Daniel, Still Unafraid Of Feral Beasts (video)

Remember the teenaged Daniel Pereg, who faced down a feral mob of Israel-haters in Los Angeles three years ago?

Read more here

Well (hat tip: reader and resource extraordinaire Ian), he now takes on one of the most repulsive feral beasts of all:

A King-Size Swipe At Iranian Antisemitism

Washington Post columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner Colbert I. ("Colby") King (who,being Black, is not unfamiliar with the scourge of racism) has written in simple yet trenchant terms of the excrescence that is Iranian antisemitism:

"Blame it on my upbringing, or what I learned in school, or what I saw when I visited the Dachau concentration camp in 1968. The Holocaust was the most evil event of the 20th century.

So it is abhorrent to me that a government in today’s world would advocate a repeat of that horror. And it is almost beyond belief that the rest of the world would hear such an outrage and look the other way.

I am referring, of course, to the leaders of today’s Iran and the global ho-hum response to the most virulent form of state-sponsored anti-Semitism since Nazi Germany....

Iran is more than a threat to a piece of geography called Israel. The Islamic Republic of Iran is the greatest threat to Jews to emerge in the past 70 years....

 Listen to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and you hear strains of Adolf Hitler. Read, for example, this from Ahmadinejad’s recent address in Tehran to ambassadors of Islamic countries ....

 The international focus today is on Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons and the threat posed by a nuclear-armed Tehran to Israel. That is too narrow a view.

It ignores the wider threat of Iranian-sponsored anti-Semitism to Jews everywhere. Iran’s bigotry has a global dimension. And that poses a moral challenge to the rest of the world....

Iran violates national sovereignty in order to kill Jews.

The fingerprints of Iran were found in attacks on Jews in Bulgaria, India, Thailand and Georgia. Contending that Iran’s threat is mainly to Israel is to ignore reality, unpleasant and challenging though it may be.

If we are to honor the pledge of "never again," will we be up to preventing the potential genocide of the 21st century?.'

Read the entire article here (Hat tip: reader Jean)

Iran's Gallows' Way & Galloway (video)

As the video editor says, "This is a Must See".  Hat tip to the Vlad Tepes blog, where I found it.  And hats off to gorgeous George, for those stirring remarks of his, at the beginning ...

Ahmadinejad's Armageddon: Iran, Israel, & The Bomb

There have been warnings a-plenty over the last few years about Ahmadinejad's nuclear ambitions, his apocalyptic belief in the coming of the Twelfth Imam, his determination to annihilate Israel ...

And now he seems to be on the very threshhold of nuclear capability.
 
 I found the following sobering, insightful video below on the Vlad Tepes blog.

 Vlad has more material on the theme here

Small Gentleman with Huge Weapon WLTM...

Small gentleman with huge weapon (erecting) would like to meet The Twelfth Imam.

“Mad Dog” Gaddafi ‘s evil regime may now be toppling in Libya, but Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is still in power in Teheran.

It is easy for Westerners to forget, and even easier to dismiss as scaremongering, the fact that Ahmadinejad believes that the central purpose of the Islamic Republic of Iran is to prepare the way – with brimstone and fire – for the return of the Mahdi, or Twelfth Imam, who according to Shia tradition was born over 1000 years ago, is not dead but in hiding, and will one day reveal himself and rule the world.

"Today, we should define our economic, cultural and political policies based on the policy of Imam Mahdi's return," the Iranian president has said.

"We must prepare ourselves to rule the world and the only way to do that is to put forth views on the basis of the Expectation of the Return."

"They [Western nations] have devised all these plans to prevent the coming of the Hidden Imam because they know that the Iranian nation is the one that will prepare the grounds for his coming and will be the supporters of his rule."

According to Shia tradition, the return, and subsequent rule,of the Twelfth Imam will be preceded by turbulence and destruction of apocalyptic proportions. A mighty cataclysm must occur to effect his arrival.

