terror
attacks on Jewish targets in Argentina—to exert its will in the so-called nonaligned world.
This has changed with Tehran forging formal alliances to further its anti-Israel, antiAmerican agenda. This ranges from the establishment of warm diplomatic and economic
relations with countries ranging from Sudan and Mugabe’s Zimbabwe in Africa to a
budding friendship with Brazil, its largest, $1.8 billion per year trading partner in Latin
America. 24
More sinister is what might be called a new “axis of evil”—the phrase President George W.
Bush used in 2003 to describe Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. The difference is that Saddam
Hussein’s Iraq was no friend of Tehran whereas the new axis member—Hugo Chavez’s
Venezuela—is its closest friend after Syria where the Iranian Revolutionary Guards are
currently propping up Bashir al-Assad’s failing regime.
IRAN targets ISRAEL THE FATEFUL CONFRONTATION 17
EMERGING TRIANGLE: NORTH KOREA-IRAN-VENEZUELA
Iranian President Khatami paid an unprecedented visit to Caracas in 2000. This was
followed by 14 exchanges between the two heads of state during the next seven years.
In 2006, President Chavez said Venezuela “will be next to Iran at all times and under any
circumstances,” and that “together, we will defeat the Empire. Any U.S. attack on Iran
will find an immediate response from Venezuela.” By 2007, 181 trade agreements had
increased bilateral Venezuela-Iran trade from virtually nothing to $20 billion dollars in such
items as steel and oil, automobiles, and ammunition. That year, Chavez and Ahmadinejad
established a $2 billion Iranian-Venezuelan Development Bank to influence Third World
countries. 25
Chavez has long been associated with extreme leftist Venezuelan anti-Semites such
as William Izarra, Diego Salazar, Juan Salazar, and Kleber Ramirez as well as extreme
rightist anti-Semites from Argentina such as Norberto Ceresole, Aldo Rico, and Mohamed
Seineldin. In 2003, his government-controlled media incessantly equated “Hitler and
Sharon” while blaming Israel for the Iraq War. In 2004, while Chavez was in a state visit to
Iran, his police mounted a 6:30 A.M. raid on the Caracas’ Club Hebraica with a Jewish day
school attended by 1500 children. The children of the Caracas Jewish community were,
literally, held hostage while Chavez’s uniformed thugs ostensibly looked for contraband
arms smuggled in from Israel. At Christmas, 2006, Chavez blamed “the descendants of
the same ones who crucified Christ” for all South America’s ills. 26
Voting against sanctions against Iran for its nuclear program, Chavez has brought in
Iranian Revolutionary Guard technicians—who fly between Tehran and Caracas on topsecret flights with a stopover in Damascus—to develop his nuclear industry including
the capacity to export raw uranium to Iran. Chavez has offered to supply F-16 fighters to
Tehran which may be deploying its Shahab 3 and Scud missiles as well as naval assets
in Venezuela. The two rogue regimes may be currently collaborating to build a predator
drone modeled on the U.S. pilotless aircraft that crashed in southern Iran. According
to an Israeli cabinet minister, “This is the Cuban Missile Crisis all over again. The only
difference is that the United States does not appear to be doing anything about it.” 27
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s secret police train their Iranian counterparts.
Most ominous are reports Tehran and Caracas collaborate in operations designed to
bring down Colombia’s democratic government as well as to sow the seeds of terror
elsewhere in the Americas. In October, 2011, the FBI announced a successful sting
operation against U.S. citizen Mansour Arbabsiar who attempted to hire the Mexican
drug cartel to assassinate Saudi Ambassador to the U.S. Abdel al-Jubeir. Also indicted
but not apprehended was Gholam Shakuri, described as a senior official in Iran’s terrorist
al-Quds Force. 28
IRAN targets ISRAEL THE FATEFUL CONFRONTATION 18
EMERGING TRIANGLE: NORTH KOREA-IRAN-VENEZUELA
North Korea predates Venezuela as a friend of the mullahs. Iran’s medium and longer range
missiles are adaptations of North Korean models, and Pyongyang has not only provided
Tehran with nuclear development advice since the 1990s. In 2006, Iranian scientists
attended North Korea’s “breakout” atomic weapons test—a model for what they have
in mind, according to an Iranian newspaper. Simultaneously, North Korean technicians,
apparently paid for by Tehran, were behind the covert development of Syria’s al-Kibar
reactor which was taken out by Israel’s “Project Orchard” military strike in September,
2007. Then in April, 2008, a video surfaced showing North Korean technicians at a secret
site Syrian nuclear site. Tehran may be able to flight test its own ICBM, capable of hitting
the U.S., by 2015. 29
TEHRAN’S PRE-GENOCIDAL IDEOLOGY AS STATECRAFT
Ayatollah Khomeini moved from the holy city of Qom to Tehran during World War II when
the streets of the Iranian capitol buzzed with rumors that “the Twelfth Imam has been
sent into the world by God in the form of Adolf Hitler”—or Haider (meaning “lion,” a
honorific title for the coming Mahdi). Blaming his arrest by the Shah’s regime in 1963
on “Zionist agents,” Khomeini came to power in 1979 with a full-blown anti-Israel, antiJewish ideology with both traditional religious and modern political roots. 30
Khomeini was succeeded as “Supreme Spiritual Leader” by Ali Khamanei who, over the
course of twenty years of pronouncements, declared Zionism a “rotten and dangerous
tumor” in need of being destroyed “root and branch,” Israelis “wild beasts” guilty of
“bloodthirstiness, barbarism, and indifference towards all rules of ethics,” and the
Nazi crimes a Jewish “exaggeration.” The Khomeini-Khamanei ideology was shared
by “hardliners” and ostensible “reformers” like President Hashemi Rafsanjani who
announced onTehran Radio in 1998 that he was convinced by European Holocaust Deniers
that “Hitler had only killed 20,000 Jews and not six million.” 31
Daily life in Iran for the Jewish community—which decline from over 100,000 to under
30,000—was lived under the ominous cloud of period “show trials” and executions of
“Zionist spies,” warning of the danger of poisoning by imported Israeli foodstuffs, a
television series dramatizing Palestinian children with eyes surgically removed and stolen
by Israelis, the Tehran Times characterizing the Holocaust as “one of the greatest frauds
