Peace in our time: Iran, Israel and Incitement

There will be much hand-wringing and frustration expressed with the Israeli attitude towards the agreement signed today between Iran and the “P5+1” group (the USA, Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany).  The following below is a minute selection of the reasons for Israeli wariness of Iranian intentions:

“Every Muslim, from the moment they realize the distinction in their hearts, hates Americans, hates Jews, and hates Christians, this is a part of our belief and our religion.” Osama Bib-Laden in an interview to Al Jazeera 1998.

“First the Saturday people (Jews) and then the Sunday people (Christians)". Yasser Arafat  Arafat added that the Palestinian flag would fly from 'minarets' in 'Al Kuds'. (i.e. synagogues and churches would become mosques)

Article 7 of the Hamas Charter is taken from Hadith Bukhari Volume 4, Book 52, Number 177: Narrated Abu Huraira: Allah's Apostle said, "The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say. "O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.  (This quote applies equally to all Jews irrespective of age or sex and is oft repeated from pulpits throughout the Muslim world).  Hadith Bukhari is second only to the Koran in being regarded as the most authoritative of all Muslim literature.

“Israel is a cancerous tumour in the heart of the Islamic World” Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei March 2009 (he recently restated this).

Mohamed Morsi, until recently, President of Egypt stated for the TV cameras the following in 2010 “We must never forget, brothers, to nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred for them: for Zionists, for Jews.” He then reminded his audience of a quote from the Koran, the holiest book in Islam: “The Jews are the descendants of apes and pigs.” (Repeated in Chapters 2, 5 and 7 of the Koran)

Of course the previous Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke as an ultra-orthodox Muslim who many would suspect was frankly unhinged.  When he spoke it was with the imprimatur of the power behind the thrown, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.  You cannot be elected to parliament in Iran without Khamenei’s authorisation.

Since his election, President Rouhani has said Israel is a "wound" that "had to be removed".  There was some debate on whether the translation from Farsi should be read as a ‘sore’ or a ‘wound’ but only a fool would quibble over the difference.

The threat of appeasing Iran has bizarrely drawn a long list of Israel’s implacable enemies towards an unofficial rapprochement (the Gulf States, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia to name the few) with her.

Israel has suffered 65 years of warfare, 65 years has it been threatened with annihilation and yes it remains militarily, the most powerful nation state in the Near-East. But the unremitting hatred that expresses itself in sermons by Islamic scholars, undermining Israel’s legitimacy everywhere at every opportunity cannot encourage Israeli confidence in any deal that is signed with Iran.  Much of the debate today focuses on a Palestinian or Muslim narrative that is filled with holes, deception and outright lies. And then Israel is told to trust the same Western nations that have never lifted a finger to stop the constant drip drip drip of hate that has enveloped the Internet, the Western media as well as all of the organs of the antisemitic United Nations Organisation.

Nobel Prize winning novelist Wole Soyinka says that “Arabs and Islam are guilty of the cultural and spiritual savaging of the Continent”, their unrepentant and unrelenting, often violent racism he calls the great taboo.  In ignoring the racism that inheres the Arab debate on Israeli or Jewish rights; or in dismissing the narrative of conquest, ridicule, vilification and hate that typifies the Islamic discourse (not just since the creation of Jewish self-determination in historic Israel) Israel has to hope for the best but make preparations for the worst.

I leave you with the words of Saudi cleric and poet Muhammad al-Farrajii and a final insight.  Al-Farrajii’s unadulterated hatred for Shiites (he calls Iranians “Zoroastrians”), and the rest of non-Sunni humanity is incitement to genocide. In his long poem that he read out on Shada TV (September 13, 2013) he lauded Hitler for “barbecuing Russians and Jews”.

If President Obama and his major domo John Kerry (current Secretary of State) want Israel to buckle under and accept their agenda they must appreciate that none of their actions over the five years of the Obama administration help to remove doubt about the deal.