What if Iran’s leaders mean what they say?
On Sept. 26, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will once again address the United Nations General Assembly. His appearance — marked on previous such occasions by anti-Israel diatribes, Holocaust denial and Sept. 11 conspiracy theories — has become an annual challenge to the very integrity of the UN.
Ron Prossor, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, has called on world leaders to walk out on Ahmadinejad’s speech, noting that Iran’s calls for the destruction of another member state, Israel, is a direct violation of the UN Charter’s prohibition against such threats.
Prossor’s challenge is justified. Last month, Ahmadinejad told a crowd of worshippers in Tehran that “the existence of the Zionist regime is an insult to humanity.” Days later, Iran’s Supreme leader Ali Khamenei called Israel a “cancerous tumour at the heart of the Islamic world” that must be destroyed. That call was backed up by Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, a senior commander in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps, who declared that Israel would be “wiped from the map and thrown into the trash bin of history forever.”
These are just a small sample of the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish ravings that are routinely spread by Iranian leaders. Their words cannot be dismissed as mere bluster.
Sadly, too many within the international community have shown indifference to Iran’s poisonous vitriol. Canada’s denunciations of this hatred and principled stand against Iran’s threats are an important departure from this trend.
What is profoundly worrying to Israe- lis is that Iran is racing ahead in developing a capacity to produce nuclear weapons and the ballistic missiles to deliver them. And it is doing so, according to the UN’s own nuclear watchdog agency, despite several rounds of UN sanctions. But neither sanctions nor negotiations have slowed down the regime’s illegal nuclear program.
Given the circumstances, Israelis live with the justified fear that should Iran decide to move quickly to assembling a warhead, the Islamic Republic might just act on its feverish hatred and launch a nuclear strike to destroy the Jewish state.
Ahmadinejad told a crowd of worshippers in Tehran that ‘the existence of the Zionist regime is an insult to humanity’
The prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran is not just keeping Israeli leaders awake at night, as signified by German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s recent statement that Iran poses a threat to the entire world. The unprecedented unity across the continent when it comes to the sanctions campaign is partially fuelled by the fact that much of Europe falls within reach of Iranian missiles.
Some commentators in the West say with casual confidence that Israelis and Europeans need not fear living with a nuclear-armed Iran since the regime is a “rational actor.” The notion is that Iran would not dare attack Israel in the knowledge that Israel would retaliate. Iranian leaders “are not suicidal,” we are assured, as though such pundits have direct access to the thought processes of a theocratic dictatorship.
Those same commentators dismiss the fact that many in the Iranian leadership openly hold an apocalyptic religious vision under which martyrdom may indeed be an aspiration (especially if it means ridding the world of a Jewish state in an otherwise Islamic region).
They dismiss the words of former Iranian president Akbar Rafsanjani, widely considered a “moderate.” Rafsanjani once remarked that a single Islamic nuclear bomb would destroy tiny Israel, while a retaliatory Israeli strike would only “harm” the Muslim world. Keep in mind that Iran, a country 70 times larger than Israel (which itself is merely the size of Lake Ontario), considers itself the vanguard of Islam.
Most disturbingly, critics dismiss the fact that history is replete with examples of our assumptions crumbling before our very eyes with devastating consequences. The most dangerous assumptions are that rational self-interest will always triumph and no government — even a genocidal one — would really risk the well-being of its own people. If these were rules of nature rather than vain hopes, we would have never witnessed the horrors of World War II.
Iran’s leaders would not be the first to take self-destructive actions that seem unimaginable to us, and no one can tell Israel that history will not repeat itself. Indeed, Israelis — or any other people — should not be forced to live under a shadow of nuclear annihilation. Against the stark backdrop of history and the Iranian regime’s own declarations, this fact should add humility to the debates surrounding a nuclear Iran. Shimon Fogel is CEO of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs.