In the first week of February 2012, a number of threats were made by Iran regarding a possible attack on Israel.
It began with the statement on Feb. 3, 2012 by Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khomeini, who has final say on all state matters, that Israel is a “cancerous tumor that should be cut and will be cut.” He was addressing thousands of worshipers attending a Tehran University prayer service marking the Fajr celebration.
“We have intervened in anti-Israel matters, and it brought victory in the 33-day war by Hizbullah against Israel in 2006, and in the 22-day war” between Hamas and Israel in Gaza, Khamenei was quoted as saying.
He added, “From now on, in any place, if any nation or any group confronts the Zionist regime, which is now weaker than ever, we will endorse and we will help. We have no fear expressing this.” The crowd met the statement by chanting "Death to Israel."
Then on Feb. 5, 2012, the Iranian parliament’s official website published an article calling on the government to attack Israel before the end of the year. According to Israeli TV Channel 2‘s, Ahmed Tavakoli posted the remark. Ahmad Tavakkoli is a conservative representative of Tehran in the Iranian parliament, and the Director of Iranian Parliament's Majlis Research Center. He had been the Iranian Minister of Labour and a presidential candidate in two of the presidential elections in Iran.
Veteran Middle East expert, Ehud Yaari, cites three reasons given in the article for the call.
- First – a religious fatwa allowing such a strike.
- Second – threats from Israel regarding a planned strike on Iran.
- And third – Iran’s alleged military capability to carry out such an attack.
The article specifies that the area between Lod and Jerusalem should be targeted, as well as Tel Nof Air Force Base.
And then in an article on Feb. 6, 2012 for wnd.com, Reza Kahlili, a pseudonym for a former CIA operative in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, told us that the Iranian government, through a website proxy, has laid out the legal and religious justification for the destruction of Israel and the slaughter of its people.
Alireza Forghani called Israel a danger to Islam and said the opportunity must not be lost to remove “this corrupting material.” The article was published on the Iranian conservative website Alef that has ties to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. It is a “‘jurisprudential justification” to kill all the Jews and annihilate Israel, and in that, the Islamic government of Iran must take the helm.”
The article is being run on most state-owned sites, including the Revolutionary Guards’ Fars News Agency, showing that the regime endorses this doctrine. Because Israel is going to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, Iran is justified in launching a pre-emptive, cataclysmic attack against the Jewish state, the doctrine argues.
Forghani details the Islamic duty of jihad as laid out in the Quran for the sake of Allah and states that “primary jihad,” according to some Shiite jurists, can only occur when the Hidden Imam, the Shiites’ 12th Imam Mahdi, returns. Shiites believe Mahdi’’s return will usher in Armageddon.
In the absence of the hidden Imam, Forghani says, “defensive jihad” could certainly take place when Islam is threatened, and Muslims must defend Islam and kill their enemies. To justify such action, Alef quotes the Shiites’ first imam, Ali, who stated “Waging war against the enemies with whom war is inevitable and there is a strong possibility that in near future they will attack Muslims is a must and the duty of Muslims.” In this regard, Ayatollah Khamenei has issued a fatwa in which he has even authorized carrying out primary jihad in the age of the absence of the Hidden imam under the authorization of Vali Faghih.
The article then quotes the Quran (Albaghara 2:191-193): “And slay them wherever ye find them, and drive them out of the places whence they drove you out, for persecution [of Muslims] is worse than slaughter [of non-believers] … and fight them until persecution is no more, and religion is for Allah.”
It is the duty for all Muslims to participate in this defensive jihad, Forghani says. A fatwa by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini made it clear that any political domination by infidels over Muslims authorizes Muslims to defend Islam by all means. Iran now has the ICBM means to deliver destruction on Israel and soon will have nuclear warheads for those missiles.
In order to attack Iran, the article says, Israel needs the approval and assistance of America, and under the current passive climate in the United States, the opportunity must not be lost to wipe out Israel before it attacks Iran.