of the twentieth century,” and regulations allowing the study of Hebrew but banning the
distribution of Hebrew books—in an act reminiscent of Pharaoh telling the Hebrews to
make bricks without straw! 32
IRAN targets ISRAEL THE FATEFUL CONFRONTATION 19
TEHRAN’S PRE-GENOCIDAL IDEOLOGY AS STATECRAFT
Worse yet came after the 2005 election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a non-pragmatic
“Principlist” committed to an apocalyptic ideology promising to use nuclear development
to hasten the second coming of the Twelfth Imam or Mahdi and to returning Iran to the
revolutionary purity of the 1980s when the Ayatollah sent a million teenagers to their
deaths in the war with Iraq equipped with little more than a plastic key guaranteeing their
admission to paradise. 33
Revolutionary Iran’s mutual love affair with western Holocaust Deniers dates back to the
1990s when Austrian engineer Wolfgang Fröhlich, Swiss Revisionist Jürgen Graf, Germanborn Canadian Ernst Zündel, France’s Roger Garaudy, and American racist David Duke
were lauded by the regime. In May, 2000, the Iranian embassy in Vienna granted refuge
to Austrian Holocaust denier Fröhlich who had testified as a defense “expert witness”
on Zyklon B and the gas chambers at Graf’s trial in Switzerland. In 2002—after soon-tobe-assassinated Lebanese President Rafiq Hariri banned from Beirut a Holocaust Denial
Conference that billed as speakers German Far Right leader Horst Mahler and National
Alliance head William L. Pierce, author of the infamous racist tract, The Turner Diaries,
which served as blueprint forTimothy McVeigh’s terrorist attack in Oklahoma City—Tehran
stepped into the void. 34
In 2006, Ahmadinejad’s regime hosted a December, 2006, “International Conference
to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust” featuring 30 speakers from 67 countries
including David Duke, convicted French Denier Robert Faurisson, Fredrick Töben,
Moroccan-born Swedish Denier Ahmed Rami, and Yisroel Dovid Weiss of anti-Israel
Neturei Karta. Keynoter President Ahmadinejad predicted that “the Zionist regime will
be wiped out soon the same way the Soviet Union was,” while presenters lectured on
“The Holocaust, the Achilles Heel of a Primordial Jewish Trojan” and showed a model of
Treblinka to prove that diesel exhaust gas chambers to be “an outright lie.” 35
In 2005, President Ahmadinejad invoked “our dear Imam Khomeini [who] said the
occupying [Zionist] regime must be wiped off the map” to justify this own vision of
the end of “the Holocaust myth,” and promised “a world with America and Zionism,”
while praying at the UN for the Mahdi’s end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it reappearance.
In 2006 on October’s Al-Quds Day, he promised and “the elimination of the Zionist
stain of shame”—but not without a “wave of destruction [that] will not be limited to
our region.” In 2007, he called Zionists “true manifestations of Satan” and prophesied
that “the countdown button for the destruction of the Zionist regime has been pressed.”
On September 23, 2008, before the UN General Assembly in New York, he updated The
Protocols of the Elders of Zion to fit the current global financial crisis b explaining that
Jews have been “dominating an important portion of the financial and monetary center
continued on next page
IRAN targets ISRAEL THE FATEFUL CONFRONTATION 20
TEHRAN’S PRE-GENOCIDAL IDEOLOGY AS STATECRAFT
as well as the political decision-making centers of some European countries and the United
States in a deceitful, complex, and furtive manner.” In 2009, he called the Holocaust “a
lie based on an unprovable and mythical claim.” In 2012, he said: “It has now been some
400 years that a horrendous Zionist clan has been ruling the major world affairs. And
behind the scenes of the major power circles, in political, media, monetary, and banking
organizations in the world, they have been the decision-makers, to an extent that a big
power with a huge economy and over 300 million population, the presidential election
hopefuls must go kiss the feet of the Zionists to ensure their victory in the elections.” 36
Going hand-in-hand with Holocaust Denial, Tehran is also obsessed with the claim that
“the Zionist regime . . . spreads homosexuality,” making Tel Aviv the gayest place on
earth! 37
Preaching and practicing a unique, potentially genocidal brand of Holocaust Denial and
Jew Hatred as statecraft extreme for even the Middle East, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has
become the embodiment and apotheosis of Revolutionary Iran’s soon-to-be-nuclear
apocalyptic vision. As Elie Wiesel put it, he believes: “That there was no Holocaust, but
there will be.” Top Iranian military brass such as Major General Hassan Firouzabadi,
Chief of Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces, and Revolutionary Guards General Amir Ali
Hajizadeh, Head of Aerospace Division in Charge of Missile Systems boast of their work
to operationalize Ahmadinejad’s genocidal threats. 38
IRAN’S NUCLEAR DIPLOMACY
Started under the Shah as an ostensibly peaceful program, Iran’s nuclear industry
temporarily came to a halt under the Ayatollah, under the combined impact of the
withdrawal of German technical assistance and the impact of the Iraq war. Revived
around 1984, the program made real strides in the 1990s with the secret importation from
China of a metric ton of UF6 fuel and Russia’s decision to rebuilding a damaged reactor
at Bushehr.
continued on next page
IRAN targets ISRAEL THE FATEFUL CONFRONTATION 21
IRAN’S NUCLEAR DIPLOMACY
Beginning the covert construction of an enrichment facility at Natanz in 2001, Iranians
were embarrassed in 2002 when the exile National Council of Iran revealed Nuclear
Nonproliferation Treaty violations at both Natanz and Arak. Following a report by the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) disclosing 15 years or covert Iranian activity,
the EU-3 (the UK, France, and Germany) persuaded “reformist” President Khatami to
agree to a verifiable suspension of enrichment that ostensibly lasted three years. Iran’s
restraint, if authentic, was probably a pragmatic reaction to fears the U.S. might follow
up the ouster of Saddam with the pursuit of “regime change” in Tehran. These fears
diminished as America became bogged down in Iraq, and the bellicose Ahmadinejad
was elected president in 2005.
