Benny Morris providing the elite with what it needs

Mideast Freedom Forum Berlin

Now that international economic and political sanctions have failed to stop the Iranian nuclear project – which all know is geared to the production of atomic weapons

One expects a level-headed, rational and scientific approach from a person calling themself a historian, not the parroting of offical propaganda, devoid of evidence.

or, Two, to resign oneself to a nuclear-armed Iran and to deter it from using its new weapons with the threat of nuclear retribution.

I wonder what makes any rational person believe the Iranians are likely to threaten a country, Israel, which can anihilate it, no doubt alone, without even using the nuclear weapon? What makes any level-headed person believe the Iranians or the Israelis would risk provoking a nuclear armageddon at such close quaters?

The wellknown American newspaper columnist, Charles Krauthammer, has recently argued that, given the failure of the Western containment strategy, a nuclear Iran is merely a matter of time, be it in 2009 or 2011 or 2013.

Rendez-vous in 2013, then. Since it goes without saying, that today's offical propaganda mouthpieces will, in one, three or five years, wether their leaders are in power or not, claim no evidence of nukes merely means dishonesty on the part of the Iranians, as they did with Saddam Hussein's regime, we will have to stick steadfastly to the evidence.

He accepts that the target of the Iranian nuclear project is Israel and that the Iranian regime, headed by Ahmadinejad, seeks to destroy Israel;they aim for a second Holocaust.

More official propaganda from the 'historian'. Is that last quoted phrase not akin to comparing the Shoah to any other holocaust? If the latter is antisemitism, what then is is the former?

President Bush must publicly announce that anyone who assaults Israel with nuclear weapons will immediately and automatically be obliterated by the American nuclear arsenal.

As if we didn't know it (Bush or no Bush) !

if Iran decided to call the American bluff and nuked Israel, what would be the point of an American assault on Iran? It would not bring the Jewish state back to life

When the US dropped two nukes on Japan, it did not wipe out the japanese political elite. What brought regime change (which, by the way, seems to be the desire of the iranian political elite if one bothers to listen) were the post-war impositions on and occupation of Japan by the dominant world force. Iran is no such thing. Only the US (and US allies with US blessing) can bring a lasting regime change by force. In short: nuking Israel won't destroy Zionism, and if the iranian political elite is as shrewd as even it's enemies depict it, it knows that full well.

and it would involve the slaughter of tens of millions of Iranians, most of them innocent, and the lasting hatred of the world’s one billion Muslims.

As if it weren't already the case! As if the US political elite cared!

Would a President, Obama or Clinton, for example, actually press the button in such circumstances? Without doubt, the Iranians have thought all this through – and most likely have dismissed this American threat as highly unlikely.

Refer to comment number two. Then recall Iraq.

Without Israel, Judaism, and the Jews, might well not [survive].

Yeah right.

Secondly, it is quite possible that among Iran’s leaders – and this probably includes President Ahmadinejad and other true believers – there are those who believe (a) that Allah will protect Iran and\or (b) that sacrificing Iran for Islam’s greater good ... The principle of selfsacrifice is deeply embedded in the psyche of messianic Islam.

Talk about a load of nonesense! A historian?! 1) lack of knowledge of Iran, Iranians, the Iranian Revolution, the iranian political elite. 2) caricatured vision of Islam.

Thirdly, the Iranians may believe that their mere possession of nuclear weaponry, with the missiles to deliver the bombs, will suffice to turn them into the Middle East’s hegemonic power and overawe Israel into gradual decline and disappearance.

Of course, Mr Morris has no evidence other than his own fantasies for this. Recent history certainly does not bear this out, as Persia/Iran has not attacked any foreign power since the early XVIIIth Century.

How long will the Israeli-Egyptian and Israeli-Jordanian peace treaties survive under the shadow of Iranian nuclear power? What Arab, indeed, what Palestinian, will make peace with Israel once assured of the backing of Iranian nuclear weapons? Will Oman and Qatar make peace? Will the Saudi peace initiative remain on the table?

Benny Morris has obviously strayed from the realm of history into the fantasy world of the mainstream media.

And will Israelis, fearful of extinction, not mob foreign embassies for visas to America and Europe? And what Jew will want to immigrate to Israel in such circumstances?

Isn't that already the case? How many young Israelis leaving the country? How many staunch supporters of Israel actually live in Israel? And this is not because of some imagined nuclear battle with Iran in some distant future. If anything, it's because of a colonial/liberation war taking place within Israel's own borders.

Iran’s leaders are not the cool, hard-headed opportunists who inhabited the Kremlin in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. The threat of mutually assured destruction probably does not move them. They march to a different tune, to a rough and beguiling chant that us secular, liberal, humanistic people cannot even hear, to the temptation of jihadist martyrdom and 70 dark-eyed virgins beckoning from the heavenly paradise.

Oh, Morris obviously doesn't share the vision of the shrewd, calculating persian mullahs and president held by so many racists among our elites. No, he prefers the caricature of the sex pervert fundamentalist muslim fanatic, enemy of freedom. The wonderfully constructed metaphor Benny Morris uses causes one to question wether he doesn't view the Iranians as dogs which as we all know can hear high-pitched sounds we humans cannot hear.

mad mullahs of Teheran

There you go again, Benny!

In truth, we don’t really know what the mad mullahs of Teheran will do – but we cannot take a chance ... And if this involves a protracted, conventional air assault on the Iranian nuclear facilities – then so be it. The Iranians will have brought that assault on their own heads.

And if, as in Iraq, we turned out to be wrong about the intentions of the 'mad Mullahs' then it'll still be their fault. So there!

It is terrible to contemplate the use of nuclear weapons to prevent others, murderous Iranian leaders, from acquiring nuclear weapons. But a second Holocaust is an even more horrific prospect to contemplate.

Understand: another jewish holocaust (note the capital 'H' in the quote). Says it all really: if a jewish holocaust is to be averted it may be necessary to resort to a persian holocaust.

All this would be funny of course, if it didn't read like a pre-invasion justification provided to the masters by the 'intellectual'.