Should We Take Iran's Threats Seriously? The Left Wing Loons Respond

There was an op-ed in the NYT’s Friday by an Israeli historian Ben Morris regarding Iran's threat to Israel's survival. The gist was that Israel will have no choice but to preemptively strike Iran if progress to end their nuclear capabilities isn’t made on other fronts. A writer on The Huffington Post, the far left blog/smear site, posted a detailed response to the NYT’s piece. I didn’t agree with everything he said but it was a decent enough effort and he had some good points.

But when you read the comment section following his critique the far left loons come out. At the bottom of this post are a couple of the more coherent comments. Typos, grammatical errors and rampant conspiracy theories are theirs – I’ve simply cut and paste them as is. The amount of blind hatred and just plain ignorance about the world is stunning. Unfortunately, because they are on a site like The Huffington Post, they probably vote.

Israel was chartered as a country on a tiny sliver of land by the U.N. in 1948. At its narrowest, you can drive from the ocean to the eastern border in about an hour. The Arabs immediately attacked to drive the small Israeli force into the sea. They barely survived. The Arabs massed what should have been overwhelming forces over and over again with the purpose of destroying the Jewish state including 1967 and 1973. Desperate, pitched battles all. No Arab country has ever acknowledged Israel’s right to exist.

Is it unfortunate and unfair that the Palestinians have lost the right to a 300 by 60 mile stretch of land in recognition of the historical Jewish homeland? Yes. But when you compare the almost incomprehensible vastness of Arab lands in the Middle East, is this so much to concede? The displaced Palestinians have chosen to live in what amount to refugee camps for 60 years, encouraged to do so and left in poverty by their wealthy Arab brethren. Meanwhile, Israel with a population about the size of New York City has become an extraordinary economic and technological powerhouse – also by choice.

Israel has agreed to land concessions and has even recognized that Jerusalem will ultimately have to be divided. But when you are negotiating with a party that believes in their core that the only acceptable solution is your destruction, it is a pretty one sided conversation.

I love some of the comments below that say if only Israel was not a belligerent power intent on expansion everything would be peaceful. If Israel would just choose to live in peace Hezbollah would simply melt away. The view from the left seems to always be that Israel is the aggressor. Israel has never attacked, or even responded militarily, without extreme provocation.

I cannot imagine any other sovereign state on the planet being as hesitant to strike back as Israel is in the face of constant deadly attacks. In something like the last 8 months 4,000 Iranian supplied rockets have been fired into Israel from the Gaza Strip. Israel responds as best it can, but the casualty statistics show that they are rarely willing to risk killing non-militants. Since the rockets are most often fired from civilian areas their response options are limited. Iran sponsored Hezbollah has no such restrictions.

With apologies to the commenter below that Akmadinajad has simply been “mistranslated”, Iran’s leaders regularly and emphatically say that Israel will be destroyed. Iran is continuing and expanding its nuclear enrichment efforts. Those that say that Iran has halted its nuclear weapons program don’t understand what it takes to make a nuclear bomb in the 21st century. Enrichment is the hard part. The rest can be completed relatively quickly.

So given the history of Arabs fulfilling their threats against Israel, Iran’s threats must be taken at face value. Much of the human experience is about surviving. What is Israel supposed to do, passively accept a nuclear holocaust and the destruction of its entire population?

Comments on The Huffington Post:

• "The US is under the body-snatchers-like control of the multinational corporations led by teh oil companies. Israel is suffering from a group insanity which believes that ethnic cleansing and atomic war are preferable to accepting the fact that Israel, in order to survive, must live within its own borders and at peace with its neighbors."
• "Doesn't he realize how much his words about the Palestinians parallel the speeches of Hitler prior to Crystal-Nacht? The parts about Iran sound EXACTLY like how Hitler described the USSR in 1940 (Hitler thought the western powers would "assist" him in the invasion of the USSR too.) I guess what goes around comes around."
• "If Mr. Morris advocates and justifies a preemptive attack on Iran they and those who support those views should be branded as international criminals and terrorists."
• "Problem is, as I see it, that the Israelis seem to have taken the Holocaust out on the Palestinians who had nothing to do with it."
• "As Dr. Goebbels proved, by defining your [Israel’s] enemies as sub human you can push the limits of National morality to any level."
• "Iran is a rational country and has demonstrated it in many occasions."
• "One good thing: If Iran is attacked, then industrial society will collapse, and at least we won't have to worry about global warming any more..."
• "Isn't the root problem the fact that Israel already has nuclear weapons and has refused to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty? Isn't that what has destabilized the region and caused Iraq and Iran to pursue development of their own WMDs?"
• "Actually, the root problem is that BushCo wants higher oil prices, and the Iranians want higher oil prices, and so neither of them has any interest in reducing tension in the Gulf. In my view, nukes are just an excuse. Why some Israelis are getting mixed up in this cynical and dangerous game beats me. Probably for internal political reasons - the Palestinian bogeyman isn't as scary as he once was, and the far right needs a new enemy to justify its bigotry."
• "Zionist ideology scares me to death. It is illogical, bigotted, fear-based, and for some reason not allowed to be discussed publicly in America."
• "Please do not feed us the drivel about Iran waging a proxy war by supporting terrorists like Hizbollah and Hamas. One man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter. The day a lasting peace can be negotiated between Israel and her neighbors, these organizations will cease to exist as a threat to anyone."
• "And the idea that Iranians want to destroy Israel is so ridiculous. It's all based on a mistranslation of one single sentence of Ahmadinejad, where he in fact said that the Israeli apartheid regime should disappear - not Israel as a country."