Calls for Israel’s extirpation, and denying the Holocaust, are endemic to Islamism elsewhere in the Middle East – we can see such statements on videos featuring the Egyptian Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi (the one who yesterday issued a fatwa against Gaddafi, incidentally) as well as many other Islamic extremists – but the fact remains that only Ahmadinejad’s Iran is on the threshold of acquiring The Bomb, which as the Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer has observed,

“could do in one afternoon what it took Hitler six years to do: destroy an entire Jewish civilization and extinguish 6 million souls.

Everyone knows where Iran's nuclear weapons will be aimed. Everyone knows they will be put on Shahab rockets, which have been modified so that they can reach Israel. And everyone knows that if the button is ever pushed, it will be the end of Israel.

But it gets worse. The president of a country about to go nuclear is a confirmed believer in the coming apocalypse.... The more devout believers in Iran pray at the Jamkaran mosque, which houses a well from which, some believe, he will emerge.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/15/AR2005121501428.html

As Ariel Sharon warned, the Mahdi, in the view of Ahmadinejad and other radical Iranian Shi’ites

"needs a war. He cannot come into this world without an Armageddon. He wants an Armageddon. The earlier we understand this the better. Ahmadinejad wants nuclear weapons for this!"

There are many who warn of this, but the warnings seem often to fall on deaf ears:

The Mahdi has handmaidens:

The Jerusalem Post (17 January 2011) featured an interview with Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon. The exact date when Iran will acquire nuclear weapons is “a moving target,” and “all we know is that this year they will not have a nuclear weapon,” he’s quoted as saying.

“However, in order to ensure that they will not have the weapons in 2014 or 2015, we must not let up. We must continue and not stop the momentum. There is a momentum where the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, the Iranian government, is now in the crosshairs of the international community.”

Well, let’s hope so...

The ex-pat Iranian political analyst and human rights campaigner Jahanshah Rashidian has warned that  despite Ahmadinejad's nuttiness it is a mistake not to take him seriously:

‘His repeated comments suggesting that Israel be "wiped off the map" is stirring international ire, and they even caused some Iranian officials to play down his remarks, saying that Ahmadinejad did not mean to speak in such sharp terms.

Ahmadinejad's bellicose remarks, at a moment when Iran is under increasing world scrutiny for its nuclear programme, suggest that the man does not care about war and catastrophe for his people. His threatening words mirror the similar methods of the unpopular [Islamic Republic of Iran] IRI by creating the shadow of an external threat in order to keep control over its own people. Ahmadinejad serves the survival of the regime, no matter how weird he is, and no matter how he has failed to rally the majority of people. In the absence of democracy, he gains more blind adherents, more Islamist followers in the world, and more apologists for the regime.

Ahmadinejad is putting forward IRI's vision for global Islamic domination. The vision of Islamic domination cannot coexist in any manner with peaceful rhetoric. Ahmadinejad's words are the direct consequences of the regime’s world view, and as such, he is supported by the Leader of the IRI, ayatollah Ali Khameneh’i, the Hojattyeh-sect and some international Islamists, despite his weird attitudes and uncontrolled speeches....

Ahmadinejad needs to seek refuge in his unreal world. He views himself the direct vassal of the Twelfth Imam, the Mahdi, of Shi’ites, for whom he prepares the reappearance after more than a thousand years of occultation. He propagates the idea that he is in permanent contact with him and receives advice from him.

Whatever one may think of Ahmadinejad, any perceived insanity or instability can be best explained by his unshakeable belief in the ethos of the Shiite sect – with a messianic idea of world catastrophe leading to the coming of the Twelfth Imam and Islamic rule over the world. If one analyses this religious belief, his words make perfect sense but only within the strict context of this belief system. When he believes the Mahdi protects him with a "halo of light", then his words must mirror this belief.

