Iran's anti-Israel rage is real

[igloo]

IRAN'S NEW ANTI-ISRAEL 'RAGE'

By AMIR TAHERI

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October 28, 2005 -- THE new president of the Islamic Republic, Mah moud Ahmadinejad, has radically changed a key aspect of Iran's regional policy by committing his administration to the destruction of Israel.

In a speech Wednesday, Ahmadinejad described Israel as "a stain of shame that has sullied the purity of Islam," and promised that it would be "cleansed very soon." All nations that establish ties with Israel, he warned, would burn "in the fires of our Islamic rage."

Ahmadinejad was not simply carried away by his rhetoric: He was inaugurating "A World Without Zionism" — a week of special events in thousands of mosques, schools, factories, offices and public squares, dedicated to mobilizing popular energies against the Jewish state.

Smaller versions of the exercise took place in Syria and Lebanon, countries where Iran exerts much political influence — and, more surprisingly, in Afghanistan, where a group of newly-elected members of Parliament joined the Iranian ambassador in a special "Death to Israel" ceremony.

Syrian Information Minister Mahdi Dakhl-Allah and Yasser Hurryiah, a leader of the Syrian Ba'ath Party, spoke at an Iranian-sponsored event and endorsed Tehran's new tough line on Israel. Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, head of the Lebanese branch of the Hezbollah movement, reflected Tehran's new policy in a message of his own in which, for the first time, he called for the liberation of "the whole of Palestine."

For the next week or so, special registers will remain open in thousands of schools across Iran to enable "volunteers for martyrdom" to put down their names for the coming "Holy War." The Iranian branch of Hezbollah claims it has enrolled 11,300 would-be suicide-martyrs for operations against the United States and its allies, especially Israel and Britain.

Hostility to Israel has been a key ingredient of the Islamic Republic's foreign policy since its inception in 1979. But the late Ayatollah Ruhallah Khomeini was always careful not to promise anything on Israel that he couldn't deliver. And while his regime could make life difficult for the Jewish state (largely by recruiting, training, arming and financing Lebanese and Palestinian guerrillas), total destruction required the full participation of Israel's Arab neighbors, especially Egypt and Syria.

Khomeini's anti-Israeli stance was largely opportunistic — a means of wooing the Arabs who, being mostly Sunnis, regarded the ayatollah's Shiite revolution with suspicion.

He also knew that Israel's presence represented a kind of insurance for Iran's own security. For, had Israel not been there to become the focus of Arab rage, Iran might have gotten that role. After all, many Arab dictators, including Iraq's Saddam Hussein, often spoke of dismembering Iran and "liberating" the Iranian province of Khuzestan (which they dubbed "Arabistan").

In the 1980s, Saddam's eight-year-long war against Iran (with the support of all Arab states except Syria and Lebanon) helped further tone down the new regime's hostility toward Israel. And when it was revealed that Israel had been shipping urgently needed anti-tank missiles to Iran to stop Iraqi armored attacks in 1985-86, many in Tehran wondered whether Iran and Israel did not, after all, face the same enemies.

But with the war's end in 1988, the mullahs reverted to their original anti-Israel posture. For years, the Islamic Republic waged a proxy war against Israel via the Lebanese Hezbollah and several Tehran-financed radical Palestinian groups, including Islamic Jihad.

Yet Ahmadinejad has gone several steps further — presenting the destruction of Israel as a major goal of his government. Why?

One reason may be his desire to distance himself as far as possible from his predecessor, Muhammad Khatami, and from Hashemi Rafsanjani, the powerful mullah-cum-businessman who still heads a key faction within the regime.

Ahmadinejad has criticized the "softness" of Khatami and his mentor Rafsanjani, which led to "a decline in revolutionary spirit." Thus the new stand on Israel may be part of a package of measures to revive the regime's original radical message.

Another reason may be Ahmadinejad's belief that Israel is preparing to attack Iran's nuclear sites as part of a broader U.S. plan against the Islamic Republic. He may thus be trying to mobilize Iranian and Arab public opinion for the coming showdown.

But the real reason for Ahmadinejad's Jihadist outburst may well be his deep conviction that it is the historic mission of the Islamic Republic to lead the Muslim world in a "war of civilization" against the West led by the United States. One of the first battlegrounds of such a war would be Israel.

Since his election in June, Ahmadinejad and his "strategic advisers" have used a bellicose terminology as part of their program to put Iran on a war footing. In the past few weeks, the regime has been massively militarized with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Ahmadinejad's main power-base, seizing control of almost all levers of power.

According to Gen. Salehi, one of Ahmadinejad's military advisers, a clash between the Islamic Republic and the United States has become inevitable. "We must be prepared," Salehi says. "The Americans will run away, leaving their illegitimate child [i.e., Israel] behind. And then Muslims would know what to do."

The war talk has given the Iranian economy the jitters, prompting the biggest crash ever of the Tehran Stock Exchange.

Remarkably, the new foreign policy aimed at provoking war with Israel and America has never been properly debated in the parliament, or even within the Cabinet. Some of Iran's senior diplomats, speaking anonymously, say they, too, have not been consulted.