Forghani suggests that Iran’s Sejil missile, which is a two-stage rocket with a trajectory and speed that make it impossible to intercept, should target such Israeli facilities as: the Rafael nuclear plant, which is the main nuclear engineering center of Israel; the Eilun nuclear plant; another Israeli reactor in Nebrin; and the Dimona reactor in the nuclear research center in Neqeb, the most critical nuclear reactor in Israel because it produces 90 percent enriched uranium for Israel’s nuclear weapons.
Other targets, according to the article, include airports and air force bases such as the Sedot Mikha Air Base, which contains Jericho ballistic missiles and is located southwest of the Tel Nof Air Base, where aircraft equipped with nuclear weapons are based. Secondary targets include power plants, sewage treatment facilities, energy resources, and transportation and communication infrastructures.
Under this pre-emptive defensive doctrine, several Ground Zero points of Israel must be destroyed and its people annihilated. Forghani cites the last census by the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics that shows Israel has a population of 7.5 million citizens of which a majority of 5.7 million is Jewish. Then it breaks down the districts with the highest concentration of Jewish people, indicating that three cities, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa, contain over 60 percent of the Jewish population that Iran could target with its Shahab 3 and Ghadr missiles ballistic missiles, killing all its inhabitants.
Forghani claims that Israel could be destroyed in less than nine minutes and that Khamenei, as utmost authority, the Velayete Faghih (Islamic Jurist), also believes that Israel and America not only must be defeated but annihilated.
The Iranian documentary “The Coming Is Upon Us” released on March 28, 2011 by the Iranian government clearly indicates that these radicals believe the destruction of Israel will trigger the coming of the last Islamic Messiah and that even Jesus Christ, who will convert to Islam, will act as Mahdi’s deputy, praying to Allah as he stands behind the 12th Imam. See video by pressing here.
Threats to kills Jews and destroy Israel are nothing new. Indeed, Iran’s state anti-Semitism is neglected and even played down by the world. Europe in particular should deal with this issue and not only with Tehran’s nuclear program, said Ambassador Gideon Behar, Director of the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s Department for Combating anti-Semitism on Jan. 27, 2012.
Iran was the first country to make Holocaust denial into a principle of its foreign policy. And the first openly to threaten another U.N. member state with, not invasion or annexation, but annihilation.
Matthias Küntzel in an article for The Weekly Standard of February 14, 2007 described Iran's obsession with The Jews.
The Ayatollah Khomeini made use of the mobilizing power of anti-Semitism in the struggle against the shah as far back as the 1960s. “I know that you do not want Iran to lie under the boots of the Jews,” he cried out to his supporters on April 13, 1963. That same year, he called the shah a Jew in disguise and accused him of taking orders from Israel.
This drew a huge response from the public. Khomeini had found his theme. Khomeini’s biographer Amir Taheri writes: “The Ayatollah was by now convinced that the central political theme of contemporary life was an elaborate and highly complex conspiracy by the Jews—’who controlled everything’—to ‘emasculate Islam’ and dominate the world thanks to the natural wealth of the Muslim nations.”
When in June 1963 thousands of Khomeini-influenced theology students set off to Tehran for a demonstration and were brutally stopped by the shah’s security forces, Khomeini channeled all their anger toward the Jewish nation: “Israel does not want the Koran to survive in this country. . . . It is destroying us. It is destroying you and the nation. It wants to take possession of the economy. It wants to demolish our trade and agriculture. It wants to grab the wealth of the country.”
After the Six Day War of 1967, the anti-Semitic agitation, which drew no distinction between Jews and Israelis, intensified. ”[I]t was [the Jews] who first established anti-Islamic propaganda and engaged in various stratagems, and as you can see, this activity continues down to the present,” Khomeini wrote in 1970 in his principal work, Islamic Government. ”[T]he Jews . . . wish to establish Jewish domination throughout the world. Since they are a cunning and resourceful group of people, I fear that . . . they may one day achieve their goal.”
Then in September 1977, he declared, “The Jews have grasped the world with both hands and are devouring it with an insatiable appetite, they are devouring America and have now turned their attention to Iran and still they are not satisfied.” Two years later, Khomeini was the unchallenged leader of the Iranian revolution. Khomeini’s anti-Semitic attacks found favor with the opponents of the shah, both leftists and Islamists.
