Interpreting Iranian Threats against Israel

by Joseph S. Spoerl (June 2018)

Cartoon from Summer 2016 Holocaust Cartoon Contest held in Iran:[1]

Special mention: Misha (Russia)

 

In 2006, a controversy erupted over a statement made in October 2005 by then-President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Had Ahmadinejad said that Israel should be “wiped off the map” or merely that “this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time”? The New York Times had initially reported the former,[2] but left-wing anti-Israeli commentators like Juan Cole of the University of Michigan and Jonathan Steele of the Guardian argued for the latter translation. Cole wrote, “I smell the whiff of [right-wing, anti-Iranian] war propaganda,” and Steele insisted that Ahmadinejad “was not making a military threat. He was calling for an end to the occupation of Jerusalem at some point in the future.”[3]

 

Cole and Steele may or may not have gotten the Persian right, but more importantly, they ignored the larger context of Ahmadinejad’s statement.

 

As for the Persian, the New York Times consulted respected translators, who informed them that “’wipe off’ or ‘wipe away’ is more accurate than ‘vanish’ because the Persian verb is active and transitive.”[4] On the other hand, in his biography of Ahmadinejad, the Iranian journalist Kasra Naji disagrees with the translators consulted by the Times and sides with Juan Cole regarding this one statement by Ahmadinejad.[5] However, unlike Cole and Steele, Naji has the honesty to cite examples of statements by Ahmadinejad and other Iranian leaders clearly calling for Israel to be erased, excised, or obliterated.[6]

 

As for the larger context, it includes the whole world view of the Iranian regime as well as its military posture.

 

A central component of the Iranian regime’s ideology is paranoid Jew-hatred that posits a global conspiracy of Jews allegedly aiming at the destruction of the Islamic faith. The Zionist movement and Israel are the leading edge of this supposed Jewish plot to destroy Islam and Muslims. This image of Jews as the enemies of Islam who must be subjugated and placed under strict Islamic control is rooted in the Koran, Islamic law, and the earliest extant biographies of Muhammad.[7]

 

Supplementing these Islamic sources, in the 20th century, Islamists like those who rule Iran have enthusiastically embraced a Western anti-Semitic work, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This work is a forgery produced by the Tsarist Russian secret police roughly around 1900 in which the Jews are portrayed as conspiring to take over the world and destroy all non-Jewish religions.[8] Iran expert Orly Rahimiyan writes: “The Islamic Revolution [of 1979] was accompanied by a continuous wave of Protocols editions, alongside other anti-Israel and anti-Jewish texts.”[9] The Iranian state promotes the Protocols as part of its official propaganda: “. . . since the revolution, they have been issued by government publishing houses such as that of the Revolutionary Guards, the department of Translation and Publication, the Islamic Culture and Relations Organization, and the Propaganda Department.”[10] Another Iran expert, Meir Litvak, writes: “. . . state-run Iranian television regularly broadcasts documentaries and drama shows based on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Such programs claim that the State of Israel was founded on the basis of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which exposed the Jewish plot to take over the world.”[11] Iranian Holocaust-denial stems from the same anti-Semitic conspiracy thinking: If the Holocaust is a myth, this can only mean that malevolent Jewish conspirators control media, academia, and political parties across the Western world.[12]

 

In his classic study of the Protocols, aptly entitled Warrant for Genocide, historian Norman Cohn summed up the significance of this toxic forgery as follows:

 

As I see it, the deadliest kind of antisemitism, the kind that results in massacre and attempted genocide, has little to do with real conflicts of interest between living people or even with racial prejudice as such. At its heart lies the belief that Jews—all Jews everywhere—form a conspiratorial body set on ruining and then dominating the rest of mankind.[13]

 

This is precisely the type of anti-Semitism that was a central aspect of Adolf Hitler’s world-view[14] and which has now become a central component of the ideology of the Iranian state.[15] Adolf Hitler’s words perfectly capture the thinking of the Iranian leadership from 1979 to the present: “I have read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion—it simply appalled me. The stealthiness of the enemy, and his ubiquity! I saw at once that we must copy it—in our own way, of course . . . It is in truth the critical battle for the fate of the world.”[16] This way of thinking about the Jews is the real reason behind any sort of threat against Israel emanating from the Iranian regime.

