As time goes on it is becoming clearer how accurate and prescient the President’s ‘Axis of Evil’ speech was. The critics of that speech, Democrats, paleoconservatives/libertarians, and the Euro left, who claimed it was, amongst other things, simplistic, are looking increasingly like the proverbial head in the sand ostrich.

This might be the most shocking speech since Adolph Hitler’s rallies. The shock value does not seem related to this irrational person’s evil object of the moment but seems related to the intention to be a nuclear terror-bomber. Israelis must be in shock now, and American Muslims will soon be in shock once they grasp what this kind of talk means to their American citizenship.

Perhaps large cities became obsolete when the first atomic bomb exploded. For years, this idea and the idea of airline security brought at best a polite musing expression followed by “too expensive.” With crazy talk becoming popular, this idea will soon be all the rage.

I agree with Mr. Murgos. The Rafsanjani speech was so ill-considered as to boggle the mind. One reads it and says to oneself, “These people must not have any idea how their words and speeches are affecting Westerners. Can’t they hire Western advisors from the States or Europe or somewhere, before their stupidity leads us all into a nuclear war?”

But nobody could be that out of touch. The supposition must be that a speech like this is mostly for domestic political purposes — in order to mollify the domestic hot-heads who may for some purely tactical domestic political reason need to be mollified at present.

Whatever the domestic political reasons for such a speech, its international implications outside the Muslim world obviously couldn’t be more disastrous for the Muslims themselves.

Post 9-11 Netanyahu want around telling everybody that the Iranians would be full nuclear in four to five years. Most people called him a crazy extremist, but it looks like they’re right on schedule.

When Bibi talks, it’s wise to listen.

Stanley Kurtz discusses this article at The Corner at National Review Online, under the entries for March 12: http://www.nationalreview.com/thecorner/03_03_09_corner-archive.asp#004793

Well - not to be making excuses for the iranians, but at least at the time of the revolution some of them had a legitimate beef against us for our support of the shah and SAVAK. Of course the ayatollah was worse, but at the time the US was not innocent by any means…

Sorry, godless, the idea that the Shah is comparable to the ayatollahs is like the idea that the czar’s secret police were comparable to Lenin and Stalin.

Unadorned describes Rafsanjani’s threat as ill-considered, stupid, out of touch with reality, counterproductive for Islam, and so on. He hasn’t considered the possibility that Rafsanjani meant what he said.

As for Godless Capitalist’s remarks, he himself seems to acknowledge that there is no equivalence between, on one hand, Iran’s threat of nuclear holocaust against a country with whom it is not at war and its slogan of “Death to America,”
and, on the other hand, the U.S.-supported Shah’s supposed oppressions of the Iranians in the 1970s. So why does does Godless Capitalist even bring it up? I suggest that the habit of moral equivalence, of excusing criminals and enemies and faulting our own society, is so deeply embeded in modern Westerners (especially liberals and libertarians) that they automatically engage in it even when they don’t mean it.

“Unadorned describes Rafsanjani’s threat as ill-considered, stupid, out of touch with reality, counterproductive for Islam, and so on. He hasn’t considered the possibility that Rafsanjani meant what he said.” — Lawrence Auster

The possibility that Rafsanjani “meant” what he said was intended to be implicit in my post — it was sort of my post’s main point, in the sense that precisely because threatened countries can’t afford to take risks, it is foolhardy in the extreme for countries to make threats — ESPECIALLY in tinderboxes like the Near East and Middle East. That is what made the speech so incredibly irresponsible — just absolutely incomprehensibly so. There are rules in international relations recognized since the remotest antiquity, one of which is that credible military threats which appear imminently realizable may justifiably call forth outright pre-emptive counterattacks. It is considered provocative, for example, for a country’s army to ostentatiously stage manoeuvres in such a way as to appear to entail a threat to a neighbor. The same applies to large-scale naval maneouvres off a country’s coast. And it is frankly militarily and diplomatically unacceptible, for example, for one country to mass troops on its border with another country. If it does so, it serves no purpose for it to say, “But we do not intend to invade you, so relax.” The neighbor thus potentially threatened is FORCED (everyone understands this, and always has since civilization began) to mass its troops in return and possibly to attack in self-defense. Thus did the entire world understand perfectly well that President Kennedy was doing nothing diplomatically impermissible in 1962 when he explicitly threatened potential nuclear retaliation on Moscow if the balance-of-power-altering missiles they had snuk into Cuba weren’t removed. Placing them there on the part of Russia constituted an unacceptible threat against which the U.S. had no choice but to defend itself by aggressive measures (blockading Cuban ports, normally an outright act of war) and explitit public counter-threats. And thus did Japan’s foreign minister recently let it be known that if his government perceived a credible threat from Kim Jong Il’s missiles, it would launch an attack “without waiting until the North-Korean missiles are already in the air heading for Japan.”

Here’s a view from a specifically Jewish-American perspective: a somewhat surprising editorial entitled “Blabber” (which I saw linked in today’s edition of www.iSteve.com ):

http://www.forward.com/

In it, one learns that a faction within Israel holds that Iran is the most worrisome threat and fears that further weakening Iraq vis-à-vis Iran might not be the wisest course.