The belief in the imminent return of the Mahdi has not only influenced Ahmadinejad's words and attitudes, but also driven his foreign policy brinksmanship. According to him, "a historic war between the oppressor, non-Muslims, and the world of Islam" is under way, and the IRI is on the front lines. Thus, as Ahmadinejad told a closed-door session of the "Majles" (Iranian parliament) foreign policy and national security committee in January 2006, Iran must abandon its decade-and-a-half-old policy of "detente" with the West in favour of confrontation.’http://wwwdamavandsafa.blogspot.com/

See also: http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2010/09/ahmadinejad-bomb-and-twelfth-imam.html

'Where is the "J'Accuse"?': Binyamin Netanyahu's Yom HaShoah Speech in the Knesset

Here, in English translation, are Bibi's eloquent reflections this week on the Holocaust and its contemporary implications, especially as regards antisemitism and the Iranian nuclear threat (hat tip: Jonathan Hoffman http://www.thejc.com/blogpost/holocaust-memorial-day-bibis-speech-knesset)

'Have the lessons of the Holocaust been learned?

For us, the Jewish people, the answer is yes.

For the rest of the world, the answer is no, or at least not yet.

Today, 66 years after the horror, we are here, in Jerusalem, the eternal capital of our nation. We, the representatives of the Jewish nation, are holding a special ceremony to mark the International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The lesson that we have learned, first of all, is that we are here, in our sovereign country, in our capital city.

We have learned another important lesson, probably the most crucial lesson to be learned from the atrocity, from the chain of atrocities that brought about one much worse; this has continued for hundreds and thousands of years, since we lost our country and our sovereignty, and since we lost our capability to defend ourselves. The lesson learned was that we had to restore the capacity of the State and the army for self-defense.

This lesson was understood by Herzl even before the great atrocity took place. He foresaw it, and we implemented it.

But there is one other lesson. At the end of the Holocaust, there were 11 million Jews in the world. Before it, there were 18 million.

Even at a very slow rate of natural increase of the population, there should have been almost 30 million Jews in the world, but in fact, there are only 13.5 million; much less, half of what there should be. This did not happen by physical loss; it happened because of assimilation and the loss of identity.

The only place where the Jewish people has grown is here, in Eretz Yisrael, in the State of Israel. We have continuous substantial and blessed growth. There is no nation that could live on a demographic pin head. Therefore, while cultivating our country, we must continue to encourage aliyah, bringing Jewish people to Israel, and to prevent their assimilation abroad. All the projects that we operate - Birthright, Masa and also Moreshet - are aimed at our young adults and also young Jews abroad. They are essential elements in assuring our future.

Have we learned the lesson? The answer is yes. Has the world learned the lesson? Well, I think one thing is clear: the fact that global antisemitism is renewing and expanding is obvious. If anyone thought that antisemitism stopped after World War II and the Holocaust, it is now evident that it was only a hiatus. The same forces that you mentioned joining together, share a new/old antisemitism with the world, and so we must fight it, globally too. For that, I congratulate my friend Silvan Shalom, who, when serving as Foreign Minister, brought about an important United Nations resolution - marking this day, a resolution which was adopted by the UN.

This resolution is indeed implemented in many countries, which is an important achievement and in many ways also unique, at least in the ability to propose an Israeli draft resolution to this organization, which I am well familiar with, I spent a long time there. It was a milestone. But I still ask: does the world that condemns that antisemitism also condemn this antisemitism?

Every now and then, very feebly - it isn't just antisemitism; it is the regime - a member country of the UN, the regime of ayatollahs - stands up and knowingly and openly calls for the annihilation of at least another six million Jews, without even a hint of pretence. And nobody says a thing. Well, that's not exact. Here and there a comment might be heard, but where is the anger, the outrage? Where is the outcry? Where is the "J'accuse?" I'm not asking about us. We are here; we've learned our lessons. But where is the global uproar that should have risen from advanced communities around the world in response to explicit declarations of genocide, of exterminating a people, that same people! [My emphasis]

We must be honest with each other. Diplomacy is, first and foremost, identifying the situation as it is. If we want to change it, we must understand it. And we have a very disturbing historical phenomenon. I don't think that it is only hard for us, but for all civilized people, all civilized peoples, who allow such an affliction, such statements, such savagery, barbarism and primitivism to be uttered and spread. It is said; it spreads, becomes acceptable, commonplace, and always prepares the ground for the next action and also prevents those actions that will not take place.

