Lobster for Iran
By Israel Shamir

“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. 

II 

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.