Iran’s frightening words let us see enemy for what it really is
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad hasn’t taken long to show his true colours and now in the words of poet W. H. Auden in September 1, 1939, the clever hopes of a low dishonest decade are expiring.
We are finally seeing the enemy for what it is. As President George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” speech warned, and as did Auden 65 years ago, appeasement of evildoers doesn’t work.
Ahmadinejad last week declared Israel is a “disgraceful blot” on the world and must be “wiped off” the map.
He and his fanatics may soon have the means to obliterate Israel, too, for Iran is in a rush to grab nuclear weapons.
Ahmadinejad’s words were backed up by Seyed Massoud Jazihiri, of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, who described Israel as a “cancerous tumour” on the world. Frankly, most decent individuals would describe Iran itself, under its current mad regime, as a “cancerous tumour” alongside, North Korea, under its equally mad leader Kim Jong-il, who also plans a nuclear arsenal and is threatening the world.
The Iranian president’s threat—no, it’s not just a threat, it’s a promise—has even stirred Prime Minister Paul Martin.
Martin’s and Jean Chretien’s Liberal government, faced with 113 anti-Israeli motions in the UN, supported 78 of them, and simply abstained on the other 35.
Not once, until now, have the Liberals felt for Israel’s plight.
Now, a flabbergasted Martin says: “This is the 21st century and Canada will never accept such such hatred, such intolerance and anti-Semitism of this kind.”
He added: “We vigorously condemn what the Iranian president said.”
That’s a bit hypocritical, since the stance of both Martin and his predecessor Chretien has been to ignore time-after-time and year-after-year those similar expressions of hatred against Israel in the UN.
Foreign Minister Pierre Pettigrew also appears to have woken from his slumbers in his apartment in Paris to threats Arab sheikdoms have been making against Israel are real.
“This is becoming just too dangerous,” he said. “It’s a very explosive combination. Racist ideology and nuclear weapons.”
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, whose government certainly doesn’t have Canada’s shameful anti-Israeli record in the UN, and whose words therefore are surely not hypocritical, expressed “a real sense of revulsion” at Ahmadinejad’s plots to see Israel annihilated.
“Their attitude towards Israel, their attitude towards terrorism, their attitude towards the nuclear weapons issue isn’t acceptable,” said Blair, who also added the western democracies may be forced to launch a pre-emptive strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Actually, that’s exactly what Israel itself did in 1981 when its air force performed an incredible feat, flying hundreds of miles at low level, and wiped out Saddam Hussein’s Osirak nuclear reactor, sabotaging his plans for an atomic arsenal.
At the time, the UN condemned Israel for its action.
One can’t even imagine the grotesque scenario that would have unfolded but for the Israeli assault.
Yet now, the world’s democratically elected leaders are finally beginning to imagine what a world would look like with a radical Islamic bomb. Or rather, after an radical Islamic bomb had been launched at some innocent nation.
Even that fawning old fraud, French President Jacques Chirac, found Ahmadinejad’s words “senseless and irresponsible” and said Iran “runs the risk of his country being left on the outside by other nations.”
So, frighteningly, all that Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have been warning about the three rogue nations—Iraq until being liberated being one of them—becomes ever more clearly true.
And, as in the 1930s, when the weak western democracies, led by the Liberal-Left, tried to appease Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler at every touch and turn, including letting him carve up Czechoslovakia in the hope, as Auden noted, he would leave the rest of us alone, our appeasement of radical and rogue nations is coming back to haunt us.
A final word from Ahmadinejad to those of us who will still support Israel: “Anyone who recognizes Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nations’ fury.”
Well, just let’s see who stands firm in support of decency and the tiny democratic state of Israel, and who runs for their perceived own safety.
- Suzuki playing gutter politics - Sunday March 4, 2007 at 10:41 am
- Grit record terror-ible - Tuesday February 27, 2007 at 9:51 am
- Britain’s Blair takes tumble - Sunday February 18, 2007 at 10:53 am
