Israel, Iran and the Diversion of Death
While Iran rejects Israel’s offer to assist in rescue efforts as Iran buries its dead, this commentary by Louis Rene Beres, written in 1998, demands to be re-read:
“Iran may be a state like no other. Founded upon the particular Islamic promise of conquering death — a promise bestowing the ultimate form of power upon those who “submit” — it may ultimately do whatever it must to divert death in other directions. As an object for this existentially critical diversion, Israel, the Jewish State, is assuredly the perfect doctrinal choice.
In March 1992, following its bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, Islamic Jihad, the Iranian-backed terrorist group, declared: “The war is open until Israel ceases to exist and until the last JEW in the world is eliminated….Israel is all evil and should be wiped out of existence.” This view, which is also the view of the terror group’s patron state, stems from alleged and irremediable historical misdeeds of Jews against Islam, the revival of blood libel by Muslims, Islamic denunciations of the Talmud and the carefully contrived demonic image of a ruthless Jewish State. Now promulgated daily by Iran, this hatred makes no distinctions between Jews and Israel. All are seen as part of a vast global conspiracy to create an insufferably alien presence in the heart of dar al-Islam, the Muslim world.
For Iran, Israel is a “cancer” not because of its particular policies on land, the Palestinians, etc., but because it is a Jewish State. Short of promising not to exist, there is nothing Israel can possibly do now to make peace with Iran. Israel’s “crime” is simply that it refuses to disappear. For the leaders in Teheran, policy toward Israel must always be determined by Mohammed’s linkage of salvation, that is, freedom from death, to war against the Jews: “The hour (salvation) will not come until you fight against the Jews; and the stone would say, `O Muslim! There is a Jew behind me: come and kill him.'”
Smooth Stone’s opinion is this: Israel, save your energy and your money. Use it to bury your dead, because with Islamic Death States like Iran, surrounding and loathing you, waiting to kill you, you will need all that you have to bury your own.
For the entire commentary by Professor Beres, click here.