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November 04, 2005
Iran President Calls for Destruction of Israel
by Faithful Progressive
Here's something that Christians on the left, on the right and in the middle may be able to agree on: the recent statements of the President of Iran saying that Israel should be "wiped off the map" are appalling. We may draw different conclusions as to the best way to deal with Iran's new tone, but surely all people of good will must comdemn these remarks. Iran president calls for Israel to be 'wiped off the map'
Iran's hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad openly called Wednesday for Israel to be "wiped off the map" and lashed out at Muslim nations which recognize the Jewish state, setting off a storm of protests..."The establishment of the Zionist regime was a move by the world oppressor against the Islamic world," the president told a conference in Tehran entitled "The World without Zionism."
Ahmadinejad said: "There is no doubt that the new wave (of attacks) in Palestine will soon wipe off this disgraceful blot (Israel) from the face of the Islamic world. ... As the Imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map," said Ahmadinejad, referring to a slogan which Iran's revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini used before his death in 1989.
Ahmadinejad's uncompromising tone represents a dramatic change from that of former president Mohammad Khatami, a mild-mannered cleric whose favored topic was "dialogue among civilizations" and who led an effort to improve Iran's relations with the West. Addressing some 4,000 students, Ahmadinejad also took a slap at some of Iran's Arab neighbors in the Gulf as they seek to break new ground in their relations with Israel. "Anybody who recognizes Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation's fury; any (Islamic leader) who recognizes the Zionist regime is acknowledging the surrender and defeat of the Islamic world," he said."
The Anglican Vicar who blogs as Salt spoke for many in a recent post entitled...
Hannah Arendt, where are you?!:
Iran's statements are deeply disturbing, and should cause us to reread some literature written after WWII about Anti-Semitism, especially the work written before the US built up a relationship with Israel. There is a link between anti-semitism, totalitarianism and communism that Arendt, especially, explores.
The president's tactics reveal, especially, the tenuous hold of the clerics in their own society. It is probably true that most Iranians consider Israel to be an outpost of the west. But this demonstration was staged for the purpose of organizing Iranian society against an outside enemy, giving license to destroy internal opposition to any future conflict. The anti-trinity of Israel, the US and Britain [formerly, South Africa], is used as a convenient way to organize and prepare Iranian society to follow the revolution uncritically. If there weren't conflict internally, his statements would be unnecessary. And Israel is an easy rhetorical target.
Iran has revealed, in these statements, to be no friend of the Palestinians. The PA rejected these statements by Iran, and rightfully so. Iranian Rhetoric seriously undermines the political movement that the Palestinians have agreed to promote - a two state solution. Clearly, the audience was not the Palestinians, even though some Palestinians will enjoy the fantasy. So who was the audience of these terrible claims, these claims that implicity declare war on Israel?
Iran has made an implicit moral claim in the Muslim world that the west should understand. In Muslim code, they've said that they are the only nation not beholden to the west. Every other nation is. They are drawing a line in the sand.
Where Christians may disagree is the role that American policy has played in both further radicalizing the regime in Tehran, and in enhancing Iran's role in the region. One of the foreseeable consequences of the Second Iraq War has been to improve the strategic lot of Iran, a regional superpower and the chief real exporter of terrorism in the area. Let's be honest, as Juan Cole has written, the only Winner of the Iraq War Is... Iran:
The Iranians hold a powerful hand in the Iraqi poker game. They have geopolitical advantages, are flush with petroleum profits because of the high price of oil, and have much to offer their new Shiite Iraqi partners. Their long alliance with Iraqi president Jalal Talabani gives them Kurdish support as well. Bush's invasion removed the most powerful and dangerous regional enemy of Iran, Saddam Hussein, from power. In its aftermath, the religious Shiites came to power at the ballot box in Iraq, bestowing on Tehran firm allies in Baghdad for the first time since the 1950s. And in a historic irony, Iran's most dangerous enemy of all, the United States, invaded Iran's neighbor with an eye to eventually toppling the Tehran regime -- but succeeded only in defeating itself.