 

[20]

 

Against this background, attempts by Juan Cole and Jonathan Steele to put a benign interpretation on Ahmadinejad’s 2005 statement about Israel are clearly an obfuscation of the real import of the Iranian president’s words. Cole and Steele are not isolated or insignificant examples of such obfuscation. They represent a long and dishonorable tradition of Western leftists and academics willfully mischaracterizing the Iranian regime and Islamist movements generally. The American historian George L. Simpson has published an important recent article copiously documenting Western leftist and liberal delusions about Khomeini and his regime.[21] Political scientist Ofira Seliktar has documented decades of American policy and intelligence failures regarding Iran, noting that “[t]he failures are deeply rooted at every level. The paradigms that drive American foreign policy are generated by a scholarly community often highly politicized and out of touch with reality,”[22] a point that Martin Kramer had made more generally about academic Mideast Studies in the USA a decade earlier.[23] Neil J. Kressel, a professor of psychology at William Paterson University, has documented in great detail how the social sciences in the USA have almost completely ignored the widespread phenomenon of Islamic anti-Semitism, which explains why US policy makers and journalists are so ignorant on this important topic.[24] As historian Jeffrey Herf, a leading authority on Nazi Germany and a keen student of US Iran policy, has written, “The scholarship on the history of anti-Semitism hasn’t yet had a significant impact on the policy discussions in Washington about Iran.”[25]

 

Professor Juan Cole is a paradigmatic example of such politicized detachment from reality in the academic realm, as is The Guardian in the journalistic world. It is this same detachment from reality that leads leftists like Jeremy Corbyn and Judith Butler to describe Hamas and Hezbollah as “friends” or “progressive” members of the “global left.”[26]

 

Moreover, since the 2006 controversy over the exact translation of Ahmadinejad’s Persian, the Iranian regime has helpfully provided us with a flood of new evidence regarding its real intentions vis-à-vis Israel. Much of this has come from the English-language news outlets of the Iranian regime itself (e.g. Fars News, IRNA, Press TV, Tasnim), sparing us the task of translating from Persian to English and thus risking misinterpretation of their true meaning. Consider a Fars News release in English dated April 21, 2018, quoting the Commander of Iran’s Army, Major General Abdolrahim Moussavi.[27] The article quotes General Moussavi as saying of Israel,

 

’. . . we shouldn’t allow one day to be added to the ominous and illegitimate life of this regime,’ General Moussavi said. He ensured annihilation of the Zionist regime in 25 years, but said this would not mean the IRGC [Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps] would sit and do nothing for 25 years. ‘The Army will move hand in hand with the IRGC so that the arrogant system will collapse and the Zionist regime will be annihilated,’ General Moussavi said.

 

Addressing the “Zionists,” the IRGC Lieutenant Commander Brigadier General Hossein Salami is quoted in the same article as saying,

 

 

Back in 2006, when discussing Ahmadinejad’s statement about making Israel disappear, Jonathan Steele insisted that Ahmadinejad was merely “making a vague wish for the future” and predicting the eventual collapse of the Zionist state of Israel, which would pave the way for “regime change.”[28] Steele wrote then that the Iranian president’s language “makes it crystal clear that he is talking about regime change, not the end of Israel.” And of course, many Western leftists also would love to see “regime change” in Israel, which is exactly what the BDS and one-state movements seek.[29] To these anti-Israeli leftists, Ahmadinejad’s position was not so unreasonable after all.

