Politically (In)Correct About Iran

Ever since the Iranian president issued his call “to wipe Israel off the map” in October 2005, debates have been raging about what exactly he said, what exactly he meant, and what the response should be. The arguments are endless: Iran is an ancient civilization, its people are no primitive anti-Semites, Ahmadinejad doesn’t really have the power to set Iran’s foreign policy, diplomacy will be sufficient to deter Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, and if not, Iran will not be so crazy as to attack Israel.

You can go on and on with the debate along these lines — but there are also red lines, and if you cross those, you will be accused of (Jewish) hysteria and (neocon) war-mongering. Of course, some of the usual suspects did not hesitate to cross those red lines anyway. Prominent among them was Binyamin Netanyahu, who mesmerized his audience at last year’s United Jewish Communities General Assembly with a powerful speech that focused single-mindedly on the assertion “It’s 1938 again.” If you make this kind of comparison, you can’t expect anything but despise from the liberal left.

But it’s still worse if you do what Benny Morris did and conjure, in most vivid terms, the frightening specter of a “Second Holocaust.” Morris’s piece, which was featured in the Jerusalem Post, was deeply disturbing, and perhaps it was all the more powerful considering that Morris was once adored by those who draw the red lines in the public debate about Iran. Indeed, not that long ago, Morris was regarded as a leading member of the “New Historians” because of his research on Palestinian refugees, but since he has in the meantime distanced himself from the political use that was made of his work, he is now despised as the “new” Benny Morris by those who couldn’t care less what a nuclear Iran might mean for Israel. In these circles, many will consider Iran’s nuclear ambitions not only as a perfectly legitimate expression of the hegemonic claims of a proud people, but also as a welcome counterweight to the irksome power projected by the US.

But if Binyamin Netanyahu and Benny Morris crossed red lines by talking about 1938 and a “Second Holocaust”, it seems that the lines that proscribe the range of the politically correct debate are now being drawn ever more narrowly. A recent article in the Forward described the startling predicament which Jewish groups in the US may face if they focus their advocacy efforts on calling for a tough line against Iran’s nuclear ambitions: they are risking accusations of pushing for a war with the regime in Teheran. As the article explained, “scapegoating” can be expected after the experience of the Iraq War, because “antiwar groups have charged, with growing vehemence, that the war was promoted by Jewish groups acting in Israel’s interest.”

Moreover, as the Jerusalem Post reported this week, Jewish organizations had to realize that, also in purely practical terms, it will not be an easy task to launch a campaign that focuses on Iranian threats against Israel: leading American news media have refused to sell Internet site ad space to the Jewish Agency for a campaign that features clips of some of President Ahmadinejad’s relevant speeches, because the content of the advertisement was “political.”

Obviously, media outlets are entitled to decide for which kind of advertisements they are willing to sell space on their sites, and Jewish organizations that want to draw attention to the threats posed by a nuclear Iran will find ways to do so even if some leading news media will not agree to carry related advertisements. But the problem that is much harder to tackle is posed by the ever growing de-legitimization of the uneasy sense of a looming disaster that many Israelis and Jews currently feel.

In the debate about Iran’s intentions, anybody who is not privy to top-secret intelligence information is ultimately reading the tea leaves, and no matter how knowledgeable an analyst is, he or she can only put forward a well-reasoned case for a plausible scenario. But it is neither well-reasoned nor plausible to suggest that Ahmadinejad’s threats should simply be disregarded as the foolish fantasies of a freak.

While comparisons between theocratic Iran and Nazi Germany may be politically incorrect, they are not that easily refuted by pointing out that Ahmadinejad is widely despised and ridiculed by Iranians and that there is little propensity for anti-Semitism in Iran. If you think that settles the issue, how do you like this one: “Hitler visits a lunatic asylum. The patients give the Hitler salute. As Hitler passes down the line, he comes across a man who isn’t saluting. ‘Why aren’t you saluting like the others?’ Hitler barks. ‘Mein Führer, I’m the nurse,’ comes the answer. ‘I’m not crazy!’” There are more jokes like that to be found in a recently published German book on humor in Nazi Germany — and these jokes were quite popular, even though telling them could cost your life.

And on the second point, the lack of anti-Semitic sentiment in Iran, consider this statement: “even though it may seem paradoxical, the German people are still the least anti-Semitic [in Europe]” — that’s what you could read in “Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism,” a book that, soon after its publication in early 1942, came to be regarded by many as the “definitive” analysis of Nazi Germany. The author was Franz Neumann, a widely respected German-Jewish intellectual who had escaped to the US, where he worked for some time as a leading political intelligence analyst in the Central Europe Section of the wartime US intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).

Neumann and his colleagues in the OSS believed that the Nazis cleverly instrumentalized anti-Semitism to cement their grip on power — as one of their analyses from 1943 stated: “For years, anti-Semitism has served the purpose of forcing all Germans either to identify themselves with Nazi-ism or pay the price of dissent.” Again, comparisons may be politically incorrect, but it is hard to overlook that, for years, even decades now, anti-Semitism has also served a number of political purposes in the Islamic world. For an Iran that aspires to gain hegemony over the Middle East, anti-Semitism, or the fight against Israel, is arguably an indispensable tool, since the Iranian theocrats would have to overcome not only the Sunni-Shia antagonism, but also Arab hostility to Persian hegemony. While that may well be “mission impossible”, wiping Israel off the map would seem pretty much the only way to try to achieve that.

Another reason for real concern is the fact that even the most dovish analyst will acknowledge that Iran’s nuclear program enjoys widespread popular support in the country. If you wonder why Iranians, who are painfully aware of their country’s dire economic situation, want their government to spend resources on a nuclear program, you will hear about national pride, and the perfectly understandable notion that Iran needs a nuclear program for defensive reasons. To defend against whom? Well, against the US, of course — against the country that, as many dovish analysts will tell you, Iranians actually greatly admire, the country that has just deposed of Iran’s greatest enemy, Saddam Hussein. True enough, there are indications that some groups in America would like to see “regime change” in Teheran — but supposedly, this is also what many Iranians want. For the time being, however, it seems that what Iranians want even more are atomic weapons.

A fundamentalist Islamic theocracy, armed with nuclear weapons and openly pursuing hegemonic aspirations in the region, can only be regarded as a potentially existential threat to Israel — acknowledging that, and acting to prevent it, should be regarded as the only politically correct option, not least because there is one irrefutable lesson of history: those who have said that they want to kill Jews have always meant what they said.

Jerusalem Post