The ongoing chaos in Iraq has made it impossible for Bush administration hawks to carry out their long-held dream of overthrowing the Iranian regime, or even of forcing it to end its nuclear ambitions. (The Iranian nuclear research program will almost certainly continue, since the Iranians are bright enough to see what happened to the one member of the "axis of evil" that did not have an active nuclear weapons program.) The United States lacks the troops, but perhaps even more critically, it is now dependent on Iran to help it deal with a vicious guerrilla war that it cannot win. In the Middle East, the twists and turns of history tend to make strange bedfellows -- something the neocons, whose breathtaking ignorance of the region helped bring us to this place, are now learning to their dismay.
More than two years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, it is difficult to see what real benefits have accrued to the United States from the Iraq war, though a handful of corporations have benefited marginally. In contrast, Iran is the big winner. The Shiites of Iraq increasingly realize they need Iranian backing to defeat the Sunni guerrillas and put the Iraqi economy right, a task the Americans have proved unable to accomplish. And Iran will still be Iraq's neighbor long after the fickle American political class has switched its focus to some other global hot spot.
It's a disturbing thought. There are no easy answers as to how to deal with an emboldened and newly radicalized Iran. But one thing seems clear: the war in Iraq has not helped matters. One of the reasons many of us opposed the Iraq war was that there were clear parallels with the experience of Israel in Lebanon. Sen. Bob Graham and others warned of this problem several months before the invasion. The invasion of Lebanon did not make Israel more secure, far from it. Israelis were at first greeted as liberators, but shortly after Barak withdrew Israeli troops from Lebanon, there were wide avenues named after suicide bombers in Beirut.
As we should have anticpated, the Iraq war has also destabilized and contributed to radicalization of the region. And any drum beat for war with Iran or Syria must first acknowledge the failure of war as a tool of foreign policy in the Middle East. What we need to do first, as Leigh Baldwin argues in this piece, Analysis: Time For A Clear Iran Policy, is to renew our own ties with Europe. The first task must be to establish a more coherent relationship with the European Union. Considering the recent trans-Atlantic tiffs over Iraq and arms sales to China, relations over Iran have been remarkably cordial. Policy co-ordination has also shown some success -- the practical freezing of the Iranian nuclear program between 2003 and the summer of 2005. The current arrangement has now reached the natural limit of its effectiveness, however.
"Previously, we have had a division of labor, where Europe provided the carrots and America the sticks," says Philip Gordon, a senior fellow at Brookings. "The United States must be willing to provide some carrots and Europe must be willing to provide some sticks."
The long relied-upon good cop-bad cop routine leaves the Europeans able to offer only limited security to Iran as long as America remains hostile. Likewise, European incentives are devalued by a lack of American support.
Secondly, the United States must arrive at a clear objective for its Iran policy. At the moment, there exists a strategic fudge, which aims simultaneously at Iranian co-operation over nuclear development and, in the long term, regime change. These aims are, more often than not, contradictory. A regime that fears invasion will be inclined to race to build a bomb, not to negotiate...A third element of United States policy must be to search for some degree of common ground with the Iranians. This might not be as hard as it seems. The author notes that we have a common interest in stabilizing Iraq. Let's hope that the pro-Iranian leaders in Iraq do not share the Iranian President's views toward Israel.
As Christians we are called to be peacemakers, but we clearly have our work cut out for us at the present moment.
Posted by Faithful Progressive at November 4, 2005 03:03 AM
Comments
I recently read Saira Shah's "The Storyteller's Daughter," a memoir of her experiences as an Afghan woman who grew up in Britain and returned in the 80s and 90s as a journalist. Reading her accounts of American 's failure to understand regional dynamics and divisions within Islam while the US was supplying the Mujahadin with weapons and training only drove home what I've been thinking about our debacle in Iraq.
The world is not neatly divided into a homogenous us and a homogenous them, let alone distinct camps of good and evil. Just because we share a common enemy may make us strategic allies in the short term, it by no means makes us close friends. In fact, if a common enemy was all we had in common, we can very ealisy become enemies once that common enemy is gone. Just as the US is a diverse country, ethnically, religiously, politically, so is the Islamic world. Unfortunately, radical fundamentalists are gaining power and prestige in both, being supported by American neo-cons. Its making the compassionate side of both American Christianity and Islam hard to see.
Posted by: John G at November 4, 2005 04:27 PM