There followed six years of effective dissimulation by Ahmadinejad’s regime:
•
In 2005, Iran was found in “non-compliance” with non-proliferation safeguards.
•
In 2006, the IAEA Board voted to refer Iran to the UN Security Council, and Iran
resumed its gas centrifuge program.
•
In 2007, a highly dubious U.S. National Intelligence’s conclusion that Iran had
ceased nuclear weapons program was leaked to the press.
•
In 2009, the U.S. joined the EU3 in new negotiations with Tehran that, however,
went nowhere. The existence of an underground enrichment facility at Qom was revealed,
and there was no real progress on negotiations for Iran to send most of its enriched
uranium to Turkey or elsewhere.
• In 2010, in the context of an emerging international consensus that Tehran was
pursuing nuclear weapons capability (with the U.S. Britain’s MI6, and Israel agreeing
that Iran, after deciding to go ahead, could build a crude bomb within a year or two and
achieve a reliable delivery system soon after), the UN Security Council passed the fourth
round of mild sanctions.
• In 2012, the P5 + 1 (the five permanent UN Security Council members plus
Germany) opened new negotiations with Tehran that rotated between Istanbul, Baghdad,
and Moscow, but so far have failed because Iran backed out of a new deal with IAEA
inspectors while the U.S. and the EU to impose new tougher sanctions. U.S. sanctions,
however, exempted countries such as China and Iran deemed to be showing “a willingness
to reduce” Iranian oil imports, while the U.S. Treasury Department has issued thousands
of companies exporting to Iran. The sanctions have hurt Iranian oil exports and the value
of the Iranian currency, but according to U.S. intelligence experts has had no effect on
Iran’s nuclear program. 39
IRAN targets ISRAEL THE FATEFUL CONFRONTATION 22
IRAN’S NUCLEAR DIPLOMACY
Who is to be believed? On the one hand, there is Supreme Leader Ali Khameini’s supposed
2003 fatwa banning nuclear weapons development as “a sin.” Khameini is also said to
have declared “the Islamic Republic of Iran, based on its fundamental religious and legal
beliefs, would never resort to the use of weapons of mass destruction. In contrast to the
propaganda of our enemies, fundamentally we are against any production of weapons
of mass destruction in any form.” Yet we now know, thanks to the Middle East Media
Research Institute (MEMRI), that no fatwa was ever issued. On the other hand, there are
Khameini’s second thoughts in 2011: “This gentleman [Muammar Qaddafi] wrapped up
all his nuclear facilities, packed them on a ship and delivered them to the West and said,
‘Take them!’ Look where we are, and in what position they are now.” 40
For forty years, Israel has honored its “no first use” policy, not only in theory, but in
practice. In 1973, when its very survival was threatened by the combined Egyptian-Syrian
surprise Yom Kippur attack, Israel stayed conventional though the aggression could have
been easily repulsed by tactical nuclear weapons. Israel has never signed the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty, but it attended a 2008 conference dedicated to removing the
threat of nuclear war from the Mideast. Israeli President Peres pledged to former Egyptian
President Hosni Mubarak that Israel would be willing to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation
Treaty within two years after the establishment of “regional peace.” Of course, now with
the Arab Spring replaced Mubarak with a Muslim Brotherhood-dominated government
that may ultimately align itself with revolutionary Iran, the prospects for such a peace are
further away than ever. 41
With Israel publicly committed to using force if other means fail to halt Iran’s nuclear
weapons program, the clock is ticking while 10,000 centrifuges spin at Natanz.The director
of national intelligence testified to Congress at the beginning of the year that they had
zero effect in slowing the nuclear program.
According to an August 2012 report from the International Atomic Energy Agency, whose
member-nation board as censured the Tehran regime, Iran has doubled the number of
high-speed centrifuges at Fordow, the impregnable facility built into a mountain outside
Qom. The IAEA reported Iranian advances in calculating the explosive power of an atomic
warhead. It noted once again Iran’s refusal to allow inspection of its weapons-testing
facility at Parchin, and cited satellite evidence of Iranian attempts to clean up and hide
what’s gone on there. Despite an unprecedented concession by the western powers to
acquiesce in Iran’s enrichment of uranium, the Istanbul-Baghdad-Moscow diplomatic
negotiations have collapsed. Rather than isolate Iran, the international community then
rewarded it with the appearance of 120 nations, plus UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon,
at the Tehran meeting of the international Non-Aligned Movement. 42
IRAN targets ISRAEL THE FATEFUL CONFRONTATION 23
IRAN’S NUCLEAR DIPLOMACY
If nothing is done to stop Iran now, then the world may have to learn to live with the
threat from former President Rafsanjani—dubbed Iran’s “atomic Ayatollah”—in 2001: “If
a day comes when the world of Islam is duly equipped with the arms Israel has in its
possession, the strategy of colonialism would face a stalemate because application of an
atomic bomb would not leave anything in Israel but the same thing would just produce
damages in the Muslim world.” 43
CONCLUSION
Iran is NOT Nazi Germany translated into Farsi and moved to the Middle East. Yet there
is inescapable common sense in Israeli President Shimon Peres’ measured observation:
“Having imperialistic ambitions and a nuclear bomb is a very dangerous combination
because a single bomb today is like a whole army in other times.” 44
Analogies with the Holocaust should not be used lightly, but as Yossie Klein Halevi and
current Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael B. Oren have noted, it’s inevitable that “the
Iranian threat has returned the Final Solution to the heart of Israeli discourse.” Historian
Benny Morris—no knee-jerk defender of Israel—writes:
The second holocaust will not be like the first. The Nazis, of course,
industrialized mass murder. But, still, the perpetrators had one-to-one
contact with the victims. . . . [In contrast], One bright morning, in five or 10
years, perhaps during a regional crisis, perhaps out of the blue, a day or five
years after Iran’s acquisition of the Bomb, the mullahs in Qom will convene
in secret session, under a portrait of the steely-eyed Ayatollah Khomeini,
and give President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, by then in his second or third
term, the go-ahead. 46
Those who dismiss this as paranoia should contemplate this juxtaposition in a picture
from a military parade: Shahab-3 missile with a 1,200 range bearing the inscription from
Ayatollah Khomeini: “Israel must be uprooted and wiped off the pages of history.” 47
Whatever one else can be said about Iran’s Islamist leadership, they have a deep (if
distorted) sense of history—together with a fanatical commitment to make sure Israel
has no future. Only the emergence of a new, enlightened Cyrus, friendly to the Jewish
people, could change this equation.
