If Benjamin Netanyahu is returned to the premiership of Israel after that nation’s elections on March 17th, the clock will start ticking on an epochal geopolitical showdown between the West and Islam. Not radical Islam, mind you, but orthodox Islam — the expansionist, totalitarian religio-political ideology embodied in the Qur’an and the Hadith (the sayings of Mohammed), whose aims demand the annihilation of Israel and the United States on the way to subjugating all the world’s peoples and forcing them to submit to the brutal dictates of the Shari’a (Islamic law).
The first act in this burgeoning Wagnerian extravaganza is the “deal” now being negotiated with Iran by the United States and several European powers for the putative purpose of slowing and restraining the Islamic Republic from developing nuclear weapons. America’s Anointed One claims the impending deal with Iran, only a few terms of which have been disclosed so far, will serve to restrict Iran’s ambitions and thereby safeguard Israel and other nations from having an atomic Sword of Damocles erected over their heads. But, whatever the actual terms of any such restriction and however effective they might possibly be, said regime will last but 10 years, after which Iran will be free to create as large a nuclear stockpile of weapons as it desires. We recall that, in 1938, Chamberlain and Daladier felt – felt, I say! — that Hitler’s hunger for foreign real estate would be satiated after all of Czechoslovakia was brought under Nazi rule. And, as some might now say, feelings are never wrong, doncha know? We well know differently, of course.
Whatever the intentions of Islamist rulers, what Obama says “the deal” now pending with Iran will do and what Netanyahu understands from experience, knowledge, and his nation’s latest “intel” that deal will do constitute very different notions. Given Obama&Co.’s forays into the Islamic world since 2009, no one should believe without solid evidence that his foreign-policy deals will do what he rhetorically purports them to be about. As a practiced form of diction, he habitually uses the politically “right” rhetoric and then acts in raw contravention of it, whether it is funding new Palestinian “infrastructure” later used for terrorism or covertly enabling transfers of arms from Libya to Syrian rebels via Turkey at the expense of four American civilian lives in Benghazi. Recall, in the healthcare arena, it was, “If you want to keep your plan, you can keep it. If you want to keep your doctor, you can do so.” For Obama, for us, it’s always the “right” thing to do, as good Americans.
But sadly, Obama has a well booked record now of lying and obfuscating; in law and politics, that’s called a “poor reputation for credibility” regardless of whatever excuses the media may concoct for it. Here, there can be no realistic doubt that Iran will achieve a nuclear force unless its economic and financial feet are held firmly to the fire going forward, indefinitely, and without any preset sunset date. Unless its emergent nuclear infrastructure is dismantled — and verified so by a consortium of earnestly motivated nations that must include the United States – Israel will be forced to launch preemptive attacks to disable it, decisively. All to save itself from eventual, direct, certain, total annihilation. Netanyahu remarked that, after 100 generations (2,000 years) of his nation’s dispersal and powerlessness, the Jewish People today have the ability to protect themselves. The postwar mantra “Never Again” is no longer merely a wistful hope; today, Israel has all of the memory, motivation, manner, and means to dispense with any temptation towards “enlightened” passivity in the face of new genocidal threats from self-avowed enemies like Iran.
As such, yesterday all now-free nations of the world heard an unambiguous clarion call to hold a rogue fascist regime accountable to fundamental norms of peacefulness, international comity and responsibility, and respect. I daresay it’s a fair call to make 70 years after the world paid such a horrendous price for indulging for too long the psychotic whims of an earlier league of messianic imperialists. There is an old Dutch saying, Wie nie wil hoor nie, moet voel – Those who refuse to listen will have to experience (lit., feel). Today all parties – both we the Free and the absolutist ayatollahs — must listen closely to Netanyahu: Free peoples of stout heart and clear mind cannot allow either sanctimonious fantasizing about what appeasement will accomplish or the maniacal intimidation of would-be conquerors to dissuade them from standing strong, resolute, and brave and so act to excise a growing contagion in the embryo. Whether by itself or in the company of other smart nations, Israel will act to ensure that there will be no easy sacrifice of a key strategic U.S. ally in a hostile region. Just as for the Jews, it’s high time that Obama wised up too, for the sake not just of Israel, but for all of humankind – and that includes us here in America.
William Pippin
The Rational Empiricist