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The Threat From Iran
13 November 2009By yonatan silverman
The Yom Kippur ritual of the scapegoat carrying the sins of the nation to “Azazel” has not been observed since the destruction of the Great Temple by the Romans in 70 CE. However, long after the demise of the ritual Torah commentators have reflected on the practice. Including Rambam who explained that Azazel symbolized a place of evil. It is not enough to be sure that we have God’s forgiveness and love – we must also recognize and repel the hostile forces that surround and tempt us. Thus the scapegoat is a reminder that God wants us to guard against the threats of our enemies by recognizing their existence and appeasing them.
The sad truth is it isn’t always possible to appease one’s enemies. As the Talmud says: when someone comes to kill you, kill him first.
The Nazis were the arch enemies of the Jews during World War II, the worst fascists imaginable. But today we have Islamo-fascism, whose main flag bearer is the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The president of Iran frequently calls for wiping the country of Israel off the map. And he is standing on the broad antisemitic shoulders of the late Ayatollah Khomeini. So president Ahmadinejad is just the present mouthpiece for venomous anti-Israel psychology.
But the problem isn’t only psychological. Iran is actively working to create nuclear weapons. The facts of Iran’s clandestine nuclear weapons program have been known for some years, but nothing the civilized world has tried in order to halt these ambitions has done much good.
The Iranians are brazen-faced about their nuclear ambitions. Sanctions don’t deter the Iranians. They continue to accelerate their use of modern gas centrifuges to enrich uranium. And while enriched uranium can be used in nuclear power reactors, there is no question but that Iran intends to use enriched uranium to manufacture nuclear weapons.
Iran has no rationale for employing nuclear power. It has the second largest petroleum reserves in the world, enough to last another century.
No, Iran is concealing its nuclear weapons ambitions, just as it says in the Koran: “and they deceived and Allah deceived and Allah is the best of deceivers”.
Writers on Middle Eastern themes like professor Benny Morris are going so far as to describe doomsday scenarios involving the launching of nuclear missiles by Iran at Israel.
And moreover, president Ahmadinejad is also a world leader who casts doubt on the reality of the Nazi annihilation of European Jewry.”We are saying that if the Holocaust occurred, then Europe must draw the consequences and that it is not Palestine that should pay the price for it. If it did not occur, then the Jews have to go back to where they came from.”
Such statements are nothing but traditional antisemitic canards, that turn history and reality on their heads.
Iran and Ahmadinejad and company have turned history and reality on their heads in other ways and in other contexts.
Consider how Ayatollah Khomeini sent children as young as twelve to the front lines in the Iran-Iraq War. There they marched in formation across minefields toward the enemy clearing a path with their bodies. The children who marched to certain death were part of the Basiji, a mass movement created by Khomeini in 1979 and militarized after the war started in order to supplement his beleaguered army.
The sacrifice of the Basiji was ghastly. And yet today it is a source not of national shame but of growing pride. And last year they formed the core of the political base that propelled Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who reportedly served as a Basiji instructor during the Iran Iraq War, to the presidency. Ahmadinejad’s ascendance on the shoulders of the Basiji means that the Iranian Revolution, launched almost three decades ago, has entered a new and disturbing phase. A younger generation of Iranians, whose worldviews were forged in the atrocities of the Iran-Iraq War, have come to power, wielding a more fervently ideological approach to politics than their predecessors. The children of the Revolution are now its leaders. More fervently ideological and more fanatically religious. When addressing the United Nations in September 2005, president. Ahmadinejad gave the audience of world political leaders a jolt by concluding his address with a prayer for the Mahdi’s appearance.
Who precisely is the Mahdi? “Mahdi” is Arabic for “rightly-guided one,” a major figure in Islamic eschatology. He is, explains the Encyclopaedia of Islam, “the restorer of religion and justice who will rule before the end of the world.” The concept originated in the earliest years of Islam and, over time, became particularly identified with the Shi’ite branch. Whereas “it never became an essential part of Sunni religious doctrine,” continues the encyclopedia, “Belief in the coming of the Mahdi of the Family of the Prophet became a central aspect of the faith in radical Shi’ism,” where it is also known as the return of the Twelfth Imam.
Daniel Pipes concludes:
“The most dangerous leaders in modern history are those (such as Hitler) equipped with a totalitarian ideology and a mystical belief in their own mission. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fulfills both these criteria, as revealed by his U.N. comments. That combined with his expected nuclear arsenal make him an adversary who must be stopped, and urgently.”
What tactics would be most effective in fighting Iran now? How can the world force Iran to halt its concealed nuclear bomb program? And prevent the nuclear bombing of the state of Israel, in particular?
In his last interview before his assassination in 1948, Mahatma Gandhi told photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White that he believed the atomic bomb should be fought with “prayerful action”. But innumerable innocent Jews went to their deaths in the Nazi gas chambers with a prayer on their lips, and one cannot say it did them much service. No one can answer the question of why God allowed the sacrifice of his people in Europe between 1942 and 1945. Ultimately it was brute Allied force that stopped the Nazi blitzkrieg and the Nazi genocide. To stop Iran from building nuclear weapons the world needs an Iranian affront on the order of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, before military force will be organized and directed against Iranian interests. We need to hope that the causus belli will not be the launching of Iranian nuclear missiles at Israel.
Even if we maintained the ritual of sacrificing a scapegoat carrying our sins into the desert for the sake of the nation’s purification, the survival of Israel depends on more than biblical rituals and prayer.
The Kapara ritual which many Jews observe before Yom Kippur explicitly offers the death of a chicken in return for the life of the atoning sinner. Some sources suggest the Yom Kippur Kapara ritual substitutes for the biblical ritual of the scapegoat. But it is all the same. As quaint and as powerful as the Kapara ritual might be, in the face of the threat of Iranian nuclear missiles Israel must determine another method of defense against death, against another Shoah.
The Islamic paradigm for mass murder of course is the catastrophe of 9/11 committed by a group of crazed mostly Saudi Arabian Muslims under the direction of Osama bin Laden. Hatred for anything not Muslim fueled their desire to commit havoc that day, and to cause the murders of 3000 innocent people in their offices in New York. It stands to reason that if Iran chose to annihilate Israel with nuclear missiles, the scenario would be the same, no warning, just mayhem and mass murder. In the name of Allah – “the deceiver”.