continued on next page
IRAN targets ISRAEL THE FATEFUL CONFRONTATION 24
CONCLUSION
In recent years, the western world should have been having a wide-ranging, no-holdsbarred debate about whether or not the moment of truth is near when Israel, the U.S.—
both or neither—should decide to take military action to prevent “wipe Israel from the
map” Iran from joining the nuclear club and igniting “a sacred fire” transforming the
Mideast. Unfortunately, what we too often have had instead is a tunnel-vision, videogame
simulation in which complicated real world issues are being discussed along preprogrammed channels determined by ideological predispositions and ugly prejudices.
Canada is exceptional for its willingness to put words into practice by closing its embassy
in Tehran and expelling remaining diplomats. 48
Of course, there are not only two sides to all these regional and global existential
issues, but three and four and more sides. If Iran goes nuclear, will it openly exult in its
WMDs or instead continue to try to hide its capabilities? Will the mullah’s apocalyptic,
Götterdämmerung mentality lead them to preemptively strike Israel, as the widow of
assassinated Iranian nuclear scientist, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, and a Revolutionary
Guard General have both recently hinted? Or will they delegate mega-destruction,
subcontracting annihilation of Israel to third party terrorist movements while Tehran
maintains (im)plausible deniability? And what will be the response of the Sunni Arab
Gulf regimes? There are already rumors that Saudi Arabia have arranged to buy, Sears
Roebuck-fashion, ready-to-assemble nukes that will give them chips with which to play
in an escalating regional nuclear arms race that post-Mubarak Egypt as well as multiple
Gulf States will enter. And should it come to an Israeli-Iranian nuclear war, what will be
the fallout— economic and political as well as military—affecting the United States and
the entire global community? 49
All positions are open to debate except one: what Ron Rosenbaum called
“inconsequentialism” or the view that—though the Holocaust really happened in
Europe—the danger that it might happen again in the Middle East is of no consequence.
Those who sit idly by are spectators unfazed by what Harvard Professor Graham Allison
calls “a Cuban Missile Crisis in slow motion.” 50
Israel and its American friends of all faiths have no secret agenda. They openly state their
commitment to maintaining the U.S.-Israeli strategic alliance behind a shared strategy
of deterring Iran from becoming a nuclear power—by diplomatic means, if possible, but
military means—if necessary. “I do not have a policy of containment; I have a policy to
prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.” The joint U.S.-Israel challenge is to move
beyond words to deeds to free the world from this terrible threat. 51
IRAN targets ISRAEL THE FATEFUL CONFRONTATION 25
NOTES
Many of these quotations herein are given specific attribution in the discussion that
follows. Primary though not exclusive reliance for sources and translations has been
placed on Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) Reports as well as Joshua
Teitelbaum, “What Iranian Leaders Really Say About Doing Away With Israel: A Refutation
Of The Campaign To Excuse Ahmadinejad’s Incitement To Genocide,” (Jerusalem Center
for Public Affairs, 2008), pp. 1-22 <http://jcpa.org/text/ahmadinejad2-words.pdf>; Elihu
D. Richter and Alex Barnea, Tehran’s Genocidal Incitement Against Israel,” Middle East
Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Summer, 2009), pp. 45-51, <http://www.meforum.org/2167/irangenocidal-incitement-israel>; Anti-Defamation League, “Iran’s President Ahmadinejad
in His Own Words,” May 11, 2012, <http://www.adl.org/main_International_Affairs/
ahmadinejad_words.htm?Multi_page_sections=sHeading_5>. I use “wiped from the
map” and “erased from the page of time” or “pages of history” interchangeably. They
are all defensible renderings that convey Ahmadinejad’s meaning.
2
Kenneth N. Waltz, “Why Iran Should Get the Bomb: Nuclear Balancing Would
Mean Stability,” Foreign Affairs, July-August, 2012, <http://www.foreignaffairs.com/
articles/137731/kenneth-n-waltz/why-iran-should-get-the-bomb>.
3
James Traub, “Zone of Insanity,” Foreign Affairs, August 17, 2012, <http://www.
foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/08/17/zone_of_insanity?page=full>; Lee Smith, The
Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations (New York: Anchor
Books, 2011), pp. 130-31, 194; “‘Cut off Head of Snake’, Saudis Told U.S. on Iran,” Reuters,
November 29, 2010, <http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/11/29/us-wikileaks-iran-saudisidUSTRE6AS02B20101129>.
4
Michael Axworthy, Empire of the Mind: A History of Iran (New York: Perseus Books
Group, 2008), pp. 251-52, 279-80; Laurence D. Loeb. Outcaste: Jewish Life in Southern
Iran (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1977); Trita Parsi’s Treacherous Alliance: The Secret
Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the U.S. (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 2007) has to
be used with care because of its reliance on anonymous sources.
5
Dalia Dassa Kaye, Alireza Nader, and Parisa Roshan, Israel and Iran: A Dangerous Rivalry
(Santa Monica, CA: National Defense Institute, RAND, 2011), p. 10; R. K. Ramazani, “Iran
and the Arab-Israeli Conflict,” Mideast Journal, Vol. 3 (1978), p. 418; Asadollah Alam, The
Shah and I (NewYork: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), pp. 179-80; Henry Parducci, Iran, Israel, and
the United States (New York: Griffon House, 1991), p. 10; Jalil Roshandel, Iran, Israel, and
the United States: Regime Security vs. Political Legitimacy (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger,
2011), p. 39; Joseph S. Bermudez, Jr., “Iran’s Missile Development,” William C. Potter and
Harlan W. Jencks, eds., The International Missile Bazaar: the New Supplier’s Network (San
Francisco: Westview Press, 1994), p. 48.
1
IRAN targets ISRAEL THE FATEFUL CONFRONTATION 26
NOTES
Axworthy, Empire of the Mind, p. 242; Walter J. Fischel, “The Jews of Persia, 1795-1940,”
Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 12, No. 2 (April, 1950), pp. 119-60; Ayatollah Khomeini, Islam
and Revolution: Writings and Declarations of Imam Khomeini, trans. and ed. Hamad
Algar (London: KPI, 1985), pp. 31, 49, 127 (1970 quote); Bat Ye’Or, Islam and Dhimmitude,
Miriam Kochan and David Littman, trans. (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University
Press, 2002), p. 199 (1979 quote); Robert S. Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism
from Antiquity to the Global Jihad (New York: Random House, 2010), pp. 834, 849.
7
Axworthy, Empire of the Mind, p. 269; Sohrab Sobhani, The Pragmatic Entente: IsraeliIranian Relations, 1948-1988 (New York: Praeger, 1988), p. 150; Samuel Segev, The Iranian
Triangle (New York: Free Press, 1988), p. 161.
8
Hilary Leila Krieger, “‘Iran’s Support For Terrorism Highest In Decade’,” Jerusalem Post,
August 1, 2012, <http://www.jpost.com/International/Article.aspx?id=279716>; “New York
Police Link Iran, Proxies To Nine 2012 Plots Against Jewish Targets,” Reuters in Haaretz,
July 20, 2012, <http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/new-york-police-linkiran-proxies-to-nine-2012- Hilary Leila Krieger, “‘Iran’s Support For Terrorism Highest In
Decade’,” Jerusalem Post, August 1, 2012, <http://www.jpost.com/International/Article.
aspx?id=279716>; “New York Police Link Iran, Proxies To Nine 2012 Plots Against Jewish
Targets,” Reuters in Haaretz, July 20, 2012, <http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacydefense/new-york-police-link-iran-proxies-to-nine-2012- Hilary Leila Krieger, “‘Iran’s
Support For Terrorism Highest In Decade’,” Jerusalem Post, August 1, 2012, <http://www.
jpost.com/International/Article.aspx?id=279716>; “New York Police Link Iran, Proxies To
Nine 2012 Plots Against Jewish Targets,” Reuters in Haaretz, July 20, 2012, <http://www.
haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/new-york-police-link-iran-proxies-to-nine-2012>.
9
Kaye, Nader, and Roshan, Israel and Iran, pp. 66-67; Ronen Bergman,The Secret War With
Iran (NewYork: Free Press, 2007), p. 186; Rafhang Rajaee, “Iranian Ideology and Worldview:
The Cultural Export of Revolution,” in John L. Esposito, ed., The Iranian Revolution: Its
Global Impact (Miami: Florida International University Press, 1990), pp. 70-74; plotsagainst-jewish-targets-1.452530>; “Pentagon: Terror Attack in Bulgaria Bears Hallmarks Of
Hezbollah,” Reuters in Haaretz, July 20, 2012, <http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacydefense/pentagon-terror-attack-in-bulgaria-bears-hallmarks-of-hezbollah-1.452536>; Bill
Gertz, “The Tehran-Cairo Express,” Washington Free Beacon, September 11, 2012, <http://
freebeacon.com/the-cairo-tehran-express/>; Iran Official: Egypt’s Morsi to Visit Bushehr
Nuclear Plant on Sidelines of Tehran Summit,” Haaretz, August 26, 2012, <http://www.
haaretz.com/news/middle-east/iran-official-egypt-s-morsi-to-visit-bushehr-nuclear-planton-sidelines-of-tehran-summit-1.460788>.
10
Ephraim Karsh, Islamic Imperialism: A History (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press,
2006), p. 217; Roshandel, Iran, Israel, and the United States, p. 68.
11
Center for Security Policy, Shariah: The Threat to America (October, 2002), p. 182; As’ad
AbuKhalil, “Ideology and Practice of Hizbollah in Lebanon,” Middle Eastern Studies, Vol.
27, No. 3 (July, 1991), pp. 391-403; Robin Wright, Sacred Rage (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 2001), p. 84.
6
IRAN targets ISRAEL THE FATEFUL CONFRONTATION 27
NOTES
Assaf Moghadam,The Globalization of Martyrdom (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2008), pp. 19-21;Jonathan Speyer, The Transforming Fire: The Rise of the IsraelIslamist Conflict (New York: Continuum, 2011), pp. 106-07; Smith, The Strong Horse, p.
170; Robert A. Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York:
Random House, 2005), pp. 253, 284.
13
Wright, Sacred Rage, pp. 270-74; Center for Security Policy, Shariah, pp. 185-86; Magnus
Ranstorp, Hizb’allah in Lebanon: The Politics of the Western Hostage Crisis (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1997), p. 31.
14
Jeffrey Goldberg, “A Reporter at Large: In the Party of God; Hezbollah Sets Up Operations
in South America and the United States,” New Yorker (October 28, 2002), <http://www.
newyorker.com/archive/2002/10/28/021028fa_fact2?currentPage=all>; Center for Security
Policy, Shariah, pp. 185-86. James Risen, “A Nation Challenged: A Suspect, U.S. Traces
Iran’s Ties to Terror Through a Lebanese,” New York Times, January 17, 2002; Yaakov Katz
and Yoaz Handel, Israel vs. Iran: the Shadow War (Washington, D. C.: Potomac Books,
2012), pp. 12, 87, 89, 155.