I am aware that there are many leaders and good-hearted, conscientious people around the world. I know that they think what I think. I know that in their hearts, they tell themselves what I am saying today from this podium.

However, that will not suffice. Because in the face of this regime, that calls for our annihilation, and arms itself with weapons of mass destruction in order to fulfill its nefarious intentions, there should be a much stronger protest. This makes me somewhat disheartened, my friend Silvan.

I was in that institution, I served in it as the representative of Israel. One day I heard that there were rumours about a file about Waldheim, who was then President of Austria. It might have been the Secretary-General of the UN. The Secretary-General said he had a profile about a war criminal in some UN archive.

What was this archive? It turned out that there was a war criminal archive instituted by Churchill and the Allies during the war to collect material against Nazi criminals and their collaborators. They gathered the information, and listened and discussed and prepared the files and at the end of the war they took these files, brought them to the UN, and locked them in the basement, where they just lay for decades.

I asked if I could go in there, and they said "No." I asked why, and was told that I needed the consent of all the allied countries, 18 or 19 countries, I think, and there was no such approval. Well, it took me a year until I got the okay and was taken to the archive.

It wasn't exactly in the basement, it was on the first floor of a UN building somewhere in New York. I walk in and see boxes upon boxes; I go to 'W,' pull out the box: Waldheim, Kurt, and various notes. My hair stood on end (I had more hair then). Horrible things, lying there, hidden for dozens of years. I look at the next file (I didn't start taking boxes out, it was the same box): Birkenau 1944, records of exterminations, the death marches, trains, the SS, it's all documented. 1944, but I think I also saw files that referred to 1943.

My friends, these 18 countries, perhaps the best statesmen in history, distinguished men, truly great men - they knew. They knew in real time, and not from this particular testimony that I have just mentioned. There are plenty of testimonies: terrible things that are very hard to read. They knew, but they did not act.

Why did they not act? Because they were busy fighting the major battle against the Nazis, which was their main concern. But how hard would it have been to bomb the railway tracks leading to the death camps? When you go there, and many of you have been there - I was there with some of you, several times - you see they could have bombed the camps. They were already bombing that awful chemical plant only seconds away. They would only have needed to tilt the plane a bit and could also have bombed the ramp and two incinerators, and the tracks. It wouldn't have made the slightest difference to their war effort. They knew and they did nothing.

Today they are very aware of it. They know, they hear, they see, they photograph. You don't need special intelligence, you only need to turn on the television, hear the news, read the newspaper. Will they act? Will they talk? Will they really talk? Will they attack? Will they condemn?

The Iranians say that it's against the Zionists, anti-Zionism. It was Martin Luther King who burst that bubble better than anyone else. He said, and I quote: "When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You're talking antisemitism!"

Martin Luther King. That's right. So that's what the Iranians say. But this is the truth. It is not only a threat against us, because it always begins with the Jews but never ends with the Jews. The hatred of Jews kindles an overall fire, and I expect that on this day, when I applaud the world for marking the most heinous crime in world history and the history of our people which was perpetrated against our people - I hope others will also learn the lesson. We already have.

I expect the world to learn the lesson and start fighting in words and in deeds against the new antisemitism. That is what I expect and I am certain, my friends, that you expect the same.'

