Everybody knows
Yesterday the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations and the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs hosted an international symposium devoted to a modest proposal: "Bring Ahmadinejad to Justice For Incitement to Genocide." Among the speakers at the symposium were Ambassador John Bolton, Ambassador Dore Gold, Ambassador Meir Roseanne, Irwin Cotler, and Alan Dershowitz. One Jerusalem has posted video excerpts of the speeches here. I have viewed them all and they are all worth viewing.
MEMRI has posted useful material on the background to the symposium's proposal. Here, for example, is the Iranian presidential adviser elaborating on Tehran's interest in Holocaust studies: "So long as Israel exists in the region, there will never be peace and security in the Middle East. So the resolution of the Holocaust issue will end in the destruction of Israel." See MEMRI's special dispatch here.
Caroline Glick's December 11 Jerusalem Post column bears on the subject:
Everyone knows that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. Everyone knows that Iran and Syria are the primary engines of the insurgency in Iraq. Everyone knows that they instigated and commanded Hizbullah's war against Israel this summer and continue to arm Hizbullah and prepare for the next round of fighting. Everyone knows that like Hizbullah, the Palestinians today act as Iranian proxies.In the new issue of Policy Review, the review/essay by Matthias Küntzel looks at Ahmadinejad in the context of the Iranian regime:Everyone knows that Syria engineered the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri in February 2005 and the murder of Lebanese Industry Minister Pierre Gemayel last month. And everyone knows that Iran and Syria are currently working to overthrow the pro-Western, democratic government of Lebanon.
And everybody knows that everybody knows. The problem isn't whether people know. The problem is that the Europeans, the UN, the Russians, Chinese and the Arabs either do not care or wish them well in their endeavors.
In the 1930s, some believed it would be possible to solve the particular problem of the Sudeten-Germans in negotiations with Hitler without considering the place of the Sudeten question in the overall strategy of the Nazis. In the 1980s, some believed it was possible to solve the particular problem represented by the seizure of the embassy in negotiations with Khomeini without considering the significance of the embassy seizure in the strategic conception of Islamism more generally. Today, with the separation of the nuclear question from the ideological dimension of the conflict, this mistake is being repeated. Although the letter made headlines around the world, Washington hesitated to confront the Iranian challenge on its own terrain: that of ideology. Policymakers focused on business as usual and thus missed the opportunity to present the real alternative facing both Muslim and non-Muslim societies: Does the world want to be oriented by life or by death? Does the world prefer individual and social self-determination or to be ruled by a clique of mullahs and their cult of death?
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