Iran, Hamas United In Hate

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Op-ed: Some in West fail to realize that persistent ideology calling for destruction of Jews, Israel flourishes among adherents of radical Islamic ideology

Anav Silverman Published: 07.30.12, 17:48 / Israel Opinion


Often times, western media overlooks a very key factor to the prolongation of the Middle East conflict. This type of oversight leads some media commentators to reach, through ludicrous logic, some very strange conclusions as to why Israelis are continuous targets of terror.

Take for example a recent article published in The Daily Beast following the terror attack in Bulgaria, which killed five Israeli tourists and wounded 36 others in a bus bombing. The author, Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council, wrote about the senseless attack in the context of the past year’s killings of Iranian nuclear scientists:

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“US officials have privately expressed concern that one of the purposes of Israeli attacks in Iran has been to generate an Iranian response that could serve as a casus belli for Israel. That way, Israel could target Iran’s nuclear facilities without paying the heavy political cost of starting a preventive war.”

In other words, the goal behind Israel’s alleged targeting of Iranian nuclear scientists was to provoke an Iranian response that would justify an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear program. Following the writer’s logic, the deadly attack on the Israeli tourists in Bulgaria would have served that purpose.

The skewed and twisted reasoning behind such statements implies that Israel wants its citizens dead, maimed and traumatized by terrorist targets, in order to carry out regional war. It completely ignores the fact that a persistent and insidious ideology that calls for the destruction of Jews and the Jewish state has deep roots in Middle Eastern countries like Iran and flourishes among adherents of radical Islamic ideology.

A very influential figure in Iranian politics, former President Hashemi Rafsanjani openly suggested 10 years ago that nuclear weapons should be used against the Jewish state. In a traditional Friday sermon in Tehran in 2000, he further articulated:

“The Jews (who immigrated to Israel) should expect a “reverse exodus,” because one day, the tumor will be removed from the body of the Islamic world, and then millions of Jews who moved there will become homeless again.”

'Resistance will continue'

More recently, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei tweeted in September 2010: “Israel is a hideous entity in the Middle East which will undoubtedly be annihilated.”

In February 2011, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was photographed carrying signs in Persian and Arabic which read “Death to Israel.”

In addition, Iranian Armed Forces regularly hold military parades in Tehran, which feature Iranian Shahab-3 missiles that have a 1300-kilometer range to strike Israel.

Footage from last year’s parade show slogans on military vehicles carrying these missiles which read: “Israel Must Be Destroyed.”

While some will say that mere hate rhetoric and intimidation parades are harmless, the culture of hate and incitement which Iran perpetuates through financial, educational means and military weapons, find fertile minds in the likes of young radical Islamist operatives both in the Middle East and internationally.

But most disturbing is that this hatred thrives right on Israel’s borders and is cultivated every year in Gaza summer camps run by Hamas. From June – August of this year, the Hamas administration and its military wing are indoctrinating 70,000 elementary school children and teenagers under the slogans of “Victory Through Youth” and “Camps of Return.”

While girls learn cooking and embroidery, the older boys are trained to use real rifles, handguns, and knives, alongside playing sports and riding horses. The camp counselors prepare the children for prison, and inculcate Hamas’s violent brand of Islam, teaching campers to revere suicide bombers. One of the celebrated heroes this year in camp was Ibrahim Hamed, who as the head of Hamas’s military wing in Ramallah orchestrated countless suicide bombings, murdering 46 Israeli civilians and wounding 400 others, and was sentenced in June to 54 life terms.

Indeed, Iran and Hamas share one mind and one heart in their hatred of Israel. This past February, Gaza’s prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, traveled to Tehran and declared to a crowd of 30,000 Iranians in Azadi Square that Hamas “will never recognize Israel,” in a commemoration ceremony marking Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution, which overthrew the country’s pro-west monarchy.

“The resistance will continue until all Palestinian land, including al-Quds (Jerusalem), has been liberated and all the refugees have returned,” affirmed Haniyeh, alongside President Ahmedinejad.

Despite these types of events and declarations that are frequently made in the Middle East, the West continues to ignore the blatant hatred that defines Iran’s and Hamas’s foreign policies and conduct. It might explain why all diplomatic attempts and negotiations have failed with Iran and Hamas. When the Quartet of diplomatic players in the Middle East peace process - the European Union, United Nations, Russia and the United States - demands that any Palestinian government, including Hamas, must renounce violence and recognize Israel, one can only wonder why Hamas would ever accede to such a request.

The deep-seeded hatred that has lead to the murder of countless Israelis both in Israel and abroad must not be ignored or imagined away. It exists in the hearts, minds, and wallets of those who seek to eradicate the Jewish state and harm the Jewish people at no moral conscience. At the end of the day, it was Israeli planes that brought the Israeli victims back home from Bulgaria—no other country carries the burden of Jewish survival as does Israel.