Iranian author Amir Taheri is a member of Benador Associates.

[igloo]

NUKES FOR ALLAH

By RALPH PETERS

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October 28, 2005 -- THIS week the president of Iran told a student rally that Israel should be "wiped off the map." Always a crowd pleaser in Tehran, Mr. Ahmadinejad's call to exterminate Jews rang freshly ominous in view of his government's nuclear ambitions.

Meeting with a lively group of American businessmen on Tuesday, I was asked how we'd know when Tehran was on the verge of acquiring a nuclear capability. "You'll see Israeli planes in the sky over Iran," I said with a smile masking my seriousness.

But it won't be as easy as Israel's 1981 destruction of Iraq's French-built Osirak reactor. This time, Israel will need more than attack aircraft (and better refueling means). It may take a combination of aircraft, missiles, special-ops teams and clandestine resources to interrupt Iran's nuclear program if the world fails to act. The effort would look more like the opening of the 1967 war than a pin-point strike.

But Iranian nuclear weapons constitute a literal life-or-death issue for Israel. Tel Aviv would be better off facing the world's (disingenuous) outrage than nuclear destruction.

Even for the military power of the United States, shattering Iran's nuclear-weapons program would be complicated. Iran's facilities are dispersed, hidden, buried and hardened. Attacks would kill foreign technicians wisely hired by Iran — de facto hostages.

Yet, for all of the concern that Israel, the United States and blithely irresponsible Europe should feel about Tehran's quest for nuclear weapons, the Sunni Muslims of the Middle East and Pakistan should be more worried still.

The likeliest future nuclear exchange in the Middle East may not be between Israel and Iran, after all, but between Shi'a and Sunni Muslims.

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The Pakistani bomb is a Sunni bomb. Tehran is hell-bent on having a Shi'a bomb to counter it.

And we are not talking about emotionally stable adversaries. The psychological dislocations of the greater Middle East and the ferocity of religious differences make the region the likeliest in the world to see an internal nuclear exchange. Even India and Pakistan are far less apt to engage in nuclear war (unless a regime of religious madmen grasps power in Islamabad).

Fiery rhetoric notwithstanding, Tehran's nuclear target list doesn't necessarily start with Israel. Tel Aviv's capacity for devastating retaliation may — may — deter an Iranian government with any residual survival instincts. And while Israel is the great symbolic enemy, the first place on the practical side goes to Sunni Arabs.

With our abysmally short historical memories, we forget that the most savage conventional war of the past 60 years was the Iran-Iraq conflict, a decade of bloodletting between Iran's majority Shi'a population and (formerly) Sunni-dominated Iraq. It was a replay of Islam's 7th-century tribal clashes, with modern weapons and mass armies. Millions perished or suffered crippling wounds. And every available weapon, including poison gas, was used enthusiastically.

Humans may hate a distant enemy in theory, but we're likelier to kill our neighbors.

An Iranian nuclear threat to the United States comes in at a distant third place behind the danger to Israel and the possibility of an intra-Muslim conflict of apocalyptic proportions. (Does anybody really think that luxury condos in Dubai are a good investment? Well, here's a toast to their "glowing" future as the mullahs nuke the Middle East's Las Vegas wannabe.)

Of course, we cannot dismiss the nuclear danger to our deployed forces or from a Tehran-backed terrorist strike on our homeland. But we may be exaggerating our importance to our sworn enemies.

If all politics are local, so are most wars. The advent of nuclear weapons in the Middle East just may coincide with the due-date for a devastating Shi'a-Sunni confrontation. In one of reality's bizarre twists that intelligence agencies never forecast, we may see Sunni Arab states begging Israel for a wartime alliance.

With all of these rising dangers between the Red Sea and the Indus, the United States long remained willfully blind to the roots of nuclear development in the region. The Iranians worried us but we essentially gave our "allies" a pass.

The Pakistani bomb was funded by Saudi Arabia as a Sunni bomb. We had no end of evidence, but Clinton-era apparatchiks refused to face the embarrassing facts.

On the eve of Pakistan's first nuclear detonation, Islamabad's leading luxury hotel filled with Saudis. On the day of the blast, the phone lines (in those days before cells) lit up from the test site back to the hotel, then from the hotel to Riyadh. According to one well-placed American witness, the information was suppressed.

Now Sunni Muslims have their bomb, the Shi'a are determined to have theirs, and the truly horrific religious war in the coming years may not be between terrorists or murderous Islamist governments and the West, but between Muslims. The sectarian hatreds within Islam (as well as between the Persian and Arab civilizations) pre-date any resentments toward the United States by many centuries.

It should surprise no one that the great bloodlettings of the 21st century will be over religion. The shock may be over which masses of believers slaughter each other.

Ralph Peters' latest book is "New Glory: Expanding America's Global Supremacy."

[igloo]

Iran leader defends Israel remark

Iranian protesters shoot a burning Israeli flag in Tehran

Protesters in Tehran burned Israeli flags

Iran's president has defended his widely criticised call for Israel to be "wiped off the map".