The Beauty, the Beasts, and Birobidjan

General Sir John Monash (1865-1931), the son of German-born parents and a civil engineer by profession, commanded Australia’s Expeditionary Forces during the First World War. The grandson of a well-known printer/publisher in Krotoszyn, Baer Loebel Monasch, and nephew by marriage to the great historian Heinrich Graetz, he was not a religious Jew – he famously joked that on Yom Kippur he fasted from breakfast until lunch – but he was a proud one, accepting the honorary presidency of the Australian Zionist Federation when the latter was formed in 1927.

So esteemed was he by his fellow-countrymen and women that during the Great Depression, when there was widespread anxiety over the leftist direction of New South Wales Premier Jack Lang and other politicians, Monash was approached to, in effect lead, a rightwing coup, and his state funeral cortège in 1931 (some months after this photo was taken, showing him at the annual Anzac Day parade) attracted the densest crowds – about 250,000 people – seen in Australia up to that time. He’s still commemorated in a variety of ways, with his name that of a university in his native Melbourne and his face on the $A100 banknote. There’s little doubt that his very presence on the national scene – in fact, his consensual status among his contemporaries as the greatest living Australian – helped to keep antisemitism disreputable and marginal.

Not that antisemitism has been very prevalent in Australia at any time. The fact that Jews arrived in Australia on the first day of European settlement in 1788 meant that they could not easily be depicted as strangers or aliens. Nineteenth-century Australia epitomised what the American historian Frederick Jackson Turner defined as a "frontier society", and Jews have done well in such societies, helping to pioneer them alongside non-Jews.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries antisemitism in Australia consisted largely of stereotypical depictions, especially cartoons, in certain populist periodicals – Jews as flashy, hook-nosed, money-grubbers, and there were scurrilous allegations of Jewish "money-power" during the Boer War. During the Nazi era, the German consul in South Australia, where a number of pro-Nazi Germans lived, drew up a list of Jews in Australia in the event of a Nazi invasion, and after the war there was some resentment against the arrival of Holocaust survivors, who were portrayed in some populist circles as taking jobs away from Australians still to be demobbed. (This cartoon, of Jews arriving under the approving gaze of immigration minister Arthur Calwell, is from a 1946  issue of the Sydney Bulletin, long an offender in carrying that sort of thing.)  Post-Second World War, antisemitism – sometimes including Holocaust denial – surfaced in the ravings of the far-right League of Rights, and among some formerly pro-Nazi elements within such immigrant groups such as Croatians and Hungarians, while anti-Zionism (not always devoid of antisemitic utterances) has been a feature of the far left, and of some sections of the Muslim community.

Nevertheless, in the scheme of things, antisemitism in Australia is and always has been relatively insignificant – after all, two native-born Jews, Sir Isaac Isaacs and Sir Zelman Cowen, reached the highest office in the land, the governor-generalship – and so it’s easy to forget and startling to be reminded that the laid-back "Lucky Country" produced the woman whom Efraim Zuroff, of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem, has described as "especially dangerous, because she is so attractive and can put a pretty face on a very ugly movement".

Born in 1946, Michèle Mainwaring was a beauty queen – Miss Newcastle [NSW], 1968 – who went on to marry, in 1970, an Australian psychiatrist of Russian background, she controversially styling herself Countess Griaznoff on the basis of a disputed title in his family, before making a brief marriage in 1991 to the Australian financier Sir Frank Renouf, nearly thirty years her senior, with whom she set up home in London, where she continues to be based.

As Lady Renouf, she has become notorious for her support of and personal friendship with some of the big beasts of the Holocaust denial movement including Germar Rudolf and Ernst Zündel – here she is (at right) with the Frenchman Robert Faurisson at his 80th birthday party in Paris – and here she is (below) with the Australian Holocaust denier Frederick Toben – as well as Bishop Richard Williamson and the Holocaust minimiser – he denies that he’s a denier altogether – David Irving. When Irving brought his unsuccessful civil libel action in 2001 against American historian Deborah Lipstadt, Lady Renouf approached her friend, Saudi Prince Fahd bin Salman, for funds for Irving, but the prince died before anything was finalised.

