"This [resolution] will not damage the nation of Iran, but its issuers will soon regret this superficial and nil act."
With these ominous threats, the Iranian president responded to the unanimous vote by the UN Security Council on a resolution imposing sanctions on his country for breaching the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to which Iran is a signatory.
The question now is: How will Mahmoud Ahmadinejad carry out his threats? To start with, he can make things even more annoying for the US in Iraq. But then, listening to the Iranian envoy addressing the Security Council immediately after the vote, one sees that Iran's seething anger is primarily aimed at Israel, a country with which it does not share any border or have any territorial problems. Instead of addressing Iran's own failures at cooperating with the international community, the Iranian ambassador ranted over the supposed double standard in how the United Nations deals with Iran and with Israel.
Ahmadinejad has consistently issued threats to wipe the State of Israel off the surface of the earth. He even recently held a conference in Tehran to which he invited all the respectable skinheads, neo-Nazis and pseudo-intellectual revisionists to denigrate the Holocaust, as a means to render the existence of the State of Israel of a lesser value and, in turn, to justify the objective of eliminating it. While this writer believes that the State of Israel, like many countries in the Middle East for that matter, is a historic anomaly that should never have displaced the original inhabitants of Palestine, the fact is that all the nation-states that emerged after the two world wars in the Middle East, and which are today in existence, are recognized by virtually all the community of nations, including the artificially-drawn countries of Jordan, Kuwait, Syria, Iraq and, yes, Israel. The point, almost a century after the emergence of this Middle East from under the Ottoman Empire, is that nothing should justify the use of violence, let alone nuclear weapons, to annihilate entire peoples and countries.
If the Iranian logic described above is to be accepted, then the United States, Canada, Mexico and all of Latin American should be disbanded, the land returned to the original Indian inhabitants, and their European colonists deported back to Europe; all of today's Islamic countries should return to their pre-Islamic religions in order to reverse the Arab-Islamic military conquest, occupation and forced Islamization and Arabization between the 8th and the 14th centuries; the Turks should reclaim their Ottoman empire over the Middle East - after all they ran it for 400 years from 1516 to 1918; and so on.
Of more immediate relevance to Ahmadinejad's threats is the fact that Israel is right next door to Lebanon, and so the Lebanese should be doubly concerned.
Like it did this past July to delay the very resolution finally made at the UN, Iran is likely to again use the Hizbullah terrorist organization, which it created in Lebanon in the early 1990s, to execute its threats against the international community by, for example, targeting the UNIFIL forces now separating Hizbullah from the Israeli border under the August 2006 UN resolution 1701. Lest we forget, Iran used Hizbullah's terrorist bombings, hostage-taking, and assassinations in the Lebanon of the 1980s to drive out all Western forces from Lebanon and hand the country over to the Syrian regime. In exchange, Syria allowed Hizbullah to conduct a war of attrition against Israel from the south of the country.
If Iran's nuclear weapons were to somehow make it into the hands of Hizbullah, then the Iranian threat becomes all the more ominous to Lebanon, which will be transformed, yet again, into a killing field - this time, an apocalyptic one - of foreigners settling their scores over the bodies of the children and people of Lebanon. Indeed, the Lebanese "opposition" rioting for weeks now in downtown Beirut to topple the Lebanese government, run the existing Lebanese institutions to the ground under the pretense of "reforming" them, and seize power under the banner of Hizbullah, is in fact a cover for inviting Iran to use Lebanon as its nuclear and "live" testing ground.
As recently as this past August, Hizbullah's leader Hassan Nasrallah declared, in an interview with the Iranian magazine Risalat Al-Hussein ["The Message of Hussein"] that it is "the wish of Hizbullah to one day establish an Islamic Republic [in Lebanon] because Hizbullah believes that the establishment of an Islamic government is the only way to achieve stability in society, and it is the only way to resolve social differences, even in a society consisting of diverse minorities." The prospects of the new year of 2007 are looking increasingly "encouraging" for the Lebanese: living under a Hizbullah-led Islamic Republic of Lebanon that is supplied with Iranian-made nuclear weapons. Let the fireworks begin!
