Forty years
ago this February, a revolution led by Shi’a Muslim clerics ousted Mohammad
Reza Shah Pahlavi, Iran’s
monarch, and installed a theocratic regime.
The Shah
had been on fairly good terms with Israel, but suddenly all that changed.
Beginning
with its new Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini, the Islamic Republic has been
threatening to destroy the Jewish state ever since.
Every few months, some newspaper columnist assures readers
that the regime is in danger and on the verge of collapse. This usually happens
when there has been some economic setback in Iran.
Two recent examples picked at random are a Nov. 23 Washington Post piece by Anne Applebaum
entitled “Iran’s Regime Could Fall Apart. What Happens Then?” and a Jan. 1
commentary in the New York Post by
Alireza Nader, “Iranian Mullahs’ Lock on Power is Now Shakier than Ever.”
I have never been one of these writers, having penned
numerous opinion pieces, dating back to the mid-1980s, cautioning against such
wishful thinking.
In truth, Iran remains a very strong state, supported by a
robust form of religiously-based nationalism.
It exports its ideology throughout the Middle East and
farther afield. It provides weapons to proxies and supports terrorism, while
also working diligently to destroy Israel.
Iran espouses the most radical anti-Israeli or anti-Zionist
position in the Muslim Middle East, calling for the elimination of Israel.
Ayatollah Khomeini maintained that Zionism was the
culmination of a Jewish-Christian conspiracy against Islam. Fusing together
anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist ideologies, Iran became a disseminator of
Holocaust denial in the Middle East.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s president from 2005 to 2013, was
particularly notorious as a Holocaust denier, as well as for his statements,
made at various times, about the need to “wipe Israel off the map.”
Speaking to about 4,000 students in October 2005 at a
program called “The World Without Zionism,” in preparation for an annual
anti-Israel demonstration, he contended that “the establishment of a Zionist
regime was a move by the world oppressor against the Islamic world.”
But he only expressed what less outspoken Iranian leaders
think.
Destroying the Jewish state remains high on their agenda.
Of far greater significance are the words of the current
Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameini, in his book entitled Palestine,
published in 2015:
“Our position against Israel is, as always: Israel is a
malignant cancer gland that needs to be uprooted. In contrast to what shallow
people believe, it is not impossible to defeat Israel and the United States.”
The opposition to Israel “is now the meeting point of
Jew-haters of diverse political and ideological colors, the common ground of
present-day anti-Semitism,” contends Monika Schwarz-Friesel of the Technical
University of Berlin and author of Inside the Antisemitic Mind: The Language of
Jew-Hatred in Contemporary Germany, published in 2017. “The old Judeophobia is
projected onto the Jewish state.”
Iran’s ideology poses an existential threat to Israel; its
Syrian and Shi’a Lebanese Hezbollah military allies sit on Israel’s northern
borders.
But last May U.S. President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from the deal that had been sponsored by his predecessor, Barack Obama, and re-imposed sanctions. So it’s possible the Iranians have resumed their quest to produce a nuclear weapon.
Iran has already test-fired a ballistic missile capable of delivering nuclear weapons to the entire Middle East.
Should the Iranians eventually succeed in their nuclear
program, Tel Aviv will certainly disappear from the face of the earth.
But since Israel also has a nuclear arsenal, the same fate
may befall Tehran and other cities. Is it a wonder some fanatics are beginning
to talk of an Armageddon in the Middle East?
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