15
Goldberg, “A Reporter at Large: In the Party of God,” New Yorker (October 28, 2002),
<http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2002/10/28/021028fa_fact2?currentPage=all>; Center
for Security Policy, Shariah, pp. 185-90; Rachel Ehrenfeld, Funding Evil: How Terrorism Is
Financed and How to Stop It (Chicago: Bonus Books, 2003), p. 130; Steven Emerson,
American Jihad: The Terrorists Among Us (New York: Free Press, 2002), pp. 35-36; Daniel
Pipes, Militant Islam Reaches America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), pp. 192-99; Sara
Carter, “Hezbollah Uses Mexican Drug Routes in U.S.,” Washington Times, March 27,
2009, <http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/mar/27/hezbollah-uses-mexicandrug-routes-into-us/>. Avi Jorisch, Beacon of Hatred: Inside Hizballah’s Al-Manar
Television (Washington, D. C.: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2004), p. 26; Katz
and Handel, Israel vs. Iran, pp. 25, 46-47; Bergman, The Secret War With Iran, pp. 219-23;
Wistrich, Lethal Obsession, pp. 861-63, 869; Judith Miller, Bagels and Plots, City Journal,
September 7, 2012, <http://www.city-journal.org/2012/eon0907jm.html>.
16
Emile Hokayem, “Iran and Lebanon,” in Robin Wright, ed., The Iran Primer: Power,
Politics, and U.S. Policy (Washington, D. C.: Woodrow Wilson International Center for
Scholars, 2010), p. 179; Center for Security Policy, Shariah, p. 181 (quote); Kaye, Nader,
and Roshan, Israel and Iran, p. 68; Katz and Handel, Israel vs. Iran, pp. 32, 143, 150.
17
Michael Eisenstadt, “Iran and Iraq,” in Wright, ed., Iranian Primer, pp. 151-54; Mohsen
Milani, “Iran and Afghanistan,” in Wright, ed., Iranian Primer, pp. 155-59; Rachel
Brandenburg, “Iran and the Palestinians,” in Wright, ed., Iranian Primer, pp. 171-74; Jubin
Goodarzi, “Iran and Syria,” in Wright, ed., Iranian Primer, pp. pp. 175-78; Roshandel, Iran,
Israel, and the United States, pp. 29-30; Steven Heydemann, “Iran’s Alternative Allies,” in
Wright, ed., Iranian Primer, pp. 192-98; Katz and Handel, Israel vs. Iran, pp. 9, 88, 93, 197;
Wistrich, Lethal Obsession, p. 764 (Nasrallah quote); Con Coughlin, Iran Sends EliteTroops
to Aid Bashar Al-Assad Regime in Syria,” (London) Telegraph, <http://www.telegraph.
co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/9526858/Iran-sends-elite-troops-to-aid-Bashar-alAssad-regime-in-Syria.html>; Con Coughlin, “Iran’s Supreme Leader Orders Fresh Terror
Attacks on West,” (London) Telegraph, August 22, 2012, <Iran’s supreme leader orders
fresh terror attacks on West>.
12
IRAN targets ISRAEL THE FATEFUL CONFRONTATION 28
NOTES
Bergman, Secret War, pp. 215, 241; Brandenburg, “Iran and Palestine,” p. 172.
Shaul Mishal and Avraham Sela, The Palestinian Hamas (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2000), pp. 97, 111; Center for Security Policy, Shariah, p. 197; Bergman, Secret War,
pp. 248-49; Matthew Levitt, Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 46, 173.
20
Jonathan Schanzer, Hamas vs. Fatah (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 110-11;
Bergman, Secret War, p. 283; Kaye, Nader, and Roshan, Israel and Iran, p. 68; Beverly
Milton-Edwards and Stephen Farrell, Hamas (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2010), p. 9 (Netanyahu
quote).
21
Katz and Hendel, Israel vs. Iran, pp. 125-26, 139; Dana H. Allin and Steven Simon, The
Sixth Crisis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 88.
22
Ehud Yaari, “Sunni Hamas and Shiite Iran Form a Common Political Theology,” Policy
Watch, No. 1716 (November 9, 2010); “Fayyad: Iranian Invitation to Hamas ‘undermines
unity’,” Jerusalem Post, August 25, 2012, <http://www.jpost.com/MiddleEast/Article.
aspx?id=282538>.
23
Bergman, Secret War, p. 270; Brandenburg, “Iran and the Palestinians,” p. 172; Roshandel,
Iran, Israel, and the United States, pp. 54-55; “Iran Warships Enter Mediterranean via
Suez Canal,” BBC News Middle East, February 18, 2012 <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/
world-middle-east-17083791>.
24
Steven Heydemann, “Iran’s Alternative Allies,” Iranian Primer, pp. 193-96.
25
Katz and Hendel, Israel vs. Iran, pp. 195-99; Heydemann, “Iran’s Alternative Allies,” p.
194.
26
Travis Pantin, “Hugo Chávez’s Jewish Problem,” Commentary (July, 2008), <http://
www.commentarymagazine.com/article/hugo-chavezs-jewish-problem/>; Hal Weitzman,
“Under Chavez’s Rule, Jews Fear for Future in Venezuela,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency,
<http://www.cjp.org/page.aspx?id=143842>.
27
Katz and Hendel, Israel vs. Iran, p. 197.
28
Heydemann, “Iran’s Alternative Allies,” p. 194; Katz and Hendel, Israel and Iran, pp. 19899.
