Lobster for Iran

“Iran’s biggest threat since Nazis,” said Israeli defence minister Shaul Mofaz, according to the Guardian; “The world must not wait! Since Hitler we Jews have not faced such a threat” as presented by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who “further stirred international outrage by calling on Israeli Jews to be resettled in Europe” (...thus the Guardian).

These guys are hard to please! In the 1930s, Hitler called for the Jews to be resettled outside of Europe, and they declared war on him. Now Ahmadinejad calls for the resettlement of Jews in Europe, and the Jews still respond with a war cry. That is, unless the Guardian missed the point in its report, and the outrage actually came from the Europeans who preferred the Palestinians to serve as unwilling host to these difficult guests.

Anyway I beg to differ: President Ahmadinejad is the biggest threat since Gerard de Nerval, a flamboyant French poet, promenaded a lobster on a blue ribbon lead, just as one exercises a dog, along the Palais Royal gardens in order to épater le bourgeois. A truly poetic soul, an enfant terrible if ever there was one, Ahmadinejad aimed to wake us up from our over-long after-dinner nap. What can the Iranian do if ‘Jews’ is the only magic word that awakens us from this slumber? Sexual innuendos would not bestir even a child fresh from his AIDS-awareness lesson. An attack of Christianity would be warmly applauded by the undeniable masters of European minds, Messrs Sauerkraut and Finkelrot. In this post-modernist age, when the Vagina Monologues have entered the matinee repertoire, it is not that easy to épater the increasingly blasé bourgeoisie. If Ahmadinejad would call for the resettlement of six million European Muslims outside of Europe, nobody would raise an eyebrow with the possible exception of Oriana Fallaci and M. Le Pen, who might object to his plagiarism. If he were to call for the erasure of France from the world map, the French would not sit up and pay attention: they think there is already a Brussels directive to this effect!

I admire Ahmadinejad. Not as a politician: let the Iranians judge him on this merit. Not as a divine: I leave this to the Muslims. But as a true poet who unveiled our hypocrisy and slaughtered our last sacred cow. This is the only possible explanation of his deeds and words: Iranians have really no reason to care about the Jewish holocaust, one way or other. Nobody accuses them, not even Mr Yehuda Bauer of Jerusalem’s Holocaust memorial institute, who is prone to accuse the World and its niece for failing to save the Jews. The Persians from Cyrus to Hosroes to Mohammad Resa Shah were always good to Jews, and even in these mad days there is a large and flourishing Jewish community in Iran. Ahmadinejad spoke about the Holocaust like Hillary conquered Everest – because it presented a challenge!

The innocent revisionist historians were so excited when he toyed with an idea of “finally discovering the truth”. They prepared their well-thumbed books and diagrams of gas consumption and body heat. But Ahmadinejad is interested in the hard facts of World War II about as much as Nerval was interested in exercising his lobster. Acceptance of Holocaust dogma is a sign of submission to the Tel Aviv–New York Axis, a sign of the new colonialism. Ahmadinejad refused it just as St Paul refused to accept the Noahide laws: not because St Paul wanted to partake of pagan sacrifices, but because he did not want to take his orders from the Jews.

The European leaders, the docile supporters of patent war criminals, of George W. Bush, the murderer of umpteen Iraqis, Afghanis and sundry Arabs, of Shaul Mofaz, the murderer of an eight-year-old girl (among hundreds of others) he killed last week in besieged Gaza, all sat up and expressed their outrage. They did not object when Israel strafed and bombed defenceless Gazans. When Israeli politicians threatened to turn Iran into “radioactive desert”, they did not describe it as “a call to genocide”. By his challenge, president Ahmadinejad saved the honour of human race, as only a poet can do.

I admire Iran, for the fiery crimson of their rose gardens and for the azure of its old mosques, for the ravishing beauty of its women, whose black eyelashes enhance the whiteness of their skin shining through their black chadors. I admire Iran for its marvellous painting that overcame the iconoclastic ravages. I admire Iran for the spiritual subtlety of its poets, who united their love to women with their adoration of God in one undivided chant just as the Song of Songs did. Their Rumi and Jami, Sa’adi and Ferdousi, Hafiz and Khayyam were of the most daring and sincere poets who ever graced our earth. Ahmadinejad is heir to their tradition, a daring mocker of our hypocrisy, a boy who saw through the emperor’s new clothes. Even if the ham-fisted Yank should flatten this daredevil, and burn the rose gardens of Shiraz just as he once incinerated the blossoms of Nagasaki, we may be proud of Ahmadinejad, our contemporary who dared to tread on the tiger’s tail.