 

The above quotations from two of Iran’s top military commanders show how misguided this all is. The context makes it crystal clear that the prediction of Israel’s demise is also a threat, and a violent one at that. Read again this key statement: “He [the commander of the Iranian Army] ensured annihilation of the Zionist regime in 25 years, but said this would not mean the IRGC [Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps] would sit and do nothing for 25 years. ‘The Army will move hand in hand with the IRGC so that the arrogant system will collapse and the Zionist regime will be annihilated,’ General Moussavi said.” In other words, Iran is actively working to ensure that its “prediction” will come true. (We might also wish to interpret Ahmadinejad’s 2005 statement in the context of statements he made in 2010, when he denied that Israeli Jews are even human, asserting that they “only appear to be human,” and anyway, since they are atheists, they “are not entitled to man’s minimal rights.”[30] These chilling words would seem to portend something a bit rougher than mere “regime change.”)

 

reported, “Iran can strike Israel directly through Hezbollah, which is believed to have more than 100,000 missiles and rockets, some capable of hitting major Israeli cities and sensitive infrastructure.”[33] Israel may have the best missile defense system in the world,[34] but even it can be overwhelmed by sheer volume. That appears to be the Iranian strategy. Even without nuclear weapons, the Iranian threat to Israel is an existential threat. Iran’s steadfast support for Hamas, Hezbollah, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad makes the threat that much more serious.[35]

 

I also include in the following Appendix threats against Israel by the Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah. The reason is that Hezbollah is a close ally of Iran and espouses the same ideology as the Iranian regime. Hezbollah has “assimilated the doctrine of the Islamic Republic of Iran totally and pledged allegiance to its leader, Ayatollah Khomeyni [or Khomeini], and his heir, ‘Ali Khamaneh’i [or Khamenei].”[36] For Hezbollah, “The struggle with Israel and the Jews is a total life-or-death war,” a modern continuation of the historical struggle between Judaism and Islam dating back to the founding of Islam.[37] According to Hezbollah leaders, “either we destroy Israel or Israel destroys us,”[38] “the Jews are the enemy of the entire human race,”[39] and “the struggle with the Jews is a struggle for Islamic survival.”[40] Like Iran (and Hamas[41]), Hezbollah uses the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in its propaganda.[42] Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, has repeatedly denied Israel’s right to exist, threatened to wipe Israel out, and stated in 2002 that “If they [the Jews] all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.”[43] The foundational statement of the Hezbollah program proclaims that “our struggle will end only when this entity [Israel] is obliterated. We recognize no treaty with it, no cease fire, and no peace agreements . . .”[44]

 

[46] Khomeini warned his followers that “the Jews . . . are opposed to the very foundations of Islam and wish to establish Jewish domination throughout the world.”[47] Khomeini’s paranoid, Judaeophobic conspiracy thinking lives on in Iranian state propaganda that is strikingly reminiscent of Nazi propaganda, for it features the same stark dichotomy: “Either we destroy them, or they destroy us.”[48] Every single threat to Israel emanating from Iran and its allies must be interpreted in light of this fact.

 

Appendix: Iranian Threats to Destroy Israel

(in reverse chronological order)

 

 

 

https://www.memri.org/tv/iranian-official-azghadi-west-trying-to-prevent-iraq-from-leading-arab-world/transcript</a>;

 

 

 

 

https://www.memri.org/reports/hizbullah-leader-nasrallah-im-not-worried-about-iran-situation-i-discussed-support-intifada</a>;

 

 

https://www.memri.org/tv/iranian-speakers-new-zealand-quds-day-holocaust-fake-israel-cancerous-tumor/transcript</a>;

 

 

https://www.memri.org/reports/khamenei-speech-irans-sixth-international-conference-support-palestinian-intifada-we-stand</a>;

 

 

 

http://www.memritv.org/clip_transcript/en/5624.htm.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/7335.htm</a>;

 

 

 

 

“Antisemitic Statements, Publications by Iranian Regime,” Middle East Media Research Institute, Special Dispatch No. 4445, January 25, 2012, accessed January 25, 2012,  http://www.memri.org/report/en/print6024.htm.

 

 

Patrick Devenny, “Hezbollah’s Strategic Threat to Israel,” Middle East Quarterly 13, no. 1 (Winter 2006): pp. 31-38, accessed Dec. 6, 2005, http://www.meforum.org/806/hezbollahs-strategic-threat-to-israel.