29
Bergman, Secret War, pp. 340-41, 350-63; Roshandel, Iran, Israel, and United States,
pp. 118-119; Katz and Hendel, Israel vs. Iran, pp. 61-83; Yonah Jeremy Bob, “Pentagon:
Iran Boosts Missiles’ Lethality,” Jerusalem Post, July 11, 2012, <http://www.jpost.com/
IranianThreat/
News/Article.aspx?id=277056>; “Iran, North Korea Sign Science and Technology
Agreement,” Haaretz, September 1, 2012, <http://www.haaretz.com/news/middle-east/
iran-north-korea-sign-science-and-technology-agreement-1.462065>.
30
Wistrich, Lethal Obsession, pp. 840-51.
31
Middle East Media Research Institute, “Khameini’s Response to Israel-Palestinian
Fighting,” MEMRI Special Dispatch Series, No. 363 (April 10, 2002); Israel Project,
“Supreme Leader Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Khamenei: In His Own Words,” <http://www.
theisraelproject.org/site/apps/nlnet/content2.aspx?c=ewJXKcOUJlIaG&b=7737551&ct=1
1150705#.T-0APpjm3Xg>; Wistrich, Lethal Obsession, pp. 861-62, 895, 912;
18
19
IRAN targets ISRAEL THE FATEFUL CONFRONTATION 29
NOTES
Brigitte Gabriel, Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006), p. 171; Shimon Shapira and Daniel Diker, “Iran’s Second
Islamic Revolution: Strategic Implications for the West,” in Diker, ed., Iran, Hizbullah,
Hamas and the Global Jihad (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 2007), pp.
33-54.Wistrich, Lethal Obsession, pp. 865-66, 910-11.
33
Alireza Jafarzadeh, The Iran Threat: President Ahmadinejad and the Coming Nuclear
Crisis (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Kaye, Nader, and Roshan, Israel and Iran, p.
73.
34
Wistrich, Lethal Obsession, pp. 910-11; Simon Wiesenthal Center, “Swiss Investigating
Holocaust Denier’s Role in Upcoming ‘Revisionist’ Gathering in Beirut,” press release,
February 12, 2001; Simon Wiesenthal Center, press release, “Wiesenthal Center Hails
Lebanon’s Decision to Bar Conference of Neo-Nazis and Holocaust Deniers,” March 22,
2001; Howard Schneider, “Jews, Arabs Join To Decry Holocaust Deniers, Beirut Bans
Holocaust Revision Session,” Washington Post, March 26, 2001, p. A 20, <http://www.
ihr.org/conference/beirutconf/010326washpost.html>; Daniel Pipes, The Hidden Hand:
Middle East Fears of Conspiracy (NewYork: St. Martin’s Press, 1996); Institute for Historical
Review (IHR), “Jürgen Graf Welcomed in Iran: Swiss Revisionist Forced into Exile for
‘Thought Crime’,” <http://www.ihr.org/conference/beirutconf/background.html>.
35
“Holocaust Denial Outrages Europe,” Washington Times, December 13, 2006, <http://
www.washingtontimes.com/news/2006/dec/13/20061213-120143-8384r/>; Nazila Fathi,
“Holocaust Deniers and Skeptics Gather in Iran,” New York Times, December 11, 2006,
<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/11/world/middleeast/11cnd-iran.html>;
“Holocaust
Deniers Rebuked,” Los Angeles Times, December 13, 2006, <http://articles.latimes.
com/2006/dec/13/world/fg-holocaust13>.
36
Wahied Wahdat-Hagh, “Iran: Islamist Holocaust Denial,” Coordination Forum for
Countering Antisemitism,Yearly Evaluation: 2011, <http://antisemitism.org.il/article/71621/
iran-islamist-holocaust-denial>;Wistrich, Lethal Obsession, pp. 883, 885, 891-92, 914-15,
926; Nazila Fathi, “‘Wipe Israel Off the Map, Iranian Says’,” New York Times, October 27,
2005, <http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/26/world/africa/26iht-iran.html?_r=1>; Matthias
Küntzel, Ahmadinejad’s Demons,” New Republic, April 24, 2006, p. 23; Middle East Media
Research Institute, “Iran and Recent Escalations on Israel’s Borders,” MEMRI Special
Dispatch Series, No. 1204 (July 13, 2006); Küntzel, “Defining Jew-Hatred Down: The
Curious Response to Ahmadinejad at the UN,” Weekly Standard (November 17, 2007),
<http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/788glfwm.asp>;
Anti-Defamation League, “Iran’s President Ahmadinejad in His Own Words,” May 11,
2012,
<http://www.adl.org/main_International_Affairs/ahmadinejad_words.htm?Multi_
page_sections=sHeading_5>; “Anger at Iranian Holocaust Denial,” BBC News, September
18, 2009, <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8264111.stm>; The alternative translation to “wipe
Israel from the map” is to “erase Israel from the pages of time.” See Axworthy, Empire
of the Mind, pp. 290, 321; Ethan Bronner, “Just How Far Did They Go, Those Words
Against Israel?,” New York Times, June 11, 2006, <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/11/
weekinreview/11bronner.html>; “Ahmadinejad: Qods Day to Liberate Palestine, Solve
Entire World Problems,” Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA), August 2, 2012, <http://
www.irna.ir/News/Politic/Ahmadinejad,-Qods-Day-to-liberate-Palestine,-solve-entireworld-problems/80257558>.
32
IRAN targets ISRAEL THE FATEFUL CONFRONTATION 30
NOTES
James Weinthal, “Iran: Zionists Spread Homosexuality to Control World,” Jerusalem
Post, September 5, 2012, <http://www.jpost.com/International/Article.aspx?id=283847>.
38
Elie Wiesel, “A Mobilization is Required,” quoted in Wistrich, Lethal Obsession, pp. 89697; Fars News Agency, “Top Commander Reiterates Iran’s Commitment to Full Annihilation
of Israel,” May 20, 2012, <http://english.farsnews.com/newstext.php?nn=9102112759>;
Joanna Paraszczuk, “Iran ‘Prepared” for EU Sanctions, Threatens Israel,” Reuters in
Jerusalem Post, <http://www.jpost.com/IranianThreat/News/Article.aspx?id=275928>.