The European and American reaction to Iran’s nuclear program was that of Uncle Tom’s slaveowner, Simon Legree, on learning of an escaped slave. How does this dusky dare to touch the white masters’ toys? Their empty talk of an “Iranian threat” is designed for the ignorant: Iran has never, ever attacked a European nation since the wars for Anatolia in the 5th century BC; whereas European imperialists have repeatedly occupied and controlled Iran, most recently in 1942, or by proxy in 1953, when they deposed democratically-elected Mosaddeq and returned to dominate this ancient nation.

Yes, the old colonialism is dead. England can’t rule over Iraq, nor France over Algeria, but the new collective colonialism, that of the imperialist Core of highly industrialised Western nations over the rest of the world, is hardly any better. The old masters have decided to pool their resources and powers to rule their erstwhile slaves together. They switched from the Athenian model where a citizen had his slave, to the Spartan model, where slaves belong to all Spartans. In this new collective imperialist universe, the US is the arm, the enforcer of this new colonialism, while the mind, the ideology is supplied by a vast syndicate that unites and coordinates the majority of newspapers and networks of both left and right from Madrid to Moscow and from Texas to Timbuktu, despite their pretensions of competition and rivalry.

This syndicate is the real powerbase of what two American professors, John Mearsheimer of Chicago, and Stephen Walt of Harvard, (M&W for short) politely called ‘Israel Lobby in the US’, though this syndicate has other fish to fry beside that of the State of Israel’s. While fully approving of M&W’s endeavour, we should say: they minimised rather than exaggerated the problem, for it is a global, rather than a local (the US) phenomenon. The fearsome AIPAC is just the visible tip of iceberg below which are miles and miles of solid ice: media lords, chief editors, their pundits, Masters of Discourse, in short. As if by a magic wand, the Iranian crisis made it visible to the naked eye: they have all cried out in one mighty voice like the legion of demons in the Capernaum synagogue in response to Christ’s words.

In his thought-provoking speech Ahmadinejad said: “The vast Zionist network has been at the service of the imperialists for decades.” This is open to an argument whether the Zionist network serves the imperialists, or the imperialists serve this network. It’s an example of Managerial Revolution: Jews were managers for the imperialists, until they took over the show, some would say. Oh no, they remained docile to their imperialist overlords, argue others. Whatever position we take, the Zionists and the Imperialists are surely integrated and intermeshed, and if one accepts the idea of the Iranian threat to Israel, one subscribes to this demonic network.

The nations that refuse the Masters of Discourse are subjugated by force. A nuclear weapon serves as a great equaliser, as did the Smith & Wesson gun in the Wild West. In order to prevent too much equalisation, the American pioneers kept guns out of native hands. The same policy now drives the West in its attempts to keep nuclear power out of reach of Iranians.

A few days ago I was invited to a live discussion on Russian TV Channel One, where the Moscow BBC bureau chief rhetorically asked why a peaceful Iran would need ballistic missiles, and he listed the Iranian missile arsenal. He could not answer the question of why a peaceful Britain would need ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons! Actually, why would anybody need one? But if England, with its long and bloody history of subjugating the Third World from Ireland to Japan, may have these toys, then it is likewise the duty of any important country willing to protect its populace from the Western masters’ whims.

Yes, Iran is still working on a peaceful program of atomic energy, but if and when that country decides to build the bomb, we may support this decision, as it would enhance peace. Actually, few people did more for the cause of world peace than Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and their associates Harry Gold and Klaus Fuchs. These wonderful men passed the secrets of American-built nuclear weapons to Russia, and thus saved Moscow and St Petersburg from the fate of Hiroshima. Without their heroic deed, the colonial masters would have turned Russia into a radioactive desert. Joseph Stalin passed the know-how to emerging China, and this was a very good deed -- otherwise the Americans wouldn’t have hesitated to nuke Vietnam as they did Japan.