 

 

“Former Iranian President Rafsanjani on Using a Nuclear Bomb Against Israel,” Middle East Media Research Institute, Special Dispatch Series No. 325, January 3, 2002, accessed May 18, 2005, http://www.memri.org/report/en/print582.htm.

 

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[1] “Tehran Presents the Winners of Iran’s 2016 Holocaust International Cartoon Contest,” Middle East Media Research Institute, Special Dispatch No. 6454, June 1, 2016, accessed June 1, 2016, http://www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/9227.htm.

[2] Nazila Fathi, “Iran’s New President Says Israel ‘Must Be Wiped Off the Map,’” The New York Times, October 27, 2005, accessed Sept. 15, 2017, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/27/world/middleeast/irans-new-president-says-israel-must-be-wiped-off-the-map.html?_r=0.

[3] Steele as cited in Ethan Bronner, “Just How Far Did they Go, Those Words Against Israel?”, The New York Times, June 11, 2006, accessed April 25, 2018,  https://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/11/weekinreview/11bronner.html. See also, Jonathan Steele, “Lost in translation,” The Guardian, June 14, 2006, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/jun/14/post155.

[4] Ethan Bronner, “Just How Far Did they Go, Those Words Against Israel?”, The New York Times, June 11, 2006, accessed April 25, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/11/weekinreview/11bronner.html. 

[5] Kasra Naji, Ahmadinejad  (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), pp. 139-140

[6] Naji, Ahmadinejad, pp. 141-149, 152-153.

http://www.memri.org/report/en/print6956.htm</a>;

https://www.academia.edu/12425107/_Muhammad_and_the_Jews_According_to_Ibn_Ishaq_The_Levantine_Review_Volume_2_No.1_2013_pp._84-103</a>;  and Joseph S. Spoerl, “Tolerance and Coercion in the Sira of Ibn Ishaq,” The Levantine Review 4:1 (Spring 2015), pp. 43-66, file:///C:/Users/jspoerl/Downloads/8719-14673-1-PB.pdf.

[8] Sergyei A. Nilus, World Conquest through World Government: The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, Victor E. Marsden trans. (London: Britons Publishing Company, 1963). The Jews are portrayed here as seeking “the killing out of the goyim [i.e. non-Jews]” (p. 30, Protocol III) and as stating, “it will be undesirable for us that there should exist any other religion than ours…We must therefore sweep away all other forms of belief” (p. 67, Protocol XIV). On the historical origins of the Protocols, see Esther Webman ed., The Global Impact of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: A Century-Old Myth (London and New York: Routledge/Taylor and Francis, 2011), pp. 1-43.

[9] Orly R. Rahimiyan, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Iranian political and cultural discourse,” in Esther Webman ed., The Global Impact of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (London and New York: Routledge/Taylor and Francis, 2011), p. 200.

[10] Rahimiyan, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Iranian political and cultural discourse,” p. 204.

http://jsantisemitism.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Holocaust-denial-Ayatollahs-Iran.pdf</a>; E. Zigron and A. Savyon, “The Image of the Jew In The Eyes of Iran’s Islamic Regime – Part II: The Blood Libel and the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion,’” Middle East Media Research Institute, Inquiry and Analysis Series Report No. 944, March 6, 2013, accessed March 7, 2013, http://www.memri.org/report/en/print7050.htm.

http://jsantisemitism.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Holocaust-denial-Ayatollahs-Iran.pdf</a>; Matthias Küntzel, “Judeophobia and the Denial of the Holocaust in Iran,” Posen Papers in Contemporary Antisemitism No. 8, 2007, Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, http://www.matthiaskuentzel.de/contents/holy-hatreds-holocaust-denial-and-antisemitism-in-iran.

[13] Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (New York and Evanston: Harper Torchbooks/Harper and Row, 1969), p. 16.

http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm?frm=189114&sec_id=189114.

[16] Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, pp. 182-183.

[17] Wistrich, Hitler’s Apocalypse, p. 180.

[18] Robert Wistrich, Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred (New York: Schocken Books, 1991), pp. 218-221.