Attending an anti-Israel rally in Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said his remarks were "just" - and the criticism did not "have any validity".

His initial comment provoked anger from many governments, and prompted Israel to demand Iran's expulsion from the UN.

Egypt said they showed "the weakness of the Iranian government". A Palestinian official also rejected the remarks.

Defiant rally

Tens of thousands of Iranians took part in the rally in Tehran which Iran organises every year on the last Friday of the fasting month of Ramadan to show solidarity with the Palestinian struggle.

Shouting "Death to Israel, death to the Zionists", the protesters dragged Israeli flags along the ground and then set them on fire.

Palestinians recognise the right of the state of Israel to exist and I reject his comments

Saeb Erekat

Chief Palestinian negotiator

Iran comments: Your views

Many carried posters and placards sporting the slogan "Israel should be wiped off the map".

Joining the protest, Mr Ahmadinejad said: "My words were the Iranian nation's words.

"Westerners are free to comment, but their reactions are invalid," Mr Ahmadinejad told the official Irna news agency.

Some demonstrators wore white shrouds in a symbolic gesture expressing readiness to die for their cause.

"Ahmadinejad talks on behalf of all Iranians. We are ready to die for Palestine," Mohammad Mirzayi, a member of a volunteer Shia militia group, told the Reuters news agency.

'Inexperience'

While most Muslim and Arab capitals have remained silent on the president's remarks, a few have spoken out - including Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat.

"Palestinians recognise the right of the state of Israel to exist and I reject his comments," he told the BBC News website.

"What we need to be talking about is adding the state of Palestine to the map and not wiping Israel from the map," he said.

Two technicians carry a box containing yellowcake at the Iranian nuclear facility at Isfahan

Tehran says the West's reaction is linked to its nuclear plans

Egypt, which has signed a peace treaty with Israel, also rejected the Iranian line.

"In principle, we are way beyond this type of political rhetoric that shows the weakness of the Iranian government," said an official at the Egyptian embassy in London.

Turkey's prime minister called on the Iranian president "to display political moderation".

Our world affairs correspondent Paul Reynolds says that the UK Foreign Office does not regard President Ahmadinejad's statement on Israel as a new policy but more as a sign of his inexperience and the very local focus of his government.

UK officials suspect that he has held such views for years and that what is happening is that ideologues like him are now in power and are having their views exposed, he adds.

While there is no sense that Iran is backing down, there are Iranians who are concerned that their country could become increasingly isolated under this new ultra-conservative government, reports the BBC Frances Harrison in Tehran.

Diplomatic drive

Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom meanwhile said Israel would call for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council.

"We have decided to open a broad diplomatic offensive," Mr Shalom said.

So far no action has been taken at the UN, but Secretary General Kofi Annan took the unusual step of rebuking Iran for the comments.

Iran has dismissed the international furore as a means of pressing Iran to compromise on its nuclear programme.

Negotiations have stalled between the EU and Iran over attempts to persuade Tehran to abandon its nuclear ambitions.

[bigpoppanils]

I hope that Iran's actions persuade Russia to stop providing weapons technology to Iran.

[igloo]

I hope that Iran's actions persuade Russia to stop providing weapons technology to Iran.

Very doubtful...too much money in it for Russia, plus they want to retain any geopolitical influence thet have.....look no further to their behavior on Iraq (especially the new Oil for Food report), and their behavior on Syria, where Russia is threatening to block any resolutions against Syria if brough before the Security COuncil, despite Syria being implicted in state sponsored assassination in Lebanon..............

[BKDJ]

Fukin A-rabs.....

[kramadas]

Fukin A-rabs.....

Hmm...which "A-rabs" would that be? The Israelis or the Iranians??? Get a clue fool!

[drlogic]

I hope that Iran's actions persuade Russia to stop providing weapons technology to Iran.

I hope so too.....but it's not likely.

BOMB 'EM!

[igloo]

This should be going on all over the world...where is moveon.org and ANSWER now.....afetr all, protesting the Iranian govts comments and refusal to cooperate on nukes is a worthy cause, right?

Excellent job buy these Italian people...............

Italians in Rome, Milan and Turin demonstrated Thursday against Mahmoud Ahamdinejad’s call for Israel to be wiped off the map

November 4, 2005, 6:05 PM (GMT+02:00)

In Rome, 15,000 Italians protesters held a torchlight procession and waved Israeli flags outside the Iranian embassy. Reform minister Roberto Calderoli was there and the mayor of Rome, Walter Veltroni. But foreign minister Gianfranco Fini stayed away – to avoid “damaging consequences for Italy,†although he had promised to come, as did defense minister Antonio Martino “with extreme regret.â€

Rome’s chief rabbi Riccardo di Segni addressing the protestors said: “They challenge Israel’s right to exist, but do not do that even to the world’s worst dictators or most bloody governments.â€

Two thousand demonstrated at the Iranian consulate in Milan and hundreds in Turin.