Iran Plays the West for Suckers
Some in the media are claiming that America’s tensions with Iran are subsiding since the two countries have attended new international talks about the Islamist regime’s nuclear program. Some say there might even be a deal in the offing to resolve the problem. The first meeting in Istanbul in April produced nothing of substance, but the “positive signals” emanating from Tehran are a sure sign the Iranians think they have found yet another way to stall the West and possibly even avert the implementation of tougher sanctions. And, as Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu pointed out, centrifuges are still spinning as the Iranians refine uranium until the next scheduled meeting in Baghdad in late May. Even if Obama’s European, Russian, and Chinese partners in the talks are serious about the goal of a non-nuclear Iran, the negotiations could drag on all year. This means the only winner is Iran, which has bought its nuclear program several months of freedom to make a bomb.
Iran’s Holocaust-Denying Cartoons
While Western negotiators were making nice with Iran in Istanbul, ayatollahs in Iran gave the world a reminder of their malevolent intentions by spending Holocaust Remembrance Day running cartoons denying the mass murder of Jews. Iran’s state-run TV broadcast a cartoon program in which Orthodox Jews were depicted fabricating the Holocaust and killing Arabs. Note that Iran, which itself denies the Holocaust, was simultaneously plotting to use nuclear weapons to commit a new Holocaust. That irony seems to be lost on Iran’s foreign apologists.
Never Again? Don’t Look at Syria
Throughout 2011 and the early months of 2012, Western leaders, including President Obama, continued to predict that the regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad would soon collapse. Of all the possible victims of the Arab Spring protests, the second-generation butcher of Damascus seemed the most likely to fall. But Assad has proved he is made of sterner stuff than the elderly dictators of Egypt and Tunisia and has spent the last year murdering his countrymen at an impressive rate. President Obama reiterated his opposition to Assad at a speech at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in April, but neither he nor any other Western leader has shown any willingness to do more than talk about stopping Assad’s depredations. That’s why Assad remains in power and the end of the slaughter in Syria is nowhere in sight. The lesson here is that tyrannical human-rights abusers can’t be talked out of office as long as they are willing to keep shedding blood.
Iran’s German Friend
Nobel Literature laureate Günter Grass, who gained fame by writing about the evils of the Nazis, was exposed as a hypocrite several years ago when it was revealed that he had been a member of the SS in his youth. But that hasn’t stopped Grass from becoming an ardent critic of the state of Israel and an apologist for the Islamist and anti-Semitic Iranian regime. Grass’s poem defending Iran and accusing Israel of anti-Iranian aggression was condemned by Israel’s interior minister, who declared the writer was not welcome in the Jewish state. That caused Grass to compare Israel with East Germany. The ban was meaningless, but those who came to Grass’s defense seemed to forget that his membership in the SS ought to have placed him on a watch list denying him entry to many Western nations, not just Israel.
Morally Equivalent Jew-Hatred
The latest instance of academic anti-Semitism comes from a seemingly unlikely source. Johan Galtung is considered the father of the discipline of peace- and conflict-resolution studies. But the Norwegian garnered some unwanted notoriety last month by claiming the terror attack by Anders Breivik, a fellow countryman, was the work of the Mossad and that the Jews control the media. In some of his earlier work, Galtung asserts that there are two legitimate ways of viewing the Holocaust, one in fact blaming the Jews for inciting the hatred of the Nazis. There is a connection between the moral relativism at the heart of much that goes under the rubric of peace studies and Galtung’s repulsive Jew-hatred.
Evicting Jews from Campus
Pro-Israel students on American campuses have increasingly come under pressure from Palestinian sympathizers who seek to demonize Zionism and intimidate Jewish classmates. The latest instance of this style of aggressive advocacy occurred at Florida Atlantic University. A pro-Palestinian group tacked mock eviction notices to the doors of students. These slips of paper falsely claimed Israel had thrown large numbers of Palestinians out of their homes and committed other atrocities. While the harassment tactic, which could have been construed as a warning to the Jews who lived in the dorm, was bad enough, the worst thing was that leaflets were stamped with the official sign of the university. The school soon apologized, but the damage had already been done. This incident and others like it across the country show that efforts to create a hostile environment for Jewish students must be countered with an equally strong campaign to answer the lies of the
Israel-haters.