[19] Matthias Küntzel, “Tehran’s Efforts to Mobilize Antisemitism: The Global Impact,” p. 510.

[20] Matthias Küntzel, “Tehran’s Efforts to Mobilize Antisemitism: The Global Impact,” p. 511.

[21] George L. Simpson, “Seeking Gandhi, Finding Khomeini: How America failed to understand the nature of the religious opposition of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in the Iranian Revolution,” The Journal of the Middle East and Africa 8:3 (2017): pp. 233-255.

[22] Ofira Seliktar, Navigating Iran: From Carter to Obama (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 179.

[23] Martin Kramer, Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America (Washington, DC: The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2001). See, more recently, by the same author: The War on Error: Israel, Islam, and the Middle East (New Brunswick, NJ and London, UK: Transaction Publishers, 2016).

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01973533.2016.1164704</a>; Neil J. Kressel, “The Great Failure of the Anti-Racist Community: How and Why Muslim Antisemitism Has Been Neglected in English-Language Courses, Textbooks, and Research,” in Eunice G. Pollack ed., From Antisemitism to Antizionism: The Past and Present of a Lethal Ideology (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2017), pp. 29-68.

[25] Jeffrey Herf, “Obama Misses the Mark on Iranian Anti-Semitism,” The Times of Israel, June 2, 2015, accessed June 3, 2015, http://www.meforum.org/5283/antisemitism-iran.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGj1PheWiFQ (accessed April 27, 2018); see also Camila Bassi, “’The Anti-Imperialism of Fools’: A Cautionary Story on the Revolutionary Socialist Vanguard of England’s Post-9/11 Anti-War Movement,” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 9:2 (2010): pp.113-137, last accessed May 7, 2018, https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/863</a>; Kramer, The War on Error, pp. 71-76 and 105-112.

[27] “Army Commander: Zionist regime Annihilated in 25 Years,” Fars News, April 21, 2018, accessed April 23, 2018, http://en.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13970201000537.

[28] Jonathan Steele, “Lost in translation,” The Guardian, June 14, 2006, accessed April 25, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/jun/14/post155.

[29] See Joseph S. Spoerl, “Whitewashing Palestine to Eliminate Israel: The Case of the One-State Advocates,” Jewish Political Studies Review 26:3-4 (Fall 2014), last accessed May 7, 2018, http://jcpa.org/article/whitewashing-palestine-eliminate-israel-case-one-state-advocates/.

[30] “Antisemitic Statements, Publications by Iranian Regime,” Middle East Media Research Institute, Special Dispatch No. 4445, January 25, 2012, accessed January 25, 2012,  http://www.memri.org/report/en/print6024.htm.

[31] In a seminar that I attended at Tel Aviv University on June 2, 2010, Dr. Uzi Rubin told the audience that the missile threat from Iran and Hezbollah was already classified by Israel as a strategic threat, not a mere terrorist threat. He said that Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah were all armed with (among other weapons) the Fateh 110 (or M500) short-range ballistic missile with a solid-fuel engine, a half-ton conventional warhead, precision GPS targeting technology, and a range that included virtually all of Israel. He estimated that each of these missiles cost Iran a mere $10,000 to build and that Iran could produce them “like sausages.” Iran’s missile technology, of course, has improved further since 2010, as has its control over Syria and the size of its arsenal in Lebanon. Already in 2010, Dr. Rubin said, Hezbollah’s missiles could “cripple power plants, airports, sea ports, population centers, military installations” (from my notes taken during the seminar).

[32] Uzi Rubin, “The Nuclear Agreement Boosts Iran’s Missile Threat,” Defense News, October 5, 2015, accessed October 7, 2015, https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/commentary/2015/10/05/the-nuclear-agreement-boosts-irans-missile-threat/.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/13/world/middleeast/iran-nuclear-mideast-conflict.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/israel-to-launch-one-of-the-most-advanced-missile-defense-systems-in-the-world-with-us-help/2016/03/03/6383cb88-dfd5-11e5-8c00-8aa03741dced_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.7ab33ce74e94.