39
Iranian dissimulation from 2005 through 2012: David Albright and Andrea Stricker,
“Iran’s Nuclear Program,” in Iranian Primer, p. 79; Shahram Chubin, “The Politics of
Iran’s Nuclear Program,” in Iranian Primer, p. 84; Michael Elleman, “Iran’s Ballistic Missile
Program,” in Iranian Primer, p. 87; Michael Adler, “Iran and the IAEA,” Iranian Primer,
p. 91; Katz and Hendel, Israel vs. Iran, pp. 175, 177; Meghan L. O’Sullivan, “The Role
and Potential of Sanctions,” in Robert D. Blackwill, ed., Iran: The Nuclear Challenge
(Washington, D. C.: Council on Foreign Relations, 2012), p. 16; Alan Culison, “Sanctions
for Iran as Talks Fail,” Wall Street Journal, June 20, 2012, pp. A1, A9; Hilary Leila Krieger,
“US Congress Passes ‘Strongest’ Iran Sanctions Yet,” Reuters in Jerusalem Post, August
2, 2012, <http://www.jpost.com/International/Article.aspx?id=279752>; Jonathan S. Tobin,
“Reid, WH Work to Weaken Iran Sanctions,” Commentary (July-August, 2012), <http://
www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/07/25/harry-reid-white-house-work-to-weakeniran-sanctions/>; “MI6 Chief: Strike on Iran Likely by 2014,” Jerusalem Post, July 13, 2012,
<http://www.jpost.com/IranianThreat/News/Article.aspx?id=277370>.
40
Jonathan S. Tobin, “The Fake Iranian Nuclear Fatwa,” Commentary, April 23, 2012,
<http://www.commentarymagazine.com/topic/ayatollah-ali-khameini/>; Robert Collier,
“Nuclear Weapons Unholy, Iran Says. Islam Forbids Use, Clerics Proclaim,” San Francisco
Chronicle, October 31, 2003, <http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Nuclear-weaponsunholy-Iran-says-Islam-forbids-2580018.php>; James Risen, “Seeking Nuclear Insight in
Fog of the Ayatollah’s Utterances,” New York Times, April 13, 2012, <http://www.nytimes.
com/2012/04/14/world/middleeast/seeking-nuclear-insight-in-fog-of-the-ayatollahsutterances.html?pagewanted=all>.
41
Abraham Cooper and Harold Brackman, “Iran Missile Test Shows Israel’s Nuclear
Deterrent Is Essential,” U.S. News, May 27, 2009, <http://www.usnews.com/opinion/
articles/2009/05/27/iran-missile-test-shows-israels-nuclear-deterrent-is-essential>;
“Israeli Nuclear Program Pioneered by Shimon Peres,” Wisconsin Project on Nuclear
Arms Control, <http://www.wisconsinproject.org/countries/israel/Israel-nuclear-peres.
html>.
42
“UN Nuclear Watchdog Sets Up ‘Iran Task Force’,” Jerusalem Post, August 29, 2012,
<http://www.jpost.com/IranianThreat/News/Article.aspx?id=283046>; “United Nations
Nuclear Agency Board Rebukes Iran,” Jerusalem Post, September 13, 2012, <http://www.
jpost.com/IranianThreat/News/Article.aspx?id=285023>; Charles Krauthammer, “The
Abandonment,” National Review Online, September 23, 2012, <http://www.nationalreview.
com/articles/316851/abandonment-charles-krauthammer>.
37
IRAN targets ISRAEL THE FATEFUL CONFRONTATION 31
NOTES
“Iran’s Rafsanjani Says Muslims Should Use Nuclear Weapons Against Israel,” CNN
Report, December 14, 2001, <http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-742815>; “France, UK,
Germany Call For Harsher Iran Sanctions,” Jerusalem Post, September 7, 2012, <http://
www.jpost.com/IranianThreat/News/Article.aspx?id=284264>.
44
Quoted in Katz and Hendel, Israel and Iran, p. 202.
45
Yossi Klein Halevi and Michael Oren, “Israel’s Worst Nightmare,” New Republic (January
30, 2007), <http://www.thecaseforisrael.com/pdf/Israels%20Worst%20Night.pdf>.
46
Quoted in Ron Rosenbaum, How the End Begins: The Road to Nuclear War III (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 2011), pp. 136-37.
47
Joshua Teitelbaum, “What Iranian Leaders Really Say About Doing Away With Israel: A
Refutation OfThe CampaignTo Excuse Ahmadinejad’s IncitementTo Genocide,” (Jerusalem
Center for Public Affairs, 2008), p. 13 (picture), <http://jcpa.org/text/ahmadinejad2-words.
pdf>.
48
“Canada Closes Iran Embassy, Set to Oust Diplomats,” Jerusalem Post, September 8,
2012, <http://www.jpost.com/International/Article.aspx?id=284254>.
49
“Wife of Assassinated Scientist: Annihilation of Israel ‘Mostafa’s Ultimate Goal’,” Fars News
Agency, February 21, 2012, <http://english.farsnews.com/newstext.php?nn=9010175602>.
50
Rosenbaum, How the End Begins, pp. 143-52; Graham Allison, ““Will Iran Be Obama’s
Cuban Missile Crisis?,” Washington Post, March 8, 2012, <http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.
edu/publication/21809/will_iran_be_obamas_cuban_missile_crisis.html?breadcrumb=%2
Fproject%2F46%2Finternational_security>.
51
“Remarks by the President at AIPAC Policy Conference,” White House Press release, March
4, 2012, <http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/03/04/remarks-presidentaipac-policy-conference-0>; Herb Keinon, “PM to Continue Pressing for Red Lines on
Iran,” Jerusalem Post, September 12, 2012, <http://www.jpost.com/DiplomacyAndPolitics/
Article.aspx?id=284842>.
43
IRAN targets ISRAEL THE FATEFUL CONFRONTATION 32