Dan Gillerman, for five years Israel's representative at the U.N. and a frequent guest on American news programs, had this to say today, as he talked openly of the need for an attack on Iran:
"We all paid a huge price for not taking seriously the ranting of another small, moustached leader who some people considered as crazy, and I don't think we have the luxury to show the same indifference and apathy as we did before."
The fact that Iran hasn't attacked another country in hundreds of years? Apparently it's escaped Gillerman's attention.
A few other things have escaped Gillerman's attention as well, as seen in this remark:
"We have a very extreme, radical fundamentalist regime there with a President who denies the Holocaust while preparing the next one, and has vowed to wipe Israel off the face of the map."
As far as "denying the Holocaust," Ahmadinejad has questioned the number of Jews killed (which is dumb and objectionable, but not much more objectionable than the American leaders who pretend the death toll in the Iraq "holocaust" is one-tenth what it really is), but mainly has objected to the use of the Holocaust as an excuse to punish people (the Palestinians) who had nothing whatsoever to do with it.
As far as "preparing the next one," if Iran wanted to start a Holocaust, they might start by killing, or even persecuting, the tens of thousands of Jews already in Iran. Of course they've done no such thing.
And as far as "vowing to wipe Israel off the face of the map," it's time to quit being polite and just say "bullshit." Not only has it been well established that Ahmadinejad said no such thing, he's even gone further and clarified what he did say by saying:
"Just as the Soviet Union was wiped out and today does not exist, so will the Zionist regime soon be wiped out."
And, as I wrote at the time (Dec. 2006):
I hardly need to remind readers that the Soviet Union was not defeated militarily (although the Nazis tried), but self-destructed with a large push from the imperialist world. Nor was the country "destroyed" in any physical sense. What it was was literally (well, nearly literally) "wiped off the map" (or "wiped out" in the latest formulation), that is, the words "Soviet Union" no longer appear on any current map. And in just the same way, Ahmadinejad (and millions more around the world) envision the word "Israel" being "wiped off the map" as a more just, democratic state takes its place.
Incidentally, although the Soviet Union per se was not physically destroyed, hundreds of thousands (probably millions) of former residents of that country have perished thanks to the replacement of the socialist economy with a capitalist one, with life expectancy dropping sharply.
And I wonder what Mr. Gillerman will have to say if Ahmadinejad is defeated in the upcoming election by Khatami. Luckily for Gillerman, Khatami is also "moustached," so I guess he'll be able to keep using that absurd Hitler analogy. Although any comparison between Hitler's facial hair and either Ahmadinejad's or Khatami's was absurd before we even got to the subtance of the comparison.
As I've written before, if Iran's alleged threats against Israel were as substantive and as frequent as Israel's threats against Iran, the U.S. bombs would have long since begun to drop.
Reprinted from Left I on the News