[35] “Sinwar: Iran is Hamas’ Largest Backer Financially, Militarily,” Asharq al-Awsat, August 29, 2017, accessed August 29, 2017, https://eng-archive.aawsat.com/theaawsat/world-news/sinwar-iran-hamas-largest-backer-financially-militarily. On the tight connection between Iran and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, see Jacob Lassner and S. Ilan Troen, Jews and Muslims in the Arab World: Haunted by Pasts Real and Imagined (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), pp. 136-141. On Hezbollah, see below.

[36] Esther Webman, Anti-Semitic Motifs in the Ideology of Hizbollah and Hamas (Tel Aviv: The Project for the Study of Anti-Semitism at Tel Aviv University, 1994), p. 6. The Hezbollah leadership has embraced the Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei as its marja or their ultimate authority on Islamic law: Augustus Richard Norton, Hezbollah: A Short History (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 100. More recently, see Amir Toumaj, “Hezbollah chief’s censored speech reaffirms group as Tehran’s arm in Lebanon,” May 4, 2018, The Long War Journal, accessed May 4, 2018,  https://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2018/05/hezbollah-chiefs-censored-speech-reaffirms-group-as-iran-proxy.php.

https://www.ict.org.il/Article/457/Anti-Semitic-Motifs-in-the-Ideology-of-Hizballah-and-Hamas?articleid=51#Publications&gsc.tab=0.)

[38] Webman, Anti-Semitic Motifs in the Ideology of Hizbollah and Hamas, p. 7

[39] Webman, Anti-Semitic Motifs in the Ideology of Hizbollah and Hamas, p. 10.

[40] Webman, Anti-Semitic Motifs in the Ideology of Hizbollah and Hamas, p. 13.

[41] Webman, Anti-Semitic Motifs in the Ideology of Hizbollah and Hamas, p. 20. See also the “Hamas Covenant,” Article 32, “The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement – Hamas,” Middle East Media Research Institute, Special Dispatch Series No. 1092, February 14, 2006, accessed Feb. 14, 2006,  http://www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/1609.htm.

[42] Esther Webman, “Adoption of the Protocols in the Arab discourse on the Arab-Israeli conflict, Zionism, and the Jews.” In Esther Webman ed., The Global Impact of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: A Century-Old Myth (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 177. See also Thanassis Cambanis, A Privilege to Die: Inside Hezbollah’s Legions and their Endless War Against Israel (New York: Free Press, 2010), pp. 194-5.

[43] Anti-Defamation League, “Hezbollah,” February 6, 2013, http://www.adl.org/assets/pdf/combating-hate/Hezbollah-backgrounder-2013-1-10-v1.pdf.

[44] “The Hezbollah Program: An Open Letter,” February 16, 1985, in Itamar Rabinovich and Yehuda Reinharz eds., Israel in the Middle East: Documents and Readings on Society, Politics, and Foreign Relations, Pre-1948 to the Present, second ed. (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2008), p. 427.

[45] Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, p. 214.

[46] Amir Taheri, The Spirit of Allah: Khomeini and the Islamic Revolution (Bethesda, MD: Adler and Adler, 1985), p. 159.

[48] For an especially vivid example of this, see: “Khamenei Associate Mehdi Taeb: ‘The Jews…Are The Only Ones Who Need Weapons Of Mass destruction In Order To Rule The World – Because There Are 1.4 Billion Muslims And None Of Them Agree To Jewish Supremacy,’” Middle East Media Research Institute, Special Dispatch No. 6759, January 27, 2017, accessed January 27, 2017, https://www.memri.org/reports/khamenei-associate-mehdi-taeb-jews-are-only-ones-who-need-weapons-mass-destruction-order.

 

__________________________________
Joseph S. Spoerl is Professor of Philosophy and Chairman of Philosophy at Saint Anselm College. His research interests include Ethics, Business Ethics, Modern Philosophy, Critical Thinking, Formal Logic, and more, and teaches classes in those subjects.

More by Joseph S. Spoerl here.

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