Apartheid Israel's Defense Minister Joins the 'Attack Iran' Chorus

I don't know something called International Principles. I vow that I'll burn every Palestinian child (that) will be born in this area. The Palestinian woman and child is more dangerous than the man, because the Palestinian child's existence infers that generations will go on, but the man causes limited danger. I vow that if I was just an Israeli civilian and I met a Palestinian I would burn him and I would make him suffer before killing him. With one hit I've killed 750 Palestinians (in Rafah in 1956). I wanted to encourage my soldiers by raping Arabic girls as the Palestinian women is a slave for Jews, and we do whatever we want to her and nobody tells us what we shall do but we tell others what they shall do.

- Ariel Sharon, Prime Minister of Israel

In today's pro-apartheid Israeli daily Ha'aretz, the defense minister, Shaul Mofaz, joined the chorus-line of true believers advocating a military attack on Iran.

With this, Mofaz adds his name to the growing list of Zionists who believe the best way for the state of Israel to 'handle' Iran is by killing Iranians. This racist obsession with killing Muslims is by no means unique. Since the partition of Palestine and formation of the colonial settler state in 1947, the content and strategy of Mofaz's remarks echo those of virtually every Israeli statesman and woman.

We've known since March that Israel plans to attack Iran just as we've known for months, thanks to the intrepid reporting of Seymour Hersch, that they are deeply involved in the arming and training of Iraqi Kurds in their losing battle against the fierce popular resistance.

It is in this context - the most heavily armed, militarized county in the Middle East murdering innocent people as they fight two genocidal wars and speak of starting a third - that Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recently remarked that Israel should be moved to Germany and Austria, the main sites of the Shoah.

Ahmadinejad told the AFP,

You believe the Jews were oppressed, why should the Palestinian Muslims have to pay the price? You oppressed them, so give a part of Europe to the Zionist regime so they can establish any government they want. We would support it.

So, Germany and Austria, come and give one, two or any number of your provinces to the Zionist regime so they can create a country there ... and the problem will be solved at its root.

Why do they insist on imposing themselves on other powers and creating a tumour so there is always tension and conflict? Is it not true that European countries insist that they committed a Jewish genocide? They say that Hitler burned millions of Jews in furnaces ... and exiled them.

Then because the Jews have been oppressed during the second world war, therefore they [the Europeans] have to support the occupying regime of Quds [Jerusalem]. We do not accept this.

Because Ahmadinejad called the Jewish holocaust a matter of belief and raised the legitimate free-speech question of whether those who question this belief should be bankrupted by the state and thrown into prison, he has been vilified and demonized by Western commentators.

[Of course, these same critics would never endorse imprisoning any United States historian who downplays the factually substantiated European genocide of 25,000,000 native North Americans.]

Ahmadinejad's incendiary statement brings to light the egregious hypocrisy and double-standards of the West. Bush, Blair, Sharon & Co. use Ahmadinejad as a foil to justify their ongoing campaign of black-op propaganda, spying, and terrorism against Iran while ignoring the outrage produced by their global campaign of torturing, raping (and here), and killing Muslims.

For the West, it's contemptable and unacceptable for men like Ahmadinejad say that Israel should move to Europe. Their silence is deafening, however, when it comes to Israel's founder David Ben Gurion commenting that, "we must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population" or saying that "we must expel Arabs and take their places."

Anti-Muslim racism permeates this debate just as it did in the lead-up to the March 2003 offensive against Iraq A short time after the ocupation of Iraq began, Paul Wolfowitz told the Independent that "we focused on alleged weapons of mass destruction as the primary justification... because it was politically convenient." And, just as the propaganda campaign against Iraq really had nothing to do with Weapons of Mass Destruction, the ongoing one over Iran has nothing to do with Iranian WMD and everything with the preservation of Israel's apartheid character and control over the world's energy supply.

To the West, Ahmadinejad's open support for Palestine's most potent weapons against the illegal occupation - democracy and resistance - pose a much more ominous threat than any bomb. His proposal to have "a referendum in Palestine for all the original Palestinians to decide on the future of what is now Israel, the Gaza Strip and West Bank," runs in diametric opposition to Israel's de-facto and de-jure apartheid system. Israel's real existential threat is democracy, not Iranian nukes. Israel's refusal to hold such a democratic referendum exposes the racist ideology at its core as well as the myth of Israeli democracy.

Ahmadinejad knows full-well that Israel will never accept this. Consequently, he gives his full-throated, unequivocal support for the right of the Palestinian people to resist. "The best solution is resistance so that the enemies of the Palestinians accept the reality and the right of the Palestinian people to have land."

These two pillars - support for a democratic referendum to determine Palestine's future and the support given to Palestinians who resist Israel's illegal occupation - enable us to understand the true nature of this propaganda campaign. When we factor in Iran's natural gas reserves, the pending collapse of the petrodollar, geopolitics, and the history of Western intervention in Iran, we get a more nuanced view of this campaign.

And as in the case with Iraq, we know in advance that the stated reasons given by the West for this campaign, unlike the ones enumerated above, are lies.