The Russian nuclear shield is the only thing Gorbachev and Yeltsin did not break down in their destruction of the Soviet Union, probably because they did not expect the patriotic forces to ever return to power in Moscow. This shield allows the Russians to disregard the nagging of Frau Merkel, and gives them their freedom of choice: to sell their oil and gas to Europe or to turn the stream towards China. It allows the Belarus people to have the president they elected by huge majority: without it, Lukashenka would share the fate of Noriega and Milosevic for his steadfast refusal to sell the assets of Belarus to George Soros. Let Iranians, too, have this freedom of choice, and restore balance in the region.
And to sincere well-wishers of our Israeli well-being I’ll say: Iran is no danger. The truth is, the Jews could live extremely well in Palestine. By making peace with the native inhabitants in 1948, we would have kept our common home, Palestine, as the hub of the Middle East with Iraqi oil coming to Haifa refineries and trains from Baghdad to Cairo flying by Lydda and Jaffa, with Muslim pilgrims coming to al Quds on their way to Mecca, with Christians walking in the footsteps of Christ from Bethlehem to Nazareth and with Jews doing their aliya (this word meant an annual pilgrimage to Jerusalem like the Hajj, rather than a permanent immigration to Palestine as Zionists wont). We would prosper beyond our wildest dreams, as the prophets promised, if we were to kick the nasty old habit of separateness and dominance.

It is not too late even now, sixty years and many deaths later. For this purpose, we may take the advice of Ahmadinejad: let the exclusive Jewish state be eliminated from the map of the region to be replaced by one state of all citizens of the land, Jews or not. “The right to govern belongs to all people of Palestine, be they Muslims, Christians, or Jews”, said Ahmadinejad, and by golly, only a Jewish supremacist may object to his words.

When I said this at the TV discussion in Moscow, I was attacked by the Chairman of a Russian Jewish Congress and Director of a Zionist Middle East Institute, a greasy and spotty bully of a man with hanging belly, a living cartoon from Der Sturmer, with the fitting name Satanovsky. “Watch out, - told me Satanovsky after the show, - apparently you have never been beaten hard enough. Here in Moscow we know of no restraints of democracy, my Jewish lads will tear your balls off like they did to many men like you. Israel should remain a Jewish state forever”. Such Jewish Mafiosi are the real leaders of the Jewish Lobby and chief supporters of the Jewish state abroad. These sort of people lead the Jewish organisations in Russia, in America and elsewhere. They need a Jewish state to escape their lands in the hour of wrath, but we, the ordinary citizens of Israel, do not need it.

However, the Mafia can’t rule forever. I take heart in the words of Ahmadinejad: “The young tree of resistance in Palestine is blooming and blooms of faith and desire for freedom are flowering. The Zionist regime is a decaying and crumbling tree that will fall with a storm. (Remember the parable of the barren tree? - ISH) Palestine is the meeting point of right and wrong. The destiny of the region will be decided in the land of Al-Qods and it will be a great honour to share in the victory of Palestine.” The victory of Palestine is our victory and we shall be happy to share in it.

“Now, will there be a war?,” one is often asked. I have no full confidence of George Bush, he does not share his plans with me. But while the gatekeepers of the Left say that Oil is the reason for the war, in my view Oil can be the reason for peace. As the price of oil has now crossed the $70 threshold, President Bush must decide whether he will survive its hike above $120 -- whether his voters in the red states will happily accept the advice of an American Jewish Congress pundit and director of their Israel/Middle East Office Eran Lerman (previously of Israeli intelligence) to stop driving cars every other day. Bush has the power to steer the US away from its perilous course, and tell to the Jewish Congress pundits to shove it.

And to my Israeli countrymen: I’ll remind you of our age-long tradition of friendship with Iran. Two thousand years ago, a picture of the Iranian capital city Susa was presented on the Eastern gate of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. Mishna (Berakoth 9) called for being especially careful towards it: “never show disrespect to the Eastern gate!” According to Rambam, this was done so that they would have the fear of the king of Persia upon them. This tradition is worth remembering and carefully preserving.

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Last updated 07/05/2006

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