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Jewish World Review Feb 6, 2012 / 13 Shevat, 5772 Iran Threatens Israel With Destruction, But the New York Times Doesn't Hear It By Jonathan Tobin
However, there was something missing from the Times report of Khamenei's speech that was reported elsewhere. Other accounts noted that in addition to threatening the United States, Khamenei said this: "The Zionist regime is a cancerous tumor and it will be removed." While we don't know how or why a mention of this element of the speech managed to get excised from the account in the Times, it's a question worth pondering.
Any discussion of the nature of the Iranian nuclear threat that ignores the regime's murderous intentions toward Israel is clearly incomplete.
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But it is only Israel that Iran has promised to destroy. That is why placing a nuclear weapon in the hands of a regime pledged to the eradication of the Jewish state is a different order of threat than Khamenei's usual bluster aimed at the United States. Because of its small size and concentrated population, one or two nuclear explosions would mean another Holocaust.
So when Khamenei repeats the Islamist regime's pledge to make good on its threat to destroy "the Zionist regime" in the same context as its vow to satisfy its nuclear ambitions, this is no minor rhetorical point. It is, instead, tangible evidence that Israel's alarm about Iran is justified and that the question of what to do about this threat is a matter of life and death for millions in the Jewish state.
For the Times to eliminate Khamenei's threat to Israel from its coverage even as it accurately reports other elements of the speech is more than curious. At the very least, it is an egregious error of judgment. At worst, it smacks of an effort to skew the discussion about Iran away from the imminent peril that its Tehran's nuclear program represents.
Those who seek to dismiss the justified fears expressed by friends of Israel about the Obama administration's hesitancy in taking actions and efforts to forestall an Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities wish to lower the temperature of the discussion and ignore Khamenei's threats. But doing so makes it impossible to make a rational decision about averting the danger. Further prevarication such as that going on in Washington right now about Iran is exactly what Khamenei is hoping for as Iran seeks to run out the clock and achieve its ambitions before the West or Israel acts to stop them. Those who believe a nuclear Iran can be "contained" or doubt Iran's evil intentions need to understand what Khamenei said and what he meant by it. But that won't happen if major media outlets suppress the full story about Iran.
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JWR contributor Jonathan S. Tobin is executive editor of Commentary magazine, in whose blog "Contentions" this first appeared.
© 2011, Jonathan Tobin | ||||||||||||||||||
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