Noam Chomsky writes: Reporting on the final U.S. presidential campaign debate, on foreign policy, The Wall Street Journal observed that “the only country mentioned more (than Israel) was Iran, which is seen by most nations in the Middle East as the gravest security threat to the region.”
The two candidates agreed that a nuclear Iran is the gravest threat to the region, if not the world, as Romney explicitly maintained, reiterating a conventional view.
On Israel, the candidates vied in declaring their devotion to it, but Israeli officials were nevertheless unsatisfied. They had “hoped for more ‘aggressive’ language from Mr. Romney,” according to the reporters. It was not enough that Romney demanded that Iran not be permitted to “reach a point of nuclear capability.”
Arabs were dissatisfied too, because Arab fears about Iran were “debated through the lens of Israeli security instead of the region’s,” while Arab concerns were largely ignored – again the conventional treatment.
The Journal article, like countless others on Iran, leaves critical questions unanswered, among them: Who exactly sees Iran as the gravest security threat? And what do Arabs (and most of the world) think can be done about the threat, whatever they take it to be?
The first question is easily answered. The “Iranian threat” is overwhelmingly a Western obsession, shared by Arab dictators, though not Arab populations. [Continue reading…]
Beware of Mr. Chomsky as he has at times been cagy on Israeli nukes. Project Daniel is Israel’s aiming its nukes at Arab/Iran “population concentration centers”– openly announced by Israel in the US Army journal PARAMETERS– so one should know that if Israel should use its nukes its targets are NOT military but, rather, as many Muslim civilians as possible. JFK, as part of the US-USSR Nuclear Roll Back of 1963 was given time by Khrushchev, to the post-election period (1964), to withdraw nukes from Israel or the pact would be annulled. JFK made a commitment to do so but was assassinated before the election, in November 1963. All the quick distracting theories in many books about assassins other than Harvey Oswald never looked at the incriminating indications of the Mossad….afterall, to do would have been “anti-Semitic.” Who else but an “anti-Semite” would ever dare to think that the Mossad would assassinate anyone considered a danger to Israeli policy? And still, history is full of surprises that argue against Zionist zeal for a strike on Iran “preemptively” as all sorts of documents might suddenly appear in the in-box of Wikileaks. The “anti-Semite” smoke screen is getting awfully thin and it would be well not to engage in psychotic bravado as Krauthammer did recently in a debate on American preventive nuclearization of Iran (just as he proposed for Iraq). The old Communist notion that the past is easier to defraud than the future– and also more convincing when used to make the case for paranoia– has been in the forefront of Israeli policies….most often because it provided a useful sand-in-the-eyes of Americans whenever Israel engaged in open aggression in order to prove its blood-thirstiness to what it assumed to be its “chicken-hearted” Arab neighbors. But from HAMAS to Hezbollah to the Iraqis– Shia and Sunni– and now to the Egyptians, Muslims have proven that their sense of “justice”– no matter how contorted– demanded revenge and, over an over again, Muslims were proven to prize revenge of the dead with life itself, over and over and over again. By contrast, Israel’s bloody venture into Lebanon and later Gaza proved that it RIGHTLY rather withdraw its invasion (now that it still can) than face massive loss of its “fierce” IDF Commandos at the hands of fierce Hezbollah resistance
In 2004, a top Israeli military, intel and acad secret conference concluded that Iran would only want the ABILITY– NOT THE STOCKPILING– for making nukes as a DETERRENT against Israel’s nukes, which according to well placed Zionist sources Israel almost used TWICE when Dyan panicked. Back when this piece of info was “leaked,” Israel felt the need to convince its neighbors that it would use its nukes on Muslim population centers. Towards that end, to claim that it ALMOST used them when facing grave reverses seemed useful. But now, wanting its American mad-dog to do its killing for it, the story changes as the ex-“historians” of Stalin and the Soviet state are now often the story-tellers of the Israeli state. Thanks be to God that an almost obsessive Israeli Sabra penchant for telling the truth has presented the nukes issue– at least partially– in real context through books and articles published in Israel and abroad. But the fact that doesn’t change is that Israeli expansionism by aggression under the cover of its nuclear threat to Middle East population centers– Project Daniel– will no longer be tolerated by the West, the American people, the Jewish Diaspora and most Israeli themselves. By absorbing Stalin&Co’s old crew and/or their second generation of neocons, Israel has put itself on a reckless path based on the assumption that all those “dumb goyim” will never catch on. So Israel ought to remember that that just as it could serve as profitable middle-man for American arming and upgrading of Khomeini’s Iran during the Iran-Contra Scandal, it can again come to some deeply secret accommodation with Iran…that is unless it can’t shake the assumptions of the old Soviets it absorbed into its leadership who insist that it “CAN have its cake and eat it too” because Obama is just a “dumb goyim schwartza.” He’s nothing of the kind and poking at him to intimidate him will not only fail but may also shake loose some old historic facts that may float to the surface and put Israel’s image very much at risk; afterall, Israel is STILL totally addicted to a massive American welfare check of ~$10 billions.