That same year she wrote a letter to the London Evening Standard newspaper complaining of biased BBC coverage of the Irving-Lipstadt trial, giving her address as the Reform Club in Pall Mall, where she had already taken Irving as her guest, and from which she was later expelled in consequence.

In 2005, during his trial in Vienna for Holocaust denial, which she attended, Lady Renouf organised financial support for Irving's family, maintained his website, and called for "so-called Holocaust victims" to be "exhumed to see whether they died from typhoid or gas". Although, at David Duke’s EURO Conference at New Orleans in 2005, she’d shared a platform with the notorious Nick Griffin (who’d once done a little Holocaust denying himself, it seems), in 2006 Griffin’s British National Party (BNP) barred her from addressing its Croydon branch on Irving's situation since "her presence would put the BNP in a bad light".

She’s described Judaism as a "repugnant and hate-filled religion" and travelled to Teheran in 2006 for the "International Conference - Holocaust Review: A Global Vision", where she reportedly declared that Judaism possesses a "dangerously misanthropic tendency" and a "fundamentally anti-gentile narcissism", and that “the anti-gentile nature of Judaism” causes antisemitism. She’s made documentary films called Palestine Scrapbook (featuring interviews with British ex-servicemen who served in Palestine during 1945-8, which was screened twice at the Westminster Parliament) and Israel in Flagrante, which features the meshugge Neturei Karta movement, and was aired in Cairo in 2004. Jailing Opinions, focusing on Holocaust denial, followed in 2006, to be itself followed by Pious Piracy, which casts doubt on the existence of Jesus.

Lady Renouf is obsessed with the bizarre notion that Birobidjan – the Jewish autonomous oblast in the far east of the Soviet Union, that Stalin dreamed up, is the true destination of the Jews; she wants the Israelis to up sticks and relocate there. She has a website dedicated to what she terms "an all round common sense campaign option for the first Jewish homeland" of Birobidjan, and spoke on the subject of Birobidjan in January this year at a conference on the UN Security Council and on 3 June (the day following the Commemoration Conference for Imam Khomeini)at the presidential headquarters in Teheran, when Ahmadinejad and 1000 international guests were on hand to hear her, in Muslim attire, say:

‘ Most Excellent President – unparalleled in our time. Our admirable hosts; and fellow lucky colleagues.

Imam Khomeini is our role model. Indeed he is a role model for the West, and it surely is our duty to make the West aware of why. For Imam Khomeini answers the question of what is Justice, to advise: "Ask your Reason, for Reason is the eye of Justice". Iran and the West share the ancient classical Greek tradition of scientific attitude, which Imam Khomeini has sustained whilst the West has been led astray and fallen prey to what I call predatory "swindle-speak". The Classical Greek tradition is based on the four inseparable virtues, namely temperance, wisdom (with scientific attitude), justice and courage.

In the last two days I have been asked which quality I most admire in Imam Khomeini, yet the reason why he is a role model for both Iran and the West is because he sustains all four virtuous qualities which are useless if separated. For, as he and President Ahmadinejad - himself a role model as exemplified in his Teheran Conference in 2006 - show us, "historical truth goes by evidence not emotion" (to quote the last courageous Christian Bishop, Richard Williamson), and that without historical truth there can be no international justice.

Imam Khomeini was a great champion of Palestine and understood that the League of Nations and later the UN were Zionist initiatives which defied historical truth and thereby created the anti-democratic, pro-Zionist, privileged veto. The very basis of the UN is the self-same specious nature of the Nuremberg Trials of 1945 and 1946. At the time five Supreme Court judges in America denounced the Nuremberg show-trials, conducted by the so-called victorious Allies, as a "judicial farce" by a "lynch mob". These forgotten Judges declared that hearsay evidence and testimony obtained by torture are illegitimate instruments and that parties who act both as judge and jury fly in the face of natural justice.

