An Ideological Offensive against Iran

An Ideological Offensive against Iran

Prof. Paul Eidelberg

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad refers to Israel as "a cancer cell that spreads through the body, this regime infects any region. It must be removed from the body."

Canadian parliamentarian Irwin Cotler calls such comments "incitement to genocide," and has introduced legislation in Canada to refer Ahmadinejad to the World Court for violating the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Israel should have done this long ago, and should have prompted American Congressman to do the same.  Furthermore, inasmuch as Ahmadinejad has frequently expressed the malediction "Death to Israel" as well as Death to the United States" in violation of the United Nations Charter, both countries should take the moral high ground and simultaneously uphold international law by calling for the expulsion of Iran from the UN General Assembly.

 Accordingly, since Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called on the world to impose greater economic sanctions on Iran, surely he should instruct Ron Proser, Israel's Permanent Representative to the United Nations, to table a resolution in the UN General Assembly to expel Iran from the world body , citing Canadian parliamentarian Irwin Cotler, but citing, in addition, Iran's of sponsoring international terrorism.

To add spice to an Israel-proposed resolution to expel Iran from the UN, Ambassador Proser should point out that Iran's membership in the UN is a travesty of the human rights which UN is legally obliged to uphold.  Accordingly, he should remind his colleagues in the UN General Assembly that in 1985, Iran's permanent delegate to the UN, Said Raja 'i-Khorassani, avowed that "the very concept of human rights was 'a Judeo-Christian invention' and inadmissible in Islam."  Khorassani went so far as to recall the Ayatollah Khomeini's imprecation that one of the Shah's 'most despicable sins' was the fact that Iran was one of the original group of nations that drafted and approved the Universal Declaration of Human Rights."[1] 

 In furtherance of this ideological offensive against Iran—never mind the question of its legal efficacy—Mr. Netanyahu should privately call on friends of Israel in the United States Congress to criticize the U.S. State Department for granting an entry visa to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad if only in view of his malediction "death to America."  It should also be publicized, however, that Ahmadinejad and his Revolutionary Guards are guilty of mass murder for having sent thousands of Iranian youth to walk across and explode mine fields during Iran's war with Iraq.

 Just as President Ronald Reagan discredited the Soviet Union by calling it the "Evil Empire," thusly Prime Minister Netanyahu should discredit Iran while waging an ideological offensive against Israel's genocidal enemy. It's no secret that Iran has supplied Hamas in Gaza, and Hezbollah in Lebanon, with thousands of missiles in Lebanon. Those missiles have only one target. Hence, Netanyahu must offer something more potent than vague red lines vis-à-vis Iran.◙

 
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[1] Cited in Robert Spencer, Islam Unveiled (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2002), 57.