In December 2001, former Iranian president Hashemi Rafsanjani first boasted that “the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything,” whereas the damage to the Islamic world of a potential retaliatory nuclear attack could be limited: “It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality.” While the Islamic world could sacrifice hundreds of thousands of “martyrs” in an Israeli retaliatory strike without disappearing – so goes Rafsanjani’s argument – Israel would be history after the first bomb.
In his first speech on the guiding principles of his politics, Iranian president Ahmadinejad made clear: “We are in the process of an historical war, . . . and this war has been going on for hundreds of years,” he declared in October 2005. This is a war, then, that is not fundamentally about the Middle East conflict and will not end with the elimination of Israel. He continued: “We have to understand the depth of the disgrace of the enemy, until our holy hatred expands continuously and strikes like a wave.” This “holy hatred” is boundless and unconditional. It will not be mitigated by any form of Jewish or non-Jewish conduct—other than subordination to sharia and the Koran.
On November 16, 2006, Mohammad Hassan Rahimian, representative of the Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who stands even higher in the Iranian hierarchy than Ahmadinejad explained: “The Jew” – not the Zionist, note, but the Jew – is the most obstinate enemy of the devout. And the main war will determine the destiny of mankind. . . . The reappearance of the Twelfth Imam will lead to a war between Israel and the Shia.”
On December 12, 2006, the Tehran deniers’ conference marked a turning point not only because of its state sponsorship, but also because of its purpose. Up until then, Holocaust deniers had wanted to revise the past. Today, they want to shape the future: to prepare the way for the next Holocaust.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad personally brought to a close the infamous Holocaust deniers’ conference in Tehran: “The life-curve of the Zionist regime has begun its descent, and it is now on a downward slope towards its fall. . . . The Zionist regime will be wiped out, and humanity will be liberated.”
Just as Hitler sought to “liberate” humanity by murdering the Jews, so Ahmadinejad believes he can “liberate” humanity by eradicating Israel. The deniers’ conference as an instrument for propagating this project is intimately linked to the nuclear program as an instrument for realizing it.
Holocaust denial is anti-Semitism at its most extreme. Whoever declares Auschwitz a myth implicitly portrays the Jews as the enemy of humanity: The assumption is that the all-powerful Jews, for filthy lucre, have been duping the rest of humanity for the past 60 years.
Whoever talks of the “so-called Holocaust” implies that over 90 percent of the world’s media and university professorships are controlled by Jews and are thereby cut off from the “real” truth. No one who accuses Jews of such perfidy can sincerely regret Hitler’s Final Solution. For this reason alone, every denial of the Holocaust contains an appeal to repeat it.
This is why the precise content of Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust tirades is not the issue. He is obsessed with the subject because he is fascinated by the possibility of a second Holocaust. Ahmadinejad does not say “Jews” are conspiring to rule the world. But he invests the word “Zionist” with exactly the same meaning Hitler poured into “Jew”: the incarnation of evil. He says, “Two thousand Zionists want to rule the world.”
He says, “The Zionists” have for 60 years now blackmailed “all Western governments.” “The Zionists have imposed themselves on a substantial portion of the banking, financial, cultural, and media sectors.” “The Zionists” fabricated the Danish Muhammad cartoons. “The Zionists” are responsible for the destruction of the dome of the Golden Mosque in Iraq. Demonization of Jews, Holocaust denial, and the will to eliminate Israel – these are the three elements of an ideological constellation that collapses as soon as any one of them is removed.
The louder the liberal West protests against Holocaust denial or the Islamists’ demands for the destruction of Israel, the more convinced Ahmadinejad becomes of Zionist domination. In a conversation with the editors of the German newsweekly Der Spiegel, the Iranian president reacted as follows to the remark that the magazine does not question Israel’s right to exist: “I am glad that you are honest people and say that you are required to support the Zionists.”
Further Reading:
Ahmadinejad calls to open "Holocaust black box"
Iranian Militia Threaten Purim Mausoleum
Iranian Website Repaints Holocaust “Lie”
Ahmadinejad: Jews aren’t human
Iranian cartoon depicts Israeli soldier