Imam Khomeini would surely wish us to make known the two fundamental swindles by those who create and control the media and public information narrative. These refer to the fact firstly that the Zionist Entity had no moral right at any time to pirate Palestine, and secondly that European Jewry had no such necessity. Half a century before World War II (and therefore making World War Two irrelevant to the issue) Theodor Herzl’s 1895 blueprint for The Jewish State instituted the genocidal policy towards the indigenous Palestinians, who to use his euphemistic term were to "disappear", to be replaced by Jews.

Inter-war Birobidjan propaganda poster

Herzl’s 1895 genocidal policy means that the Jews were the culprits not the victims, and thus had no moral right at any time to Palestine. Indeed after 1928 European Jews had no need to pirate Palestine, and to this day a Jewish Autonomous Region called Birobidjan exists peacefully and available on Russia’s south-east border with China, having never displaced an indigenous people for its creation. Today some Jews try to claim that it was an act of anti-semitism when Stalin gave this region of 30,000 sq. km (the size of Switzerland) to Jews. The truth is that Stalin was providing every ethnic group comprising the Soviet Union with its own autonomous region, and nothing "antisemitic" has ever endangered Birobidjan. Furthermore in 1945 when European Jews were crying "We have no homeland, we need and deserve Palestine" – again they lied, for in 1945 there was no political impediment to prevent European Jewry heading for the welcome arms of their vast and long-established Jewish Autonomous Region in Birobidjan.

The same is true today, yet in our mainstream media we hear not a word of Birobidjan. Only rarely does the Jewish Telegraphic Agency mention Birobidjan, and when it does it refers to it disingenuously as a "district". Which district in the world is the size of Switzerland? The fact is that since the dissolution of the Soviet Union its ethnically autonomous regions have been entitled to republic status, yet the JTA lets us know that due to so-called "sensitivity" to Israel, Birobidjan has declined, due to fear of raising gentile public awareness of its existence, to acknowledge this first Jewish homeland, and all but state and republic.

My hope is that our President Ahmadinejad, who speaks the whole truth bravely, will promote awareness of the first Jewish homeland and that there is no need for European Jews to go back to Germany, Poland or Austria when they have their own state whose first language is Yiddish. Please view my first homeland option website at www.birobidjan.co.uk for, in the spirit of Imam Khomeini, there you will find a campaign for moral and morale rearmament. The Palestinians whose Nakba constitutes the greatest tragedy of the 20th century – those brave voters who democratically elected the long heroic Hamas - deserve the return of every inch of their tormented land, and not any part in the specious "one-state two-state" farce. The immediate vacation of European Jews from all of Palestine and compensation to the indigenous Arab people is more than overdue to those who, for more than a century, continue to fight for Reason at the front line of historical truth and international justice for all of us.'  [My emphasis]

Below is an agency report that appeared in a Sydney Jewish newspaper in the 1950s. It made the not unreasonable assumption that the Holocaust, by revealing the horrors of where Jew-hatred can lead, had put paid to antisemitism. But as we’ve since found, the Holocaust only made the utterance of anti-semitism shocking – and unacceptable in polite society.

As Conor Cruise O’Brien remarked, the monstrous old beast is “a very light sleeper”. And as we have seen in recent years, the monstrous old beast is fully awake once again. The Hebrew Standard’s headline was just another case of "famous last words".

Ahmadinejad, the Bomb, and the Twelfth Imam

Earlier this month the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency warned that Iranian scientists – who in February this year were enriching uranium to just 5 per cent at the plant in Natanz – have made at least 22 kilograms of enriched uranium of up to 20 per cent purity. Although this is 70 per cent lower than weapons-grade uranium, the Iranians have thereby achieved a significant breakthrough. While sanctions have had an affect on the Iranian economy they have not hindered Ahmadinejad’s nuclear ambitions, and consequently Iran could have the Bomb within a year.