With these ominous threats, the Iranian president responded to the unanimous vote by the UN Security Council on a resolution imposing sanctions on his country for breaching the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to which Iran is a signatory.
The question now is: How will Mahmoud Ahmadinejad carry out his threats? To start with, he can make things even more annoying for the US in Iraq. But then, listening to the Iranian envoy addressing the Security Council immediately after the vote, one sees that Iran's seething anger is primarily aimed at Israel, a country with which it does not share any border or have any territorial problems. Instead of addressing Iran's own failures at cooperating with the international community, the Iranian ambassador ranted over the supposed double standard in how the United Nations deals with Iran and with Israel.
Ahmadinejad has consistently issued threats to wipe the State of Israel off the surface of the earth. He even recently held a conference in Tehran to which he invited all the respectable skinheads, neo-Nazis and pseudo-intellectual revisionists to denigrate the Holocaust, as a means to render the existence of the State of Israel of a lesser value and, in turn, to justify the objective of eliminating it. While this writer believes that the State of Israel, like many countries in the Middle East for that matter, is a historic anomaly that should never have displaced the original inhabitants of Palestine, the fact is that all the nation-states that emerged after the two world wars in the Middle East, and which are today in existence, are recognized by virtually all the community of nations, including the artificially-drawn countries of Jordan, Kuwait, Syria, Iraq and, yes, Israel. The point, almost a century after the emergence of this Middle East from under the Ottoman Empire, is that nothing should justify the use of violence, let alone nuclear weapons, to annihilate entire peoples and countries.
If the Iranian logic described above is to be accepted, then the United States, Canada, Mexico and all of Latin American should be disbanded, the land returned to the original Indian inhabitants, and their European colonists deported back to Europe; all of today's Islamic countries should return to their pre-Islamic religions in order to reverse the Arab-Islamic military conquest, occupation and forced Islamization and Arabization between the 8th and the 14th centuries; the Turks should reclaim their Ottoman empire over the Middle East - after all they ran it for 400 years from 1516 to 1918; and so on.
Of more immediate relevance to Ahmadinejad's threats is the fact that Israel is right next door to Lebanon, and so the Lebanese should be doubly concerned.
Like it did this past July to delay the very resolution finally made at the UN, Iran is likely to again use the Hizbullah terrorist organization, which it created in Lebanon in the early 1990s, to execute its threats against the international community by, for example, targeting the UNIFIL forces now separating Hizbullah from the Israeli border under the August 2006 UN resolution 1701. Lest we forget, Iran used Hizbullah's terrorist bombings, hostage-taking, and assassinations in the Lebanon of the 1980s to drive out all Western forces from Lebanon and hand the country over to the Syrian regime. In exchange, Syria allowed Hizbullah to conduct a war of attrition against Israel from the south of the country.
If Iran's nuclear weapons were to somehow make it into the hands of Hizbullah, then the Iranian threat becomes all the more ominous to Lebanon, which will be transformed, yet again, into a killing field - this time, an apocalyptic one - of foreigners settling their scores over the bodies of the children and people of Lebanon. Indeed, the Lebanese "opposition" rioting for weeks now in downtown Beirut to topple the Lebanese government, run the existing Lebanese institutions to the ground under the pretense of "reforming" them, and seize power under the banner of Hizbullah, is in fact a cover for inviting Iran to use Lebanon as its nuclear and "live" testing ground.
As recently as this past August, Hizbullah's leader Hassan Nasrallah declared, in an interview with the Iranian magazine Risalat Al-Hussein ["The Message of Hussein"] that it is "the wish of Hizbullah to one day establish an Islamic Republic [in Lebanon] because Hizbullah believes that the establishment of an Islamic government is the only way to achieve stability in society, and it is the only way to resolve social differences, even in a society consisting of diverse minorities." The prospects of the new year of 2007 are looking increasingly "encouraging" for the Lebanese: living under a Hizbullah-led Islamic Republic of Lebanon that is supplied with Iranian-made nuclear weapons. Let the fireworks begin!