Ahmadinejad: ‘No limits’
Consistent in his cynicism, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has shown once again why Israel considers him a dire threat to it and the West.
Meeting with staff from the Atlantic on Tuesday, Ahmadinejad was given a chance to clear up his obscene views on the Holocaust and, well, deny his denial.
Instead, he took the occasion to sound like a “mere” revisionist. “The question is, why don’t we allow this subject to be examined further?” Ahmadinejad said. “It is incorrect to force only one view on the rest of the world.” He added: “How come when it comes to the subject of the Holocaust there is so much sensitivity?”
Ah, yes. The death of six million. The destruction of a civilization. An enemy who has vowed to finish off those who were lucky enough to escape. We can’t let it go, can we?
Ahmadinejad also suggested the stakes in containing a nuclear Iran when he dismissed the idea of a U.S. military strike. “The United States has never entered a serious war, and has never been victorious,” he said. “The United States doesn’t understand what war looks like. When a war starts, it knows no limits.”
Hearing that kind of veiled threat — of war with “no limits” — it becomes clear yet again why Israel refuses to dismiss Ahmadinejad or to treat his uranium-enriched saber-rattling as anything less than an existential threat. Perhaps Iran’s president is merely a provocateur, dialing up the rhetoric to make himself appear relevant back home. But Israel isn’t ready to take that kind of chance.
In a speech given at three Washington synagogues over Yom Kippur, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, asked American Jews to imagine themselves as Israeli policymakers. “Do you remain passive while Iran provides nuclear weaponry to terrorist groups, targets Tel Aviv with nuclear-tipped missiles, and triggers a nuclear arms race throughout the region? Or do you act, as Israel has now, joining with the United States and other like-minded nations in imposing sanctions on Iran, hoping to dissuade its rulers from nuclearizing? And, if that fails, do you keep all options on the table, with the potentially far-reaching risks those options entail?”
Painfully difficult questions, made more agonizing by the frightening rhetoric of Iran’s madman mouthpiece.
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