Ahmadinejad’s declaration a few years ago that Israel should be “wiped off the map” was widely dismissed as demagoguery or bluster – in much the same way as Hamas’s genocidal charter is – or else attributed to a clumsy misinterpretation of his remarks. Israel’s enemies were quick to point out that if Israel has a nuclear arsenal it is reasonable for Iran to have one too. The lefties blazed forth with their usual line: that the nuclear club should not be restricted to the United States and its allies. And the naïve have contentedly accepted that Iran’s nuclear acquisitions are intended for peaceful purposes only.

A poll taken in June on behalf of the Chicago Council on Public Affairs asked “If Israel were to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, Iran were to retaliate against Israel, and the two were to go to war, the United States should or should not bring its military forces into the war on the side of Israel.” Of the 2,596 respondents, 56 per cent favoured the reply “No, it shouldn’t”, and 38 per cent the reply “Yes, it should”. And as the Jerusalem Post reports (20 September), Barack Obama, in an interview with the American news station CNBC, described as not “ideal” the option of preventative military action against Iran by the United States or Israel. "We continue to be open to diplomatic solutions to resolve this," he said. "We don't think that a war between Israel and Iran or military options would be the ideal way to solve this problem. But we are keeping all our options on the table."

How much longer will Obama dither? For how long will Obama – who responded last year in Turkey regarding whether he “sees America as uniquely qualified to lead the world?" with the retort that he believes “in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism" (hat tip: Caroline Glick) – act as if he has abdicated the leadership of the West? For how long will he allow his perceived weakness imperil Israel – and not only Israel but the rest of the democratic world? How his reluctance to act must warm the hearts of the Israel-hating American pundits whom I saw on Press TV months ago smirking in triumph as they declared that Israel will be unable to count on any endorsement or aid from the United States in any plan to attack Iran’s nuclear facility.

But the Holocaust-denying Iranian dictator has not the hallmarks of a fully rational man. The Balance of Terror depends upon rational nuclear regimes which recoil from the ghastly prospect of mutually assured destruction. Ahmadinejad, however, appears to believe in the concept of the Twelfth Imam, a sort of messianic figure whose coming will be preceded by a period of violent turmoil, which Ahmadinejad might seek to expedite by unleashing a nuclear catastrophe in the region regardless of the consequences for Palestinian Muslims as well as for Israeli Jews.

This ominous possibility has been explored by political scientist John von Heyking, of the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada. He has warned:

‘Ahmadinejad’s speeches and actions cannot be understood exclusively in terms of a despotic figure who radicalizes politics for the sake of power. He has chosen to radicalize Iranian politics in a particular way, and one that issues a direct challenge to the underpinnings of the regime. This returns us to Ahmadinejad’s references to the return of the Twelfth Imam. The Hojjatieh’s belief in humans’ power to effect his return, which, to repeat, are unorthodox for Shi’ites, should be of grave concern for everyone....

While Ahmadinejad has not drawn an explicit connection between his desire to see Israel wiped off the map and an activist belief in the Twelfth Imam’s return, the dots are there to be connected once one understands the tyrannical "logic" behind someone who, perhaps viewing himself as a self-proclaimed deputy for the Twelfth Imam, might wish to effect Mahdi’s return....

Western observers need to be able to understand the ideological and religious overtones of the current situation in Iran. Ahmadinejad’s peculiar references to the Twelfth Imam are no mere eccentricity to be taken lightly. Nor do they seem to be the rhetorical ploy of a politician manipulating the excitable masses (as some have interpreted Saddam Hussein’s embrace of Islamism in the later part of his rule). Minimally, Ahmadinejad’s speeches and actions portend a constitutional crisis for the Iranian regime. Maximally, there are times when one should take bombastic statements not as double-talk, but for what they are.’

John von Heyking was commenting in 2005, and as Teheran edges ever closer to possession of the Bomb his words have a terrible urgency. You can read his entire piece here: www.ashbrook.org/publicat/.../vonheyking/twelfthimam.html

Let's hope that